Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now – anyone else noticing this?
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353 points by kevincox 1d ago 292 comments
Design for 3D-Printing
284 q3k 75 5/4/2025, 5:38:13 PM blog.rahix.de ↗
Notably, in fusion 360 this would all be designed in "plastics" mode, and yet that mode is oblivious to whether the part is printed or moulded. I wonder if any CAD engine can do "production-aware design" that constrains design to the capabilities of standardized machines, e.g. keeping a metal part 3-d millable. I've seen strict design rule enforcement with PCBs, and I have seen sheet metal macros, but nothing for general mechanical CAD.
I've been playing with 3D printers for 7 years, and I even assembled mine at home during the pandemic. Some topics described here I already found out by practice and I think most people with experience in 3D printing also do that.
But having everything studied, compiled and explained in that level is just, again, amazing! Not only that, but there are so many other topics covered here that I still have to learn.
Great work, thank you!
I've heard that Bambus are much better. I have a Raise3D E2 from the Ender era, and it's rock solid. A step up in price, but no finicking. Just works, when new, and now.
I don’t actually think Bambu makes unreliable printers; to the contrary, they are excellent machines that, if anything, are much more reliable on the whole than Creality. But they’re kind of like sports cars, in that their target market is either people who want something fast and flashy and are willing to throw money at any problems to make them go away, or for technical types who want something they can take out on the track and don’t mind wrenching their own machines. The problem is that Bambu printers are marketed and touted as being great for beginners, and while they certainly make it easy to get into 3D printing for nontechnical people, I think most of them will end up ultimately being disappointed at either the lack of customization they allow or amount of time, effort, and money required to diagnose and fix them when something goes wrong.
Predatory licensing agreements and cloud software which presumably allows the company to access/steal designs.
I've had an MK3S+ for years and even though it's a primitive machine in comparison to the current Bambu hardware I see no reason to upgrade to something else. It just keeps printing whatever I throw at it and the results continue to be very good. In fact, I seem to have better luck with it than the Bambus I sometimes use at various hacker/makerspaces.
If you just look at the numbers (speed, volume, ...) against Bambu hardware they're not as good, but the reliability and simplicity make up for it IMO. The main missing feature is multi-material support, but that's something I'm not really interested in due to how wasteful the current technology is.
Super off-topic, but I've always kind of been let down by the appearance of 3d printed text. As noted, engraved seems to be better than embossed, but it still just looks kind of weird. I envy the clean, crisp labels that seem to be commonplace on commercial injection-molded plastic parts.
The toner transfer technique seems kind of promising. I think I've also seen people spray painting 3d-printed parts, and then lasering away the paint to draw text, which is interesting (if somewhat more materials- and equipment-intensive).
Really cool article though.
I’m not making my own designs yet. It is too difficult. Modifiying a little here using Blender is where Im at
* Sketch a 2D design on a surface * Make the elements in that design depend on each other (this is parallel to that, this is equal to the other, X is at an angle to Y) as much as possible * Pull the 2D shape up into 3D space
Now you know how to design your own things! The rest is just learning the buttons, but there's usually one called "sketch", one called "constrain", and one called "extrude".
1. The majority of 3D modeling is not done parametrically, meaning there is not a lot of data. The little data there is is generally in OpenSCAD, which isn't very powerful or extensible for useful CAD. 2. Generally, when you want to do CAD, you need to come up with a way to define everything precisely. Like I want this hole 2 millimeters from the bottom, and this exact edge next to the hole to be beveled, etc. Saying all that to an LLM is slower than just making the whole.
That said, these still can be useful for beginners, and there are things like Adam AI that are starting to catch on for simple stuff.
Then there's the possibility of an agent automating an actual CAD program. This has already been done with game dev, e.g. Unity MCP.
[0]: https://archive.org/details/StructuresOrWhyThingsDontFallDow...
While it’s done a lot of cool stuff and enabled rapid prototyping etc it never scaled the way I really thought it would
[0]: there may be a better turn for this however this is what I mean: that is one machine that can output a wide variety of different things using the same common material, IE maybe one day it produces ball bearings and the next it could produce a bunch of car pistons, with only having to make minimal changes to the machine itself if not changing anything at all
Dan Gelbart has a response (with caveats)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLgPW2672s4
That said, for smaller scale products, news businesses, or things where 3D printing is the only way the thing can exist, these services exist.
https://reprap.org/wiki/RepRapLogo
Then overhangs got good enough that people just started doing normal holes again. :)
Thanks to the author for being willing to put so much of their hard-earned experience into a resource for the rest of us.
Each of the points could basically be expanded to an article on their own. E.g. they don't mention for vase mode that you can get much better results using a big nozzle with it.
I've been meaning to try my hand at CAD and designing models to print but I haven't quite made the jump.
One thing that has given me pause is a good CAD program for Linux, does anyone has any good tips for a complete Newbie where to begin?
