Pinecil/TS100/TS80p with D-something tips (chisel) are great irons for electronics (and Pinecil > TS***), they are small, temperature controlled, heat up super quick (like seconds) and make using leadfree solder a breeze. Just make sure to also buy a decent power supply with it (if your laptop has a USB-C power supply you can probably use that)

Other than that, practice makes perfect so depending if you're soldering SMD diodes or not consider working on something else first (maybe a kit?), if I can do this then I believe you can too!

Wooo, as a MINI owner I never thought I'd get this! Damn you PRUSA, foiling my plans to get a faster printer and adding value to my 2 year old purchase!

SALOME is definitely on my list along CAD Builder, which as far as I could see seems a more streamlined version of SALOME 9.09 focused on part modeling (at least from my 5 min quick look)

Oh that's a neat idea, I was exploring comment systems but the ones that inspired me (like Cactus Comments which is based on Matrix) I had trouble getting to work. I'll try setting it up when I get more time!

It's up! Let me know if you have anything I should look at correcting

I read that Dassault is quite active in tracking down pirates, and honestly I don't see the need to resort to potentially installing malware (how much ethics can you expect from random torrents anyway) when the free alternatives seem good enough?

FreeCAD has a lot of problems that stem from things like opaque errors (wire is not closed, failed to recompute) to how some features aren't just there (multi surface sketch is the big one for me) that continuously break my flow. I could adapt but it feels a bit miserable to use compared to others. It's not "hard" it is actually "worse" (for now)

On the FOSS side I also like SolveSpace but I think its limitations and attitude from the team are holding it back. For simple project I'd even prefer it to FreeCAD to be honest, it tends to trip up way less!

Solid Edge is available for free for non-commercial use to everyone, I'm almost done writing its article and it looks really good tbh!

Never heard of ZW3D, sadly the pricing seem a bit steep for what I'm looking for :S

I will probably try out Blender with CAD Sketcher because I have a neat use case for it where I'd like both constrained geometry and pure meshes to work together and that seems the best candidate for it!

I hope I get to revisit it for the series. I had the trial months ago but let it expire without trying it much (had a lot on my plate at the time, plus was having some issues with it). Sadly I could not reset the trial, maybe if I ask kindly they'll let me have an extra week or something?

I'd suggest giving Onshape a look, it's the more user friendly and intuitive of the ones I've tried yet.

If you have an iPad with a Apple Pencil, Shapr3D has a really neat UI (it uses touch and pencil interactions distinctly) but having to pay a subscription just for exporting was too much of an ask for me. They seem to have different pricing now with a free tier and a Windows app (I don't have an iPad anymore) so I might cover it later on.

I will probably explore scripting based CAD in a different style since there's different breeds and they don't really fit the format. One I found out recently which seems very interesting is build123d which comes with more features out of the box (like fillets etc), a VSCode extension for live preview and generally I'd rather write Python than OpenSCAD

If you want a similar price for a more CAD-y like software (sketch/feature-based) Alibre Atom3D should approach that price (also non-subscription), though pricing may be regional. The italian reseller asks for 180eur (but already had a discount down to 130) which isn't as cheap but definitely within the same range.

Yep! I was critical of FreeCAD but I also tried to make sure to point out that I think that for us hobbyists it is the sustainable choice, save for some other (CAD Sketcher/Solvespace) leapfrogging them but I don't really see that happening. I want to try out CAD Builder later on which is pretty much FreeCAD but managed by the OpenCASCADE/SALOME team, maybe it will be a similar experience with less boobytraps...

Have ordered multiple 3D printed parts from JLC, the shipping times are quite longer than with PCBs yeah. The quality is great for the price, they can even print pretty big pieces with resin (I had a flatbox case printed). Tried resin and MJF, honestly quite satisfied with both. Don't really see the reason to order their FDM.

Here are pics of some stuff I had done by them: TOTEM keyboard, resin Flatbox case and buttons (resin case, MJF buttons)