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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  24d ago (text post)   391 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for October 21, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Trying to learn CAD software. I am fairly convinced that all of the people that were involved in the creation of those system hated humanity even more than the C++ guys. No other explanation.

I actually just tried learning CAD software this week. It's a little less obnoxious than I was expecting. Though I'm both watching YouTube videos and asking LLMs for help every 5 minutes.

2D or 3D? IMO (as a civil engineer), 2D CAD software is pretty easy. (QCAD is very similar to the MicroStation v8 and OpenRoads that I've used at work.) But I don't know much about 3D CAD software. (OpenSCAD is great but perhaps a little clunkier than desirable. I didn't like FreeCAD when I tried it a while ago.)

I love openscad, but my programmer's mind still can't comprehend why the fuck they don't have the ability to assign group of points as an object. So it is quite the struggle. They really need to push it a bit more towards ide. The engine is great.

If you're willing to pay $300/month for a license, Autodesk Inventor is pretty good (I use it at work). If you aren't, then Autodesk Fusion 360 is the next best, and it's terrible (I use it at home). Why is the distance constraint categorized with the lines and circles instead of the parallels and coincidents? Why is "horizontal or vertical" one button? Why do you have to reset your fillets to radius zero to select new edges? Why can't you make coils out of arbitrary shapes? Why do they have so many greyed-out options clogging up the menus (okay, I know that one: the free version is an ad for the paid version)?

It seems I will do what is the most sensible thing - just pirate solidworx

Onshape is good. Though might teach you some bad habits if you're moving to big standard platforms.

It's been ages since I used one, but I don't remember it being that bad... then again, I don't really mind C++ either...

Still refactoring. After simplifying the content import I wanted to consolidate everything so that it effectively doesn't matter whether the user is browsing the automatically imported content from the database, or the API directly (in a nitter like fashion), by putting everything into the same type of data transfer object. This is where I ran into a common issue of mine, where a framework / package does 90% of what I need it to, and the remaining 10% is something non-standard enough to cause the majority of my pain.

Well, I think I'm close of digging myself out of this particular hole.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Tried to debug my funny physics issues. Removed the terrain, no change. Tried to get some logging of collision events, and either there aren't any or I'm trying to catch the wrong signals.

Next step will be to set up controlled collisions and look up more code examples, but I haven't gotten around to that.

TRON bike lighting!

The ESP32-C3s with 0.5" OLEDs are in and looking cute.

Putting a spandex cap on bike helmets and sewing into that works better but kinda like looks crappy. I'm thinking maybe just a woven accessory rail/harness like you see on army helmets might work better. I'll have to ask grandma what she thinks next time she visits

In the meantime been working on getting the BLE stack together. Seems like it works. I'm using some smartphone app for debugging BLE to test but I'm almost certainly going to have to make a shitty Android app if I want to blast the same synchronization info to all of the kids' helmets at once. Really don't want to make an Android app but maybe ChatGPT will make it painless.

By the way, you don't have any pics of the progress on this project?

It doesn't look the way I want it to so I'm self conscious. Though I think the main idea is to see LEDs in the dark or at a distance and that part works fine. Should try to put together some admiration shots ...

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