- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
California’s new bill requires DOJ-approved 3D printers that report on themselves targeting general-purpose machines.
Assembly Member Bauer-Kahan introduced AB-2047, the “California Firearm Printing Prevention Act,” on February 17th. The bill would ban the sale or transfer of any 3D printer in California unless it appears on a state-maintained roster of approved makes and models… certified by the Department of Justice as equipped with “firearm blocking technology.” Manufacturers would need to submit attestations for every make and model. The DOJ would publish a list. If your printer isn’t on the list by March 1, 2029, it can’t be sold. In addition, knowingly disabling or circumventing the blocking software is a misdemeanor.
Do yourself a favor: Learn on TinkerCAD/Fusion 360 or OnShape. No, they are not open source and both have some REALLY nasty caveats for free users. But both of those are THE most user friendly CAD tools out there and you’ll be able to google anything you need. Learn the fundamentals and the language first.
Once you have that down? FreeCAD is surprisingly not horrible these days and I think I even actually like it. But FreeCAD is still heavily restricted by being “for users, by coders” as it were. So operations that might take one step in every other tool could take three or four because that maps a lot better to the underlying math libraries. And you’ll need to constantly translate between what everyone else calls something and what FreeCAD calls it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaTNTUzA5dM is a very good video comparing the two (just watch it at like 1.25x because Deltahedra has a very very very slow speaking cadence…). But they key is that if you know what you are trying to do in the language everyone else speaks, translating that to FreeCAD becomes super easy. Rather than not even knowing how to ask for help in the first place.
OpenSCAD is REALLY nice for building something in a vacuum where you know every dimension you want and have very clean (or nonexistent) interfaces to existing geometry. But, odds are, the vast majority of what you are going to be doing is matching to reference images or even reference parts.
Thanks, yeah, my friends use Fusion 360. I don’t have a working Windows machine right now but maybe I can set something up or run under Wine.
Yeah right now what I want to do is duplicate a shower door guide which is a 3 inch plastic part with some specific grooves and a screw hole. It’s incredibly hard to find the right one online or tell that it’s right. Home Depot doesn’t even have that kind of thing in their store any more. I do at least have a reasonably intact one that I can measure with a caliper.
Yikes, a 28 minute video, but I guess I’ll watch it during some downtime at some point. Thanks again.
You don’t need to watch the whole video. Mostly it just highlights why FreeCAD is VERY capable but not a great First CAD Tool.
And Fusion 360 is the best, period. But OnShape actually might be better for a purely FDM workflow. Most of Fusion, and FreeCAD, strengths are in being able to simulate stress and strain and having ways to design a part to incorporate the cuts that a CNC/Mill would be doing. And OnShape is fully browser based for good and for bad.