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 !functionalprint@fedia.io
There are CAD communities available at: !cad@lemmy.world or !freecad@lemmy.ml
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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Think about where you are. Solidworks costs many thousands of dollars for a licence. FreeCAD is free. Which one do you think the vast majority of Lemmy users would use?
Solidworks.
By far.
It owns 1/4 of the CAD market all by itself. No one, and I mean no one, who uses CAD for a living is going to waste their time with FreeCAD.
People just starting out might. Especially if they don’t get liscensed from their schools or jobs.
FreeCAD is way too complicated to pick up compared to other options, IMO, but they’ve always had a strong and loyal community
I just watched a tutorial video. Once I figured out how sketching works a lot of other tasks became easier to figure out and intuit.
I do think knowledge is disorganized, said knowledge is out of date and a lot of included legacy workbenches are offered which adds to initial confusion and the errors aren't very helpful.
I use the linktree branch though. Prior to learning freecad I also worked primarily in a codeCAD library in golang which probably helped with understanding basic operations.