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Comment by s1mon | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's been doing mechanical product engineering for 30+ years, doing this as a first project is way more than jumping off the deep end. Impressive.

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I’m just a hobbyist 3D user but I feel like I have good experience, been using Autodesk Inventor then Fusion since early high school…

I saw the level of detail in the model and am shocked. If this is truly their first experience with CAD/CAM they are a natural.

For example - here’s my home built camera. It’s massively more simplistic: https://blog.maxg.io/phase-one-swc/

It may be simplistic, but that's a cracking photo you've taken on it.

Thank you, I appreciate that!

Wow super cool. I’ve always wanted a Hasselblad SWC, but now I think I want what you built even more ;)

Thanks! It was surprisingly challenging to get right, in fact that body is slightly misaligned somewhere (possibly the lens…).

Does the Phase One back have a preview screen on it, or are you just sort of eyeballing what's in the frame?

Also, I noticed a lot of photos of the olympics on your flickr page. Are you in West Seattle, too, by any chance?

Most of the modern ones do - anything from the IQ1-IQ4 has a good preview screen, for live view specifically you need a CMOS sensor based one like the IQ3 100 or the IQ4 150. The CCD ones technically do live view but it's really not good. So this only works for backs that are fairly expensive still...

Close to West Seattle! I'm in the North Seattle area and walk around near the water there a lot.

ah right on, thanks for the info

BTW, if you want to design some models for 3D printing but the only thing you know to do is to code, you can use OpenSCAD & program the obejcrs into existence:

https://openscad.org/

Also recommend using the BOSL2 library with OpenSCAD - it turnes an already very powerful tool into something insane:

https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2

This is really cool, I had no idea this existed. Thanks for sharing!

Hey, this is super interesting! Thanks for sharing. I have been playing with using the Python console/scripts/macros in FreeCAD to create 3D models. I found this to be very friendly for my programmer mindset. I have learned a bit of onshape, tinkercad, blender and freecad, but I find it extremely tedious and full of unknowns that I struggle to make sense of and resolve (e.g. contraints in freecad, sometimes I just don't know how to add the missing constraints, or just adding text to a curved face in literally all programs, it's never as easy as click the face add text, there are always gotcha's).

I wonder how does openscad compare to FreeCADs python, if you know. I just found https://pythonscad.org/ which looks interesting, but then, the BOSL2 library looks super interesting and important for a good user experience, so I do not know if the PythonSCAD could somehow just import it and use it.

I guess there's homework for me to do here, but if anyone has the experience to get a hint of "what is the best/easiest python-based programming way of doing 3D modeling", I'd be forever thankful for sharing their thoughts.

LLMs are really good at writing Python, so iterating over a model in code I found is really quick, and I really enjoy the process. Meanwhile clicking so many times in so many menus makes me desist on designing anything more-or-less complex.

Just got a 3D printer and was curious what the best practice was for generating objects in code and then outputting to a printer.

Thanks for sharing!

Another, arguably even more powerful, alternative is Rhino + Grasshopper. Grasshopper is often used for generative designs, but can include arbitrary Python nodes and can even be used for "parametrically" designed functional parts.

Grasshopper can also output gcode directly [1], enabling pretty wild things like [2].

[1]: https://interactivetextbooks.tudelft.nl/rhino-grasshopper/Gr...

[2]: https://www.instagram.com/medium_things/

Agreed, both the pcb and 3d design was very well done. I'd love to do something similar (on a smaller camera lol)

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