Sean Heber
Tried 3D printing a simple box-thing for a project yesterday. A 5 hour job. Box-like structures always take forever to print.
It didn't fit quite right.
Dammit!
Slight redesign, printed it again over night.
It still didn't fit quite right.
ARGH!
(I am not an engineer.)
Sean Heber
@montyhayter that bouncing ball demo was legendary. I remember reading about it in magazines and stuff, even. I never had an Amiga. Was a long time before I ever got to see it in person, but even when I did finally it was still impressive at the time.
Then Wolfenstein 3D came out and suddenly everything else looked terrible by comparison and then Doom was dropped a year later, I think, and wow... What a fun time that era was. Stuff got exponentially better almost every year for like a decade.
Monty Hayter
@bigzaphod I distinctly remember the Amiga bouncing ball demo, which was mind-blowing at the time: real-time, shaded, animated, 3D rendering?!?! Never mind that it was fairly low res by today’s standards, and tied up most of the machine including the custom chips.
And now… as you said, thousands of instances on a web canvas.
(I really need to dig out my Amiga and see if it still works)
Sean Heber
@montyhayter haha - yeah, it's amazing how much it's all changed! What's weird is how quickly we get used to those changes. I was watching some retro computer YouTube thing a few days ago and they had a program bouncing "balls" written in BASIC on a C64 or something. And it was like, they could only bounce maybe 6 of them and could double that if they used assembly language. (Or maybe more - I already forgot the details.) Now we can do thousands on a web canvas with javascript. 😛
Monty Hayter
@bigzaphod It’s all changed so much. I had a summer job in ‘88 working for a CAD software company, and man it was rough. It would actually do a shaded render rather than just a wireframe, but the rendering times were in the hours and even days.
Everyone was pretty excited about the then-brand-new PS/2 model 70 towers that had just arrived, with “fast” 386’s in them…
And now you can do more in free software on Raspberry Pi.
…man that makes me feel old 😜
Sean Heber
@montyhayter I did a tiny bit of early CAD stuff in a highschool class in the late 90s. There wasn’t any manufacturing though. Was a (presumably early) version of AutoCAD that ran on DOS machines so while there was some visualization, it wasn’t exactly… good. 😛
Monty Hayter
@bigzaphod Given that it was the late 80’s we didn’t have much in the way of computer rendering, so we were kind of forced to get practice in visualizing/thinking about things in 3D.
A prof might give us a part to machine with only an orthographic drawing, not even an isometric view… and then (in part) grade us on how well it mated with another part we’d never even seen.
“Fun”
Sean Heber
@montyhayter there's imprecision in the 3D printer, for sure. I think maybe less so with a resin printer, but I don't have one of those. Sometimes the problems occur because of roughness with overhangs or bridging which I usually forget about.
Sean Heber
@montyhayter mostly, though, I'm just not used to thinking about stuff in 3D so I end up forgetting that when I'm going to attach a plate to a thing, I have to consider how thick the plate is too. Or that nuts are bigger when you measure them from point-to-point instead of edge-to-edge. Oops. Or that if the hole for the nut is big enough, but too small to fit my fingers or a tool in there, I can't very well tighten it, can I? Stuff like that. 😛
Monty Hayter
@bigzaphod When I went to college (technically CEGEP, the system in Quebec is a little different) I was in a Mechanical Engineering Technology program — there was a fair bit of time spent on allowances for machining tolerances, shrinkage when casting, thermal expansion…
No idea how much of that would apply to 3D printing, because I’ve (so far) resisted getting one — I know it would be an enormous time sink for me.
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