Recommendations for Beginners Guides
Recommendations for Beginners Guides
What are your favorite resources to recommend for beginners?
I'm wanting to get interested for doing a cyberdeck case, and/or custom cluster racks for Raspberry Pi's but any and all newbie resources would be appropriate for this question.
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The Free and Open Source Software options are FreeCAD and Blender. These are not trying to manipulate you in any way. You 100% own them, your products from them, and this can never be taken away from you.
I use FreeCAD for all of my designs. All CAD software has a substantial learning curve. There are 3 common modes of design. You can make parts: programmatically with OpenSCAD, like wooden building blocks/Lego's, or using 2d sketches and performing 3d operations like extruding and pocketing. FreeCAD can do all 3. Check the official documentation to get started, it is very high quality. The workbenches can be a bit confusing at first. If you want to do the building blocks style, learn to use the Part Workbench. If you want to do sketch based design, use the Part Design workbench. Don't worry about anything on any other workbenches, they are for advanced operations you do not need.
I use FreeCAD for most of my stuff now, but I found it very, very hard until I watched some video tutorials. After a little training, I'm really happy with it. I tried OpenSCAD, and that can be a really good option depending on your background.
You will also need to choose a slicer, or try some different ones. A lot of people like the prusa slicer, but I've never tried it. I started with the cura slicer, and it worked well enough that I haven't tried anything else. It seems that some people really like the new orca slicer, so that might be a good choice too.
If you can connect a computer to your printer (either raspi, or something else), some software to manage that is definitely helpful. Octoprint is the most popular option, and maybe the only one; so look that up if it's something you think would be relevant for you. There is also something called Klipper for upgrading your printer's firmware. Whether or not that's for a "beginner" depends very much on what their background is, but it's something to consider if the additional features sound worthwhile.
I don't know if these are really the kinds of resource suggestions you had in mind though.
Any specific video suggestions for learning FreeCAD?
This is the one I started with; the ui has changed a little since then, but the basic info is still good I think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXN7TOg3kj4
While not open source, Fusion 360 has a free for personal use version if you are wanting a fairly easy to use CAD program. I had been using mostly Blender up until recently since learning how to use Fusion. I love being able to parameterize everything. Blender is awesome though in it's own right. I use both for making functional prints depending on what I'm trying to do. I tried FreeCAD, but it definitely has a bit more learning curve than Fusion.