3DPrinting
3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: or [email protected]
There are CAD communities available at: [email protected] or [email protected]
Rules
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No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
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Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
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No porn (NSFW prints are acceptable but must be marked NSFW)
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No Ads / Spamming / Guerrilla Marketing
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Do not create links to reddit
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If you see an issue please flag it
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No guns
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No injury gore posts
If you need an easy way to host pictures, https://catbox.moe/ may be an option. Be ethical about what you post and donate if you are able or use this a lot. It is just an individual hosting content, not a company. The image embedding syntax for Lemmy is 
Moderation policy: Light, mostly invisible
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Tinkercad (free, closed source, in browser) is what I use. It's very basic, but easy to learn.
So many CADs.
I grabbed FreeCAD but it made no sense to me.
Yeah abandon FreeCAD for now. It's a powerful FOSS option, and the new v1.0 looks promising, but I second TinkerCAD to learn. It's intuitive, and most of the principles you learn will translate fairly easily to other CAD software. Unless you're trying to sculpt organic shapes, I'd focus off TinkerCAD
I second tinkercad for super basic parts. Need to print a knob for a radio that isn't on thing-verse? 20min in tinkercad.
For blender basic things to learn could be plugging a hole in a part and adding a smaller or bigger one to match the screws you have on hand.
Or cutting a part in half to extend it, fill in the gap.
That's all CAD software. You can't just jump in and intuitively learn it by just doing it. It's like trying to learn a programming language. You need a solid tutorial to explain the basics, at a minimum. Even with something simple like TinkerCAD.
FreeCAD was probably the worst choice. Give TinkerCAD a try. I know the FOSS community will hate me for saying this, but I like Autodesk Fusion for a full featured CAD package. It has a very steep learning curve, like all CAD software, and you need to watch some videos first. You will make a ton of mistakes and do even simple things wrong at first, but once you get going, it's great to use.
I'm both used CAD software professionally to do engineering and developed CAD software professionally, and TBH I, too, find FreeCAD difficult to use.
(I haven't tried the latest versions that are supposed to be better yet, though.)
Tinkercad is in the browser, super easy to use.
Tinkercad is just combining basic shapes, so there's basically no learning curve.
Yeah I noticed that. Kinda feels like doing it in the slicer but with brighter colors.