Strongly disagree. There's nothing I can do in any of the commercial CAD programs that I can't do in FreeCAD. Most people just don't want to invest the time to learn it - and instead blame the tool. Yes, there's a learning curve and it requires understanding the tool's limitations, but if it wasn't for FreeCAD we'd have nothing in the free, open source space for CAD.
ScottE
joined 2 years ago
I'm glad it was helpful. They are great little controllers and ESPHome makes them so accessible for people like me who don't really want to write code manually.
In a quick read, it sounds like the video you are referencing might be an old one. There's a lot of functionality in sketcher that is relatively new that used to be done in other workbenches. And even more in the forthcoming 0.22 release.
FreeCAD can be tricky, but once you learn a workflow that keeps things smooth, it helps a lot - and that comes with experience. And while I certainly have had to watch videos and read docs on how to do some things, I've had to do the exact same thing with commercial tools I've used. And sometimes, you just have to delete a bunch of steps and re-do them. This can be frustrating, but aside from the topology naming problem, that's really the same on the commercial products too - CAD can be frustrating. And in a lot of cases all you really need to do is go back and re-reference to work through the naming problem (such as a sketch or operation referencing a face that is now different).
In summary - it takes time and effort to learn, it's not a simple tool. Once you start to work with it, and learn to do things the way FreeCAD wants you to, it gets a lot easier and you'll be very productive.
For what it's worth, my favorite FreeCAD YouTube videos are from MangoJelly's channel. Many, many times I've been stuck on something and he will have a video on the exact thing. A recent one for me is failed fillets on curved surfaces and learning how tangency matters.
I hope this helps. It's a powerful, but complex tool, with plenty of pitfalls, but once you spend the time to work with it, it'll do what you want it to.
Oh, and one more thing - there's a commercial product Ondsel built on FreeCAD. They are contributing a lot back to FreeCAD (and I think some core FreeCAD devs are part of Ondsel). While commercially wrapped open source can be good or bad, I think this will help move things forward for FreeCAD in a positive way. I've been running Ondsel myself (it's FreeCAD at the core) as it has many 0.22 features in the current stable release.
I don't have an exact answer to your problem, but I do have a few ideas to think about. I've got a few ESP32 WROOM boards running in various applications, so I'm a bit familiar. So here's my thoughts:
- I only plug the module into data USB (computer) for the initial firmware provisioning. After that, it's 100% wifi and USB is only for power using a power supply, not the computer. And I do the initial provisioning with just the bare ESP32 - no breakout board, nothing plugged into GPIO. Get the device up on wifi with NO other configuration in the firmware.
- I use the "arduino" framework. I don't know if that's correct or really matters, I've heard it's the same as "esp32dev" but I don't really know. I use "arduino" because that's what the examples used when I setup my first board.
- Is it possible that the sensor module/board is using the same GPIO that the USB UART uses? There is a lot of shared usage of the GPIO that you've got to be careful to work around. The dev tools will often catch this when you compile your firmware, but not always. Again, using wifi after the initial provisioning might be enough if it is sharing GPIO with the serial port.
- If you repower the ESP32 too many times rapidly it'll boot into safe mode. You can change the settings on that, but you can also just work slowly - make sure the device is powered on for a few minutes to record a good boot in the flash. It outputs a message in the logs, so it's handy to always be running the log command in a terminal while developing.
Hope that helps! They are a lot of fun to integrate with HA.
Our house has wall vents for all 4 bathrooms, so it's definitely something allowed by code here. It works just fine, there are louvered exits on each one. It's better than venting into the attic like a lot of older houses for sure.
Yep, all desktop environments have this - whatever text editor is handy. :-)
Same here. Useful breakdown on tools, several of which I've used. I've invested a lot of time in FreeCAD thus far, and as I've learned how to do things with the right workflow to prevent errors it's really quite nice and very powerful - and it will continue to only get better with each release. Fortunately, there are great videos and posts when I do get stuck. I can't say enough good things about MangoJellys YouTube videos in learning how to do things the FreeCAD way - probably half of FreeCAD I'd never learn to use by just clicking around. I intend to continue down this road too, and have donated to the FreeCAD project and supported creators versus paying for commercial software. No regrets!
Maybe they are, but this is the way the medium works - you don't get to control what people post (unless you are mod). Scroll past and move on.
Nope - that's the whole point of ZFS - you don't need any special hardware, nor do you want that layer hiding the details since ZFS manages the drives. Plus, you probably want to use RAIDZx with spare drives to absorb failure.
rxvt-unicode - lightweight and nearly perfect, and one of the few that handles fonts well.
100% all this. Canonical has been pushing snaps for awhile, and I wonder if the 12 year LTS for Ubuntu is part of that strategy - want something newer? It's in the snap store. snap is terrible, worse than flakpak and appimage - but just as you say, as an arch user I don't have to care. Whatever I want is probably in the AUR if not the main repos. Rolling distros, done right (arch), are an amazing experience.
Exactly this - once people invest the time to understand the FreeCAD flow, and get over it, they'll find it's an amazing and extremely productive tool.
I tried out SolidWorks and it's a complete mess. You can't just download and install it, it runs a bunch of weird background programs on the computer, and interacting with the multiple web sites is a nightmare. I've been waiting well over a month for them to refund under the promised 30 day guarantee. I'd never, ever do anything with that awful company again.
I'm really looking forward to see how Ondsel does. I've been using it for the last week or two, as it's integrated 0.22 features, and I think it could be a really good thing for the FreeCAD community.