I’ve tried Overture, Creality, and Inland (all black though, not transparent) and Overture printed the best for me (at least for functional parts where I cared about print quality and tolerances). Inland’s PETG+ and High Speed PETG was even better though.
I don’t know the architecture of AI accelerator in Ryzen processors but I do know a fair amount of image deblurring and denoising tools run on the neural engine on Apple Silicon. The neural engine is good enough for a lot of tasks, provided that your model only uses relatively simple operators and doesn’t need full precision.
What I do have an issue with is new users that try and have problems and immediately start whinging that “FreeCAD isn’t like what I know. And it needs to be like my favorite” Those are the lazy people that can’t be bothered to learn something new. And they should either expend the effort to learn or go back to whatever they were using
I think that’s fair, but most criticisms of FreeCAD from people coming from other CAD packages rather fall into your latter category that you mention here:
But if you have given FreeCAD, (or ANYTHING new in life), an honest try and you can’t get the hang of it or simply don’t like it.
I don’t think we’re actually disagreeing in principle, just on what we perceive as the common criticisms of FreeCAD. Normally, I’ve seen people from other CAD programs get frustrated at limitations within FreeCAD or needing to work around bugs in ways that slow them down. For example, FreeCAD previously was unable to cope with multiple geometries being contained in a single sketch (I believe 1.0 now supports multiple extrudes from different sketch regions, but previously FreeCAD would throw an error), which made modeling less efficient for those coming from programs like Solidworks where this feature exists. Throw other issues like toponaming into the mix and it’s no surprise people from other CAD programs tried learning it, got frustrated (since their baseline was better than what FreeCAD could offer) and moved on.
I agree that criticizing FreeCAD for having different workflows than other CAD programs is a bit silly, though. I don’t really care what the exact workflow is as long as it 1) works and 2) is fast, and for me FreeCAD 1.0 (and previously Realthunder’s branch) ticks all the boxes there.
I appreciate the respectful discussion!
I do think the point about all CAD packages having failure paths is a little overblown. Yes, you can definitely get proprietary CAD to break but in my experience (at least with Solidworks and Fusion), it usually requires much more complex parts than FreeCAD parts. Post 1.0 the situation is definitely better though.
You’re right that users should try following best practices from day one, but realistically most users are not going to learn everything correctly automatically. They might use an out of date tutorial, or might have just learned by tinkering themselves.
The point I was trying to make was that because FreeCAD operates differently than other CAD programs do to one another and because it’s generally a bit more brittle and demanding of the user, I can’t say I blame anyone for not wanting to switch to it if they already have a CAD program they’re proficient with. You could call it being lazy, but from a practical standpoint there isn’t necessarily a ton to gain for a relatively large amount of time investment required to be capable of using it.
I really hope FreeCAD improves enough one day in the new user experience department. I love the software and have been using it as my tool of choice for years now, but evidently not everyone thinks it’s worth the time investment.
The main benefit I think is massive scalability. For instance, DOE scientists at Argonne National Laboratory are working on training a language model for scientific uses. This isn’t something you can do on even 10s of GPUs for a few hours, like is common for jobs run in university clusters and similar. They’re doing this by scaling up to use a large portion of ALCF Aurora, which is an Exascale supercomputer.
Basically, for certain problems you either need both the ability to run jobs on lots of hardware and the ability to run them for long (but not too long to limit other labs’ work) periods of time. Big clusters like Aurora are helpful for that.
I’ll mention this fix is aimed at mitigating toponaming primarily for sketch attachment. Some features still struggle with toponaming, namely chamfers and fillets. But in any case, it’s a massive step forward and makes FreeCAD much easier to recommend! Until now I’ve been using Realthunder’s fork since toponaming was such a headache to resolve manually.
I think that’s a little unfair. The bigger issue IMO is that FreeCAD doesn’t quite share the same workflow as other (proprierary) CAD packages, so someone coming from proprietary CAD also needs to unlearn habits that were previously fine but now potentially harmful. For example, adding chamfers and fillets in FreeCAD pretty much should only be done at the end to avoid toponaming issues, which is less of an issue in other packages.
