Book finished: Empire Games

Empire Games by Charles Stross

★★★★★

Excellent restart/continuation of the Merchant Princes series. It has a lot of new places to go now.
I was amused by the afterword. He nailed the writing style, or maybe Bruce actually had a hand in writing that bit.

FreeCAD first (real) use

I have a simple object I designed for FRC with openSCAD. I figured it was a good candidate for recreating in FreeCAD as an exercise, since it's just geometric shapes and I need to print one more anyway.

Man, FreeCAD gets super cranky about making holes where there are intersecting cylinders. I approached the object several different ways, but as soon as I tried punching that last set of holes, the object went black and the wireframe looked like it had been hit with a hammer.

I fixed a small part of the problem by fusing all the objects to be subtracted, then creating an object that was an intersection of those with a copy of the object to be subtracted from, then doing the subtraction. Pain in the butt but not a show stopper.

I must say that I actually at one point threw my hands up and grabbed Fusion 360. Let it start installing but thought of the above dodge while it was downloading.

Still not 100% sold but I prefer to use open source software if at all possible, so I'm going to stick with this a bit more.

The STL output is interesting. It's clear that the cylinders are treated as cylinders right up to the point of STL export generation. OpenSCAD renders cylinders as polygons then converts to STL. Neither is more correct than the other. The FreeCAD version is a little cooler looking :)