3d design for printing

I don't want to sound like an idiot.  I really don't.  I just lack the patience to learn Blender.  It's not just because the name of the application sounds like a dating app for some subculture of swinger.  It is because it operates in a very similar manner to the Adobe Creative Suite.  There are menus for every button, and there are shortcuts that look very similar to finishing moves in mortal combat just to do something simple like replicate a part.  So, I had to put that down and walk away.

The sad part is that my main desktop system is feeling some neglect since I dork around with my pi systems and containers, but I do not actually investigate minor issues with my main box.  I didn't remove Totem until last week.  I just kind of lived with the jerky garbage video until I wanted to watch something clearly.  This is a problem because I could not consistently get FreeCAD to work.  So, for me, it seemed like I couldn't use the 2 most popular 3d tools to build stuff to print.  Then I spoke to a coworker.

A little back story about my history with 3d printing.  I asked around for recommendations on a 3d printer for a few weeks before pulling the trigger.  Everyone owned a different brand and didn't talk about it really at all.  Then I asked the guy who runs a print shop out of his house.  He owns 5 of the same model Prusa.  I think I pulled the trigger within 3 days of hearing about his print shop.  So, I asked him with help on design for a beer tap handle.  He immediately told me to check out Tinker CAD.  Within 6 hours I had a prototype.  Within 2 days I had a working model.  By the end of the week I had a working model that was in use.

The only real aggregate:
Tinkercad

Of course, once that was finished, I had to make more stuff.  The nice thing is that you can upload directly to Thingiverse from the app.  The instructions were very basic and allowed an easy path to get straight into working.  I like to print a few prototypes prior to finalizing a model, but it works so much better than printing ingots of plastic when using Blender.  So far I've made tap handles and smart watch charging stations.  Next up, the case for the pi IR blaster/universal remote from my first blog.  I'm pretty happy now.

I may have mentioned it in another blog post, but it is also pretty cool that you can print tools like a micrometer.  That helped quite a bit in the design of the charging stations.