A general query/survey --- what sort of machines do folks have/use?

[William Adams]

What sort of CNC equipment do folks here have?

 - 3D printer

 - laser

 - CNC mill

 - CNC router

 - CNC lathe

What software do you use for them currently?

What sort of projects are you currently making?

Do you have any interest in using (Open)PythonSCAD to make files for them? If so, in what fashion?

William

[William Adams]

I have:

 - multiple 3D printers (Ordbot Quantum (not used much, trying to give away), Centauri Carbon (0.8mm nozzle used for PETG and PETG-GF functional prints), and a small open CoreXY w/ a filament switching system (0.25mm nozzle used for PLA)

 - multiple CNC routers (I work for Carbide 3D, so have an SO5 Pro 4x2, Pro XXL, and multiple SO3s)

 - various hand and power tools

Mostly I use Carbide Create, been trying to learn Alibre Atom 3D, but my difficulties with that are why I picked up OpenSCAD (which I mostly use by way of BlockSCAD or OpenSCAD Graph Editor) and have been working on:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

which of course uses (Open)PythonSCAD.

Mostly, I make boxes (operating on the premise that there are two types of furniture, patforms and boxes, and if one can make a box, one can make any sort of furniture), exploring various sorts of joinery at: https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d --- current project is a replica of Thos. Jefferson's Lap Desk which I hope to finish in time for the 4th of July:

https://community.carbide3d.com/t/independence-day-project-with-hardware-thos-jeffersons-lap-desk/91666

I'm currently finishing up re-working gcodepreview to write out DXFs so as to take advantage of the new support for importing DXFs w/ layers:

which generates a DXF (attached) which when imported into a Carbide Create file which has matching layers and associated toolpaths:

is ready for cutting with just a Boolean operation:

William

-- 

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

https://designinto3d.com/

[John David]

I have a 40W Creality Falcon-2.  I also have an old TechnoIsel CNC router that was rebuilt with LinuxCNC, that is long in the tooth and needs to be rebuilt.  I have not had enough time with 3D printers to be ready to play with that at the moment.  I also have access to a 4-axis Okuma milling machine, and a Cincinnati Milacron lathe.  It would be cool if I can get a *SCAD tool chain for the mill or lathe.

My work with PythonSCAD, colormaps, and machineconfig, were specifically set up to simply a *SCAD to laser cutter tool chain.  Hope that helps.

  EBo --

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[nomike Postmann]

What I have
I own Prusa Core One with MMU3.

In Metalab (a hackerspace in Vienna/Austria) I have access to a few more printers and also to a laser cutter (BRM 90130).

What I design
Fixing things in my household (freezer-door, kitchen-scale, etc.), art (e.g. pride-rainbow-pins).

Other things I do
I wrote a tool called thingiverse-publisher for publishing my designs to thingiverse.com using their API. But as it's quite hacky, I started developing a proper thingiverse-client Python SDK on the basis of which I want to develop publish3d (A versatile tool for managing and synchronizing 3D printable designs across multiple platforms with a plugin-based architecture). They are both in very early draft stages however.

As I was unhappy with TinkerCad (too limited, to many weird quirks necessary to do even basic things, performance suffers on even moderately complex designs), FreeCAD (it's a cool project, but I never really got the hang of it) and Fusion 360 (close source and the locked down nature of it deterred me quite quickly), I ended up with OpenSCAD, which I like a lot in principle. I don't like the limitations of their DSL though and after failing to get cad-query to run on my system (their build system and build documentation needs some major improvements, and they should publish proper deployables (installer, .deb and .rpm packages, etc.)) I discovered PythonSCAD and was immediately hooked. So much so, that I'm now one of the core developers of the project (and I'm the one who made sure that there are proper deployables for Linux, Windows and macOS and that we have new releases regularly (looks at OpenSCAD)).

At some point I want someone to explain the CNC mill in the hackerspace to me and then I'd be able to use that as well.

What I want PythonSCAD to do
As I'm mostly doing 3D designs for FDM printing, I'm perfectly happy with PythonSCAD just outputting 3D objects, as in this case gcode rendering is best to be left to the slicer software. There is no way PythonSCAD could ever become feature-rich enough to replace PrusaSlicer for me, and I'm also a fan of the Unix philosophy that each tool should only serve one purpose, but that extremely well.

I do want to see an improvement in multi-color support though. I've designed a polyamory-shopping-cart-coin in OpenSCAD for example where I currently need to export each color as a separate STL file to import them together in PrusaSlicer. It would be nice to be able to export different parts of a design (or different colors) as separate objects into to 3MF file (as STL doesn't support this), so I can just import this as one file and be done with.

But that seems to not be a trivial change...

[W W]

Equipment:

- I have an old, humble, Prusa i3 mk3. It is slow, but consistently gets the job done.

Software:

- pythonscad for parameterized modelling.

- prusaslicer for compiling stl to gcode to send to the printer.

Projects:

- mostly household items. Greatest hit has been a silly gutter downspout guard.

- I built a "higher level abstraction" library on top of Pythonscad, ztools. Things like bounding boxes (before it existed in pythonscad early days), centering a solid on origin, monad around transformations and restore back to original position after scope exits, finding the closest face given a point or vector, etc. The beauty of Pythonscad is unlocking user freedom to expand abstraction with Python :)

- I have a silly vibes coded tool that takes an image as input, user then manually mark points on the image, and user input known distance between two points. Output is a list of points to import into pythonscad as a polygon. It is my workaround in creating awkward shapes in pythonscad. The code is slop but it does work. It's in a private repo and probably don't deserve to see the light of day. Let me know if folks are interested, I can publish it.

[Guenther Sohler]

The printer which runs my jobs is an Anycubic Kobra ,the 3rd already. Had 2 other printers before,

My 1st one was a "Think and Have" built by a German hobbyist.

I am happy with my printer , especially after it was running klipper, I like the web interface and the scalability most

In the past I have designed a lot of things with OpenSCAD, see 

https://www.thingiverse.com/gigl/designs

but gradually I become unhappy with literally attaching another language to it. which does not require obfuscated workarounds for impossible options.

I own one of these cheap 40W China lasers,

I got a special price for "over 98% new", but I planned to replace the mainboard anyway with an up-to-date mainboard

(finally found out, that one of the mirrors was basically dead and old mainboard was not connected to power)

Its running FluidNC now and I created some basic designs for it already with PythonSCAD

....

More to come in future ...

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[Guenther Sohler]

sorry wanted to express:

but gradually I became unhappy with it  which resulted in literally attaching another language to it.

and yes: My Slicer is CURA