News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into sub... by detourdog on Saturday July 01, 2023 @08:32AM (#36549417)
Has any tried SolveSpace?

https://solvespace.com/index.pl

I'm considering digging in.

Re:Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into sub... by junon on Saturday July 01, 2023 @09:59AM (#36550183)
This looks really cool. I use freecad but find it really frustrating to use, this might be more my style.

They also provide the geometric constraint solving algorithm separately as a library. Incredible.

Re:Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into sub... by bemusedthrow75 on Saturday July 01, 2023 @04:26PM (#36554772)
> They also provide the geometric constraint solving algorithm separately as a library.

Indeed -- it's actually used in the FreeCAD Assembly 3 workbench as a solver (I think that supports switchable/pluggable alternatives now though)

Re:Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into sub... by surfpel on Saturday July 01, 2023 @10:05AM (#36550249)
I love solvespace. I basically only use solvespace now.

It’s very lightweight and minimalistic, but it’s not the easiest to use and very bare bones. I often have to find new ways of building things to account for the lack of functions, such as filleting an edge. In a way it’s a good thing because it’s hard to over complicate a design with unnecessary features, which I tend to do, but my designs in solvespace aren’t as nice or pretty and everything takes longer than inventor or fusion, but it takes half a second to boot up, I love the UI, and I really don’t need a complicated CAD tool for the vast majority of my projects.

The other caveat is that like any FOSS CAD tool it’s not totally stable and certain actions may get you into a bad state and possibly crash the program, but eventually you get used to it and can work around them (so far as I’ve seen).

If you’re just doing simple hobby projects, I’d say it’s worth trying out but it does take a little time to get used to. For professional endeavors it’s probably not gonna do the job.

Re:Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into sub... by detourdog on Saturday July 01, 2023 @12:31PM (#36551857)
That actually sounds like a pretty positive review. Have you done anything with the gcode paths?

I guess one just works through the tutorials until you on your own.

Re:Louis Rossmann: Autodesk turns lifetime licenses into sub... by heretoo on Saturday July 01, 2023 @11:25AM (#36551117)
It would be nice if I could scale the UI. Some text can be scaled with GDK environment variables, but not the icons.