One of the big changes in my opinion is the addition of a “Smart Dimension” tool where the system interprets and previews the constraint that you want to apply instead of requiring you to pick the specific constraint ahead of time(almost identical to SOLIDWORKS), and the ability to add constraints such as length while drawing out shapes (like Autodesk Inventor, probably also Fusion but I haven’t used that). It makes the sketcher workflow more like other CAD programs and requires a little less manual work with constraints.
Hmm, that actually sounds like a bug. I haven’t seen that on my end (once I set the locations of options in my toolbars they stay there, even after restarts). You may want to report that on their issue tracker. Sorry that you’re having a rough experience!
Last I tried it, there was no fix. Their latest update on the website says:
The work on the toponaming problem is an ongoing project, and we are very grateful to the FreeCAD community for contributing a lot to that effort. But it’s not complete yet, there will be much more to say when it’s largely done. So let’s focus on the other three.
So I take it they haven’t implemented a fix. They previously said they were going to work with the FreeCAD team on mainlining a toponaming fix, using realthunder’s work as a proof of concept, but said fix has not landed in mainline FreeCAD yet. I believe that’s the major feature they’re looking to implement for FreeCAD 1.0.
Definitely excited for Ondsel though! Hopefully that fix can be integrated quickly.
IMO the bigger problem with FreeCAD is the topological naming problem. It’s very easy to get frustrated because your model broke due to a change you made in an earlier feature.
The UI isn’t amazing though, and that unfortunately happens quite a bit with open source software. Hopefully it’ll go the way of Blender and KiCAD with an eventual major release that overhauls the UI.
Ondel has a nicer user interface, but I personally use and recommend realthunder’s LinkStable branch of FreeCAD. Mainline FreeCAD (and by extension, Ondsel) suffer from the topological naming problem, which can be especially jarring to users coming from proprietary CAD software. realthunder put a lot of work into a solution that handles the problem pretty well, so I’m using his fork until toponaming gets mainlined.
I haven’t used all of the assembly workbenches but I’ve found Assembly3 to be pretty robust to design changes if you use realthunder’s Link Stable fork of FreeCAD. I wouldn’t be surprised if all of the assembly workbenches would benefit from toponaming fixes, though I don’t know how they all work.
The topological naming problem is handled quite well by realthunder’s FreeCAD Link Branch fork, and his Assembly3 workbench is an acceptable, albeit imperfect method of making assemblies when combined with his fork. Assembly3 can run on upstream FreeCAD but I found it to work way less consistently due to issues like the topological naming problem breaking links in the assemblies.
Nonetheless the added features by Ondsel look interesting. I’d consider switching once upstream FreeCAD implements a solution to the topological naming problem, but like you mentioned, toponaming is such a huge leap in usefulness that I’m hesitant to switch to another FreeCAD version that doesn’t handle it well.
Not sure what’s going on but if the printer was flashed with Klipper, it won’t show anything on the screen until it is connected to a computer running klipper’s host software.
That sounds about right. You can technically achieve full torque at 0 RPM, but the current required for that might be very high (and may not be practical for the small size, power limits, and cost of a 3D printer). I know this is a problem in Asian import mini-lathes - if you run the spindle too slow you won’t get much torque out because the driver can’t supply enough current.
I think it would be a better idea to use linear encoders if you were going to add encoders to the shaft, as that way you could directly readout the position of the tool along an axis without issues like backlash that would mess up your calculated position. This is what I’ve seen on (both manual and CNC) mills and lathes.
BLDC and AC servos maintain full torque at stop too, and have about 2-3× the torque of a stepper of similar size.
Huh, this is true about BLDCs as well? I remember seeing in a video that BLDCs tend to have very poor torque output when stopped and especially when at low speeds (due to very low efficiency requiring too high currents for drivers to supply), whereas AC motors have a pretty much flat torque curve until they get fairly fast. I’d be interested to know if this is true.
I’m not sure about chamfer (I haven’t used it in my sketches) but fillet is definitely included in the Sketcher workbench.
A filament dryer was honestly the single biggest improvement to my printer’s quality. I’d definitely recommend getting one. Wet filament is so frustrating to print.