- Solvespace --- small and lightweight, the UI may be a bit off-putting
- FreeCAD --- hugely improved in the recent 1.0 release, this is a large and impressive system
- Dune 3D --- the new kid on the block, it has the advantage of a modern appearance and UI standards, and the consistency of being a one-man project
If one moves away from traditonal/contemporary CAD there are a few other options:
- BRL-CAD --- intensely old-school, this is one of the oldest opensource codebases
- OpenSCAD --- programmatic CAD, this has inspired more successors than I would care to count (esp. look up libfive and Matt Keeter's Master's Thesis if you are academically mathematically oriented)
For that last, one of the more successful hybrids is "OpenPythonSCAD" which is just what it says on the tin --- Python in OpenSCAD:
https://pythonscad.org/
which I have been using for a project on the other side of the fence --- making DXF and G-code for CNC mills and routers:
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
EDIT: One additional tool to note is Fullcontrolgcode Designer, which to bring things full-circle, is the 3D-printing version of the above:
https://fullcontrolgcode.com/
One of its standout features is the `hull()` function, which computes the convex hull of multiple shapes. When used skillfully, `hull()` becomes more than a geometric operation — it’s a design primitive that lets you smoothly bridge components, create enclosures, and generate complex organic forms without manual sculpting. It's like having a smart “connective tissue” for your model.
If you're comfortable with code and want exact control over your 3D prints or CAD designs, OpenSCAD delivers precision with minimal overhead. It rewards clean thinking and composability — making it ideal for rapid prototyping, parametric part libraries, and even mechanical design.
Consider signing up via your favorite YouTuber's sponsorship link to support them.
Downsides are that the CAM plugin is paid-only (irrelevant for 3D printing) and you're obviously trapping yourself in a commercial, proprietary walled garden that might start charging subscription fees or otherwise rug-pull you once it gets popular enough. I've decided that the ease of use benefit is high enough to warrant the risk - I'd rather risk not being able to edit my models in the future than not creating them in the first place because the alternative software is too painful to use.
It's helpful to understand how the software works, because it's different from what you might have experienced from other software: It essentially stores operations, like "start with this sketch, then extrude this part of it to a height of 10 mm, then add a fillet". You can go back and edit previous steps and the following steps will be directly re-applied.
In sketch mode, you can just draw, but you can also add arbitrary constraints, e.g. "these points have to be exactly 3 cm away" and it will adjust your sketch to match the (new) constraints. This makes it really easy to change some aspect of the part later. This is common in CAD software, although OnShape's implementation seems more intuitive to me than e.g. Fusion 360.
If you want to do actual 3D CAM (for CNC machining), Fusion360 seems to be the only free option (not available for Linux).
In general, with all CAD software, the common "just poke at it until you figure out how it works" approach doesn't work well, although once you've understood the basic concepts that I've explained above and know some CAD terms/concepts like creating 3D parts by extruding or rotating 2d drawings, Onshape will mostly let you get away with that approach. You probably should still watch tutorials before you start.
The free CAM available in F360 has been artificially limited to only allow extremely slow travel speed. It's almost useless.
You certainly won't want to use it for mass production, but for hobbyist use where getting the model and CAM config right, setting up the machine etc. are the biggest time sink and most parts are made in quantity 1, I found it acceptable.
- Tinkercad (browser) fun and great for very simple projects. Like the MS Paint of 3D.
- OnShape (browser) seemingly pretty powerful, but not the easiest to learn in my experience, and has some annoying bugs.
- Plasticity (desktop) I played around with the free trial and liked it a lot, found it more intuitive than OnShape.
- Womp (browser) not CAD software, but easy to use and great for making free-form/organic looking designs.
- Blender (desktop) not CAD software and haven't used it myself, but I've seen others use it to design 3D prints.
Start with Tinkercad: https://www.tinkercad.com. It runs on the browser, it has some limitations, but it is really simple to use, just open and model whatever you want joining and extracting shapes and importing SVGs for extrusion.
After that, if you know any programming language you'll find OpenSCAD easy to learn. I gave a course last year about it, the slides are available here: https://lucasoshiro.github.io/posts-en/2024-03-24-openscad/. They are in Portuguese, if someone shows interest I can translate them to English, but I think they are easy to follow even by non-speakers.
The learning curve is still there, but I felt more empowered to adjust/share 3d printing designs made in it over dealing with quirks of GUI-based CAD applications. The discord community on there is rather helpful too.
https://build123d.readthedocs.io/
https://github.com/bernhard-42/vscode-ocp-cad-viewer
I'll still use FreeCAD on occasion as a secondary viewer for stl files, though my hope is to use build123d entirely including for describing joints as well.
Here's a playlist for FreeCAD 1.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_yh_S31R9g&list=PLWuyJLVUNt...
But he has a bunch of other videos.
https://www.youtube.com/@4axisprinting/videos
Best of luck =3
Not entirely sure if it's available for Linux.
I probably shouldn't use autodesk but I'm not trying to make the world a better place. Just to unleash my creativity.
And I rather spend my limited free time creating stuff than to learn a new tool. Unless it is actually a more powerful one for the purpose that enables me to do things I can't now. But this doesn't seem to be the case.
It's the same reason I use BambuLab printers. My hobby is making stuff, not tinkering with printers. They're just tools, a means to an end.
Ps forgive me my defensive attitude but I often get people at the makerspace that take my choice of tools as a political statement. But I don't care. I just want to use what does the job for me.
https://www.cadsketcher.com/
and
https://blendercam.com/