Ohh. Good to know. Thanks!

Pretty busy at the moment but I have seen TinkerCAD mentioned a bunch so I will give it a shot when I have some free time.

After reading all of the comments and doing some research on the side it definitely looks like PETG is a great all rounder for functional prints. Guess I’m going to need a filament dryer.

PETG, ABS, ASA and TPU seem like the most common functional print materials, of course each has it’s own strength. If I end up doing ABS/ASA one day I’m doing to have to figure out a good ventilation solution lol.

I saw some debunking videos that said the opposite unless you live somewhere extremely humid. But I do remember there are certain filament types that benefit greatly from being dry and IIRC PETG was one of them.

I’ve read that PETG is susceptible to moisture. If I plan to get PETG, do I need to vacuum seal the filament after use or a filament dryer? It’s not super humid here but it can hit like 70% RH on a bad day.

Do you know what temperature range that is? Is 35 to 30C fine?

I’ve read that PLA will sag over time pretty much no matter what you do. I assume it would be terrible for the first use case. I assume you can’t design around it but I’m happy to be proven wrong.

I have experience with SketchUp which I’d imagine is like TinkerCAD. It was very simple and I was able to learn it very quickly. I think it should be enough to give me a good sense of how tools like these work.

While going through tutorials I definitely found that issue you were talking about where a lot of things are either renamed, moved or absent and I had to go puzzle out the “new way” to do the thing in the tutorial.

Funny enough I actually used SketchUp a bunch in the past for interior decoration. I would create realistic renders of rooms in our house in Sweet Home 3D and I used SketchUp to create all of the funiture, etc. I heard it wasn’t that great for 3d printing which is why I am inquiring if there is something better but if I don’t find anything I like maybe I’ll just stick with SketchUp lol.

Makes sense. Thanks!

Looks like there is a consensus with FreeCAD so I will give that a try later today. Thank you!

I will mostly be printing functional parts. Eg. mounts, furniture accessories etc.

My WIP dashboard

Oh interesting. I didn’t realize I can just use Tile. Thanks!

Hmmm I guess I could try placing them side by side. Will try it after work. Thanks!

One learning I had was to prefer devices that used AAA. A lot of the smart wireless devices use button batteries. The pro is that they are smaller but it is annoying finding, ordering and replacing those batteries. AAA on the other hand is way easier to source and you can get rechargeable ones.

Most of the ThirdReality zigbee stuff uses AAA batteries so huge props to them.

I am pretty much doing the exact same thing except I went all in on Zigbee instead of Zwave and I can share that it’s pretty great as well. One of the reasons I went the Zigbee route is because I owned some IKEA smart devices and Phlips hue devices and both of those use Zigbee. Using Zigbee also allowed me to continue to purchase smart devices from IKEA with easy integration.

You can also just do both Zigbee and Zwave. The only thing you need to make sure is to try to build a good mesh for both so that you don’t run into connectivity issues. IIRC ZIgbee and Zwave do not share a frequency so you shouldn’t have any interference issues.