I feel like we're reliving the late 1790s again, back then you had Ramsden figuring out how to divide the circle into into seconds of arc, taking the marking of scales from an artform into something that could be manufactured reliably. Maudslay with his thread cutting lathe took the making of screws from a manual process pawned off on apprentices to something that that could be done in mass production. Wilkinson's boring machine made it possible for Watt to build a pressurized steam engine.
All of these tools are based on things that were one-offs of earlier efforts, and turned into practical machine tools by someone that history chose to remember. We're now at the point where making things by manipulating individual atoms is something a determined amateur can do, it's amazing!
I find myself fascinated by the Wyler Inclinometer, which uses a thin copper disk with spiral arms as the basis of a differential capacitor, and when complete, resulting in a device that can used to calibrate a granite surface plate. It can typically measure 1 micron/meter of deviation.
We now have 3d printers that can reliably make almost anything you want by fusing filament, or stereolithography, or fusion of metal powders. You can buy desktop 5 axis CNC machines. There are control systems available to let you build almost any type of machine tool you can imagine, in as many axis as you want.
We've got software defined radio, cheap atomic clocks, transistors that can switch megawatts, all within reach of a hobbyist.
> We now have 3d printers that can reliably make almost anything you want by fusing filament
I bought a cheap, used, Bambu Lab A1 printer after reading a comment here on HN a few months ago saying that it was basically now "download and print". And it's just that. Not saying Bambu's practices are great: what I'm saying is that 3D printer now work better than inkjet 2D printers ever did.
> What an amazing time to be alive.
I agree. In a few days I learned to model 3D pieces myself in OpenSCAD (and there are many other options than OpenSCAD) and I've already done "print in place" pieces (pausing the print, inserting a metal piece, continuing the print) to fix stuff around the house (and in the cars).
If you had told me 30 years ago that I'd be 3D printing pieces and getting help from LLMs, I wouldn't have believed it.
Openscad feels very comfortable for programmers. Some years ago I tried to use freecad first, and I felt the GUI was getting in the way. (I heard it's gotten better more recently) Declaring geometry in a programming language with variables, functions (err "modules"), for loops etc. is much more intuitive to me.
Openscad is great for flexible parameterized models as well. However, fillets and chamfers that are just a couple clicks in Fusion 360 are a major undertaking in openscad once your shape is more complicated than a cube. That alone basically kills openscad for me for most use cases
Freecad used to be way outclassed by Fusion, but seems to have made major strides in recent months to bring it closer to the state of the art (even if it's still not quite there)
I found it's not so bad to do fillets and chamfers as a for loop that gradually increases or decreases a dimension, then put it as a module to make it into a reusable high level primitive.
As a programmer, I wasn't confortable with OpenSCAD, and ended up moving to Fusion360 like almost everyone else.
The problem isn't the scripting, I am a programmer, I am fine with it. The problem is that I had to do all the math myself, or worse, use hardcoded values when it should have been computed. That is, for example, if I want a hole in the middle of a square face, I want to be able to say "I want a hole in the middle", whatever the language is, without having to solve a math problem.
That's why I prefer constraint-based modeling, like what the likes of Fusion360 offer. Paradoxically, even if it is graphical, it feels more like programming to me than OpenSCAD. In Fusion360, the model is defined as a sequence of instructions (the timeline at the bottom), these are not lines of code, but it is a program. That sequence of instructions can be manipulated, and you can use variables. And it is easier to define things programmatically than with OpenSCAD, where you often have to put in values by hand, because the math is too complicated without an constraint engine like Fusion360 has.
I think we tend to underestimate the importance of precision manufacturing in science.
For example, we attribute general relativity to Einstein, fair enough. We generally acknowledge that he built his work on mathematical foundations by Lorenz, Minkowski, Poincaré, Riemann,... But what really made general relativity into a concrete theory rather than just a cute math problem is that it solved the problem with the orbit of Mercury. And the reason we knew there was a problem with the orbit of Mercury is that we had instruments with enough precision to measure it, if we didn't, then general relativity would have been useless.
Newton couldn't have come up with general relativity, not because of math or because he wasn't enough of a genius, but because with the level of precision their instruments had, it had no reason to exist.
I'm trying to find the original very informative video from a decade or so ago, but I've found this pdf[1], which mentions the heart of the mechanism as a disk/spring on page 19. Some product training in this pdf[2] touches on the mechanism as well, as does page 39 and 156 of this pdf[3]
Here's a PDF from Wyler's own site[4] about the Zerotronic, with the mention of the "pendulum" on page 7.
All of these tools are based on things that were one-offs of earlier efforts, and turned into practical machine tools by someone that history chose to remember. We're now at the point where making things by manipulating individual atoms is something a determined amateur can do, it's amazing!
I find myself fascinated by the Wyler Inclinometer, which uses a thin copper disk with spiral arms as the basis of a differential capacitor, and when complete, resulting in a device that can used to calibrate a granite surface plate. It can typically measure 1 micron/meter of deviation.
We now have 3d printers that can reliably make almost anything you want by fusing filament, or stereolithography, or fusion of metal powders. You can buy desktop 5 axis CNC machines. There are control systems available to let you build almost any type of machine tool you can imagine, in as many axis as you want.
We've got software defined radio, cheap atomic clocks, transistors that can switch megawatts, all within reach of a hobbyist.
What an amazing time to be alive.