I found that I could move my junk tray from the side of my work area to the currently unused space underneath my laptop, but with the current arrangement there isn’t enough clearance above the tray to see/access the stuff in the back. This has worked well for years, but recently I have been looking for ways to simplify/neaten up my workspace.
![blender donut primitive blender donut primitive](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/59575502/103438945-97a8f000-4c5e-11eb-8326-fb72fac9f588.png)
Note the red ‘riser elevators’ under the metal display risers Closeup showing the built-in shelf for my XPS 15 laptopĪs shown above, the ‘riser elevator design incorporates a built-in shelf for my XPS15 laptop. I have the monitors on 4″ risers, but found they still weren’t high enough for comfortable viewing and seating ergonomics, so I designed (in TCAD, several years ago) a set of riser risers as shown in the image below My two-display setup. My main PC is a Dell XPS15 laptop, connected to two 24″ monitors via a Dell WD19TBS Thunderbolt docking station. Jonathan encourages his students to go beyond the lessons and to modify or extend the particular focus of any lesson, so I decided to try and use Blender/CAD Sketcher for a small project I have been considering. There is a MakerTales Discord server and a channel dedicated to helping academy students, and Jonathan seems to be pretty responsive in responding to my (usually clueless) comments and pleas for help. I also found it extremely helpful to go back through the first few lessons several times (very easy to do with the lesson layout), even to the point of playing and replaying particular steps until I was comfortable with whatever procedure was being taught. At first I was more than a little intimidated by the deluge of short-cut keys (and still am a little bit), but Jonathan’s lessons expose the viewer to slightly more bite-size chunks than the normal fire-hose method, so I was able to stay more or less on the same continent with him as he moved through the design step. All lessons are extensively documented, with video, audio, and all keypresses fully described. In particular, Jonathan starts off with the assumption that the student knows absolutely NOTHING about Blender (which was certainly true in my case) and shows how to set the program up with precision 3D modeling in mind. I have to say this may be the best money I’ve ever spent on self-education (and at my advanced age, that is saying a LOT □ ). I signed right up, and so far have worked (and I do mean worked!) my way through the first six lessons.
![blender donut primitive blender donut primitive](https://i.redd.it/2y3zzg4zcnz21.jpg)
After posting about my problems, Jonathan was kind enough to point me at his paid “ How To Use Blender For 3D Printing” 10-lesson series for $124USD. So, I worked my way through Jonathan’s CAD Sketcher 0.24 tutorial, and as usual got in trouble several times due to my ignorance of basic Blender GUI techniques. Then I ran across Maker Tales Jonathan Kobylanski’s demo of the CAD Sketcher V0.24 Blender add-on, and I became convinced that Blender might well be a viable TinkerCad replacment. Unfortunately for me, the donut tutorial didn’t really address dimension-driven 3D models at all, so while the tutorial was kinda fun, it didn’t really address my issue. After several tries and a large amount of frustration due to the radical GUI changes between Blender 2.x and 3.x, I was able to get most of the way through to making a donut. I ran across the Blender app several months ago and started looking for online tutorials the first one I found was the famous ‘Donut Tutorial’ by Blender Guru. Blender seems to be aimed more at graphic artists, animators, and 3D world-builders rather than for the kind of dimension-driven precision design for 3D printing, but the CAD Sketcher and CAD Transforms add-ons go a long way toward providing explicit dimension-driven precision 3D design tools for us maker types.
![blender donut primitive blender donut primitive](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Se3ZJhDjwG8/maxresdefault.jpg)
As I discovered eight years ago, AutoDesk’s 123D Design offering wasn’t the app I was looking for, but Blender, with the newly introduced CAD Sketcher and CAD Transforms add-ins, may well be. As I mentioned in my 2014 post comparing AutoDesk’s TinkerCad and 123d Design offerings, TinkerCad is simple and easy to use, powerful due to its large suite of primitive 3D objects and manipulation features, but runs out of gas when dealing with rounded corners, internal fillets, arbitrary chamfers and other sophisticated mesh manipulation options.Ĭonsequently, I have been keeping an eye out for more modern alternatives to TinkerCad – something with the horsepower to do more sophisticated mesh modeling, but still simple enough for an old broke-down engineer to learn in the finite amount of time I have left on earth. I have been been doing 3D printing (a ‘Maker’ in modern jargon) for almost a decade now, and almost all my designs started out life in TinkerCad – Autodesk’s wonderful online 3D design tool.