mafm

That looks like a really nice approach.

Build123d could really benefit from being able to add features interactively (including explicit constraints) and options like freecad and Onshape could really benefit from explicitly representing the model as code.

Build123d seems to require a lot of coding to calculate constraints and positions that could be more easily expressed using something like the solvespace constraint engine and some construction lines.

Nikodem Bartnik video on building and training a cheap robot arm. At least to me, this looks significantly more interesting than using AI to generate text.

Thanks - just tried gnovies and got a great recommendation.

I'm surprised that something I'd never heard of appears to work that well.

It's true that talent is almost entirely curiosity/enthusiasm/drive.

But that curiosity/enthusiasm/drive has a large genetic component - like every pretty much every other individual characteristic that humans exhibit.

Onshape is wonderful. Free users complained a lot about the changes to the free license years ago when they changed the rules, but I have no issue with it. TBH, I'm grateful they make it available on the terms that they do.

Solvespace is beautiful, but limited.

I spent enough time using FreeCad to get the hang of the user interface, but got enormously frustrated by it more or less randomly crashing and frequently generating bizarre shapes due to numerical issues when trying to do things like complex lofts. I have had no similar problems with OnShape.

I honestly don't know why there was so much noise about 'topological naming' in FreeCad, the stability issues I kept running into were way more frustrating than the clunky UI or counter-intuitiveness.

I did think about digging into FreeCad to fix some of the issues I was having, but once I started playing around with OnShape I totally lost interest. I am a lot more interested in designing parts than in debugging and fixing stability issues in complicated software in my spare time.

I am quite interested in trying out dune3d. It looks like the author has some expertise and interesting ideas about what's wrong with the other free CAD options.

Nice work!

Cool that you made this available for other people to benefit from.

I'm not bob, but I bought a ruixin pro 8 (~40AUD) and 3 diamond stones (~5AUD a piece) on aliexpress a couple of weeks ago.

Watched a YouTube video and got half a dozen kitchen knives sharp enough to shave arm hair in about an hour. They seem to be holding their edges reasonably well a couple of weeks later.

I'd previously not had much success with Japanese water stones and with the lansky(?) gadget.

It seems like the key part of the process is (a) detecting when you have formed a burr so you know when to change sides/move to the next grit and (b) stropping at the end (get the leather strip with polishing wax).

The Chinese gadget is a bit crude but was honestly surprisingly effective.

I don't think the theory is that complicated but getting good practical results reliably can be a bit tricky. The gadget seems to work quite well for that.

Ps: Just looked at Cliff Stamp's sharpening site. I think that's an order of magnitude sharper than I was going for with my kitchen knives.