What kind of board are they going in? Tall, thick-walled, and spherical doesn’t often go with shinethrough, but it can happen. On the budget end, the “QX SA” that goes by several names can be had in a translucent pudding-esque style. I reckon the blend is mostly ABS though, regardless of what the Amazon listing says.

Still Tuesday here, but I’ll jump in. Working on the CAD file for the 3D printed case of my next mechanical keyboard. For this one, I actually designed a super primitive PCB instead of hand-wiring all the keys, and it’s on its way from China. I’ll still need to wire the Raspberry Pi Pico myself, since I wanted to start by dipping my toe in to see if I could route the switches’ matrix and the mounting holes for the diodes I’ll need.

Certainly looks like it came out great. I loved the write-up, too. Extra points for figuring out what you actually needed to make an effective press.

I’m not the Step Conference, I’m the Conference who stepped up…

Was not expecting a custom t-shirt gag at that point in the video. Well done all around, though.

Yup. At this point, “locally installed, reliable, parametric modeling on Linux” = “FreeCAD, including Ondsel, and SolveSpace”. That’s it. Well, there’s code-to-CAD as well, which obviously retains parametric history, but goes about it very differently than a design tree.

For non-parametric modeling, BricsCAD and Plasticity enter the discussion. For parametric on the web, OnShape works very well but I hate their licensing scheme and the huge doughnut hole in their pricing model.

I LOVE MY KIDS AND I TAKE CARE OF MY KIDS BUT DON’T Y’ALL UNDERSTAND?!?!?!? THAT STUPID BITCH WHO WAS ALWAYS CALLING THE COPS ON ME WANTS TO LIVE IN THE SAME HOUSE AS THEM THAT MY MONEY WOULD BE PAYING FOR!!!111!!1! CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT SHIT!?!

…

THEY’RE PROBABLY NOT MINE ANYWAY.

…

YOU KNOW WHAT? FUCK IT. THEY CAN FEND FOR THEMSELVES. UNGRATEFUL SHITS.

…

I think the guide I did at !cad@lemmy.world is still in pretty decent shape.

I actually settled on Alibre Design. Permanent license at half the cost of a year of OnShape for a slightly dated but very capable parametric modeler, and the free trial made Parametric modeling click for me in a way FreeCAD didn’t. It comes with a renderer of a similar class, though I haven’t tried that yet. Changing colors of parts has been enough for my needs.

FreeCAD has apparently fixed the topological naming issue, one of the big things that was keeping them so far behind the commercial suites. It’s already in the weekly builds, along with several other enhancements pioneered in the Realthunder fork, including UI enhancements and a default Assembly workbench. Version 1 is going to come out in the late summer or early fall, I think. Ondsel is FreeCAD but they have some venture funding to pay developers to work on the main project and to bolt-on an optional paid PDM system (download from their GitHub and you don’t have to sign up for anything). I had some crashing issues on both Windows and Linux when trying to import DXF files into either flavor, and as you say, there’s still that learning curve, but I can get a part done in it now if I need to.

SolveSpace can do some nice things and will teach you good techniques.

I had the same issues as you with OnShape, particularly since their free licensing is very weird, and in the worst case it implies that while YOU must use your designs non-commercially, no one else is similarly bound. It’s sloppy legal drafting, and that annoys the little black kernel of lawyerness still sunk down in my heart. Fusion has become the poster child for free feature erosion and price hikes.

BricsCAD Shape is a basically an AutoCAD clone warped and twisted to act like SketchUp, and it works on Linux. It’s meant to be the tease to get people into their full-suite ecosystem, but I couldn’t find any legal limitations on the free version.

Depending on what it is you’re scanning, the people mentioning Blender may have a good point.

Shapr3D at $300/year might also be a good option.

Finally, for your particular workflow, Plasticity at $150 permanent license may hit the exact sweet spot. Definitely try their free trial. Some of the other programs I tried are also interesting.

This is true, and there was a joking element to my comment, though I do think if you happen to start with these two, expectations will be mis-set in a very jarring way. For those folks, poor Everett is about to snap.

Timothee Chalamet is much older than we thought…

Those in particular are called XDA. They’re good for nonstandard layouts because every key has the same profile, which is to say it looks the same from the side. Amazon and AliExpress should have plenty of designs in that profile. DSA, ZDA, and a few other are similar “unsculpted” or “flat” keycap profiles.

EDIT: They’re most likely a clone set called “Gentleman”

I’ve done a couple of boards worth of lasering dye-sublimation markers into PBT keycaps. It comes out pretty nice, and blanks from Amazon or AliExpress are cheap.

Don’t forget pop podcasts hosted by “storytellers” who read one primary source and one outdated secondary source before writing 20 hours of content, mostly about how the generals and kings got ready for the battles.

I feel like some folks are getting the wrong idea about our lovable rageaholic with these recent strips…

LED joysticks that can select from over 16 million color options. This might not be practical, considering only about 25 different color settings would have been sufficient.

So the RGB leds come with 256 levels of brightness for each color. Don’t worry, article-writer, the company wasted zero extra effort on this “feature.”

I consider getting one of these things every once in a while, but then I remember that I’ve pulled my hacked PSP out of the drawer like three times in the last ten years, and I shrug and move on. It’s generally more fun for me to plug a USB controller into my computer for retrogaming.

Oh hey! It’s that thing I use to put on decals and melt perler beads!

Yup, and honestly, looking at the particular takes Gen-X’ers had when they/we were in charge of the culture, this is completely unsurprising.

Reminds me of Meow Wolf.

This is a weird power grab from the court. Chevron already allows that the courts can decide what Congressional intent it. The deference to agencies only comes once they determine the law is ambiguous. In a different world, where we had expert courts full of engineers and analysts, this might even produce better results than the current system, but we do not, and Judges opining on technical fields are probably the only thing worse than engineers opining on the use of language, LOL.

I suppose if Trump wins and guts the career professionals in the executive branch and replaces them with partisan hacks at every level, we could end up glad this ruling happened, but agencies already had to act with a certain respect for internal rules and “reasonableness”. What’s more likely is that this SCOTUS will make sure it passes the final word on every significant regulatory question that arises in the next 20 years, and somehow magically the status quo that was being abused will become the law, even when it has only the thinnest threads of non-technical justification. Or worse, everything is now up for re-litigation and nobody knows WTF anything will mean anymore.

The amount of merch that a company must provide to get on a hobby-centric Youtuber’s good side seems to be depressingly small.

FWIW, you can order a V6 regular cab F150 work truck with an 8-foot bed. Still costs $40k, but it exists.

Ranger and Maverick can both haul plywood sheets with a few 2x4 slats in the stamped slots on the side of the bed and some tiedowns.