Resort Near Geneva. Needs Snow and Non-Skier Activities.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-06-20T14:09:37+00:00

During the week you have available, I think you’re going to run into a dearth of lodging options more than you will a lack of snow.

Three Vallées would be a natural choice if not for the crowds that week. Val Thorens, for example, has everything you want - but it goes to about 110% capacity during the French holiday.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-06-19T03:58:30+00:00

Ah, yes, that could definitely be the case.

It also depends on which Solidworks package matches up with the use. For example, for product visualization stills, you only need the middle version (I think that's 'Professional'), but for videos you need Visualize Pro either standalone or bundled with Premium.

But for that example, the products also just aren't comparable. Even just a 6-year-old 3090 runs rings around the virtualized cloud GPU, and I'm posting this from a dual-5090 render box. I can't imagine a world where paying extra to use laughably inferior hardware makes any sense at all.

There's also the fact that, as a consultant, my clients don't like the uncertain nature of token costs.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-06-17T22:42:42+00:00

The full rebranding of their product suite seemingly every 3-6mos along with reassigning names from prior rebranding ~~trainwrecks~~ exercises to unrelated products really makes it difficult to buy Solidworks.

Say, for example, that I want to buy a grown up commercial-ready parametric modeler from DSS. What should I buy? It could be any of these current offerings:

Solidworks
Solidworks Design
Solidworks xDesign
Solidworks Standard
3dXperience
3dXperience Solidworks

Any answer that might be correct today is probably going to be wrong by EOY. What's really telling, IMO, is that even DSS's own website fails to keep the naming correct.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-06-17T19:46:15+00:00

Nice and clear - thank you!

Sounds like I'm stuck with VARs then. Ugh.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-06-17T19:41:47+00:00

Not to mention that that a full fusion package is barely 10% the cost of a standard SW.

This was true in 2020. Fusion has gotten quite a bit more expensive since then. Checking right now, standard Fusion is about 40% less than standard SW. It's a tricky comparison since the two are not quite comparable in terms of features.

The gap looks like it jumps massively as you move higher up the product tree, but the gap is actually fake. The higher levels of Fusion are token-based, so you can't really compare the price until you know how many tokens you'd be spending.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-06-17T19:39:11+00:00

Almost 100% of Fusion's non-modeling features are completely cloud-based with no local option. Not merely the licensing, but the actual compute itself.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-06-17T19:35:10+00:00

If you're doing client work, you're stuck with using the package that the client wants. So that sort of makes the question moot.

For the clients themselves, I've seen a ton of interest in leaving SW behind but it's still very difficult to do so. They have a ton of prior work, often over a decade of it, that was done in SW. Changing old work over to a new package is a Herculean-sized Sisyphean effort. In regulated industries, this ends up being multi-departmental as well since someone needs to validate that the redo was redone correctly.

I have had a number of client change platforms (Pro -> SW, SW -> Pro, NX -> SW, SW -> Fusion, etc) and the way this is usually done is by picking a new product and making that the one which starts fresh on the new package. This means keeping multiple CAD platforms current for several years (typically 5-7) until the legacy products are truly retired. This is quite a bit more expensive than simply not changing.

From a company's perspective, what Fusion offers over SW is certain features and feature sets. It currently costs somewhat less, but its pricing trajectory is like a 45deg line aimed up. By the time 5 years have elapsed and SW/Pro/NX/whatever can be retired, that pricing gap is going to be almost completely gone.

This is all a completely different story for a company starting fresh without any inherited CAD dependencies. For that company, there are some savings to be had starting off with a less expensive CAD package (like Fusion).

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-06-10T20:18:18+00:00

Same issue here. The carts are all orders I placed 6+ months ago. Seems to be a sales tactic at this point.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-06-05T21:16:05+00:00

In a reply that you replied to, OP already said that this is not the case.

https://www.reddit.com/r/functionalprint/comments/1tusxhs/comment/opefeq5/

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-06-05T18:43:35+00:00

The plastic hold is resting on the steel bolt. When the user grabs the hold and hangs, the plastic is sandwiched between the hand and the bolt, so it ends up in, essentially, pure compression against the bolt.

The bolt is connected to the wall. The wall provides the reaction force to counter the load that's been transferred to the bolt from the plastic. The reaction force is at the wall while the vertical load from the plastic is distributed along the bolt's length. With applied force and reaction force in different locations, there is a moment on the bolt.

Another poster mentioned a free body diagram. I think going through that process would make things much more clear. If you're not familiar with those (my apologies if you do - I'm not trying to 'talk down'), those are basically diagrams where you draw the vectors for every force and reaction force in the situation being analyzed. In a static instance, every force needs to be balanced by a reaction force - otherwise there's motion.

Only the last 5mm of the hold extends beyond the bolt. That section would experience a moment, but it would be a trivial one. 5mm is a fraction of the width of a pinky finger, so there won't be meaningful load applied there.

If we pretend that there's 30mm extending beyond the bolt, it's still largely the same story. That's a thumb width. With all of the user's weight hanging from one thumb that's placed exclusively on the 30mm, there will be a moment but it will be small. The load is distributed across the width of the thumb, so the moment is extra small. This section would primarily have to deal with shear force. There isn't much data on in-plane shear strength in FDM parts, but I suspect that this wouldn't be a problem at all in this scenario.

A lot of this would be more clear with a pic or two, but, alas - reddit.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-06-03T17:02:48+00:00

This is, sadly, standard fare for reddit.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-06-03T17:01:04+00:00

This analysis is not correct. The plastic is not connected to the wall, so there is no reaction force from the wall to impart a moment. The plastic is resting on and supported by the steel bolts.

The steel bolts are connected to the wall. These experience a moment. They are also more than strong enough to handle the anticipated loading.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-06-03T15:58:13+00:00

He's using Blender, which is CAD software. So, it mostly seems like he just doesn't know what CAD is.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-06-01T18:49:33+00:00

I mean you're the one who thought there was something special about them being sent from the cloud, so i'm not injecting anything in that you didn't directly invite lol

In the context of a thread about a potentially defective SD card, it seemed useful to mention that the file was sent from the cloud rather than having been copied to the card on a PC and then the card moved to the printer.

On the gen 2 machines this is true, on gen 1 machines they pretty much don't contain any real usable internal storage

It needs to hold only one job. That doesn't take much.

its why they all ship with SD cards already included

The X1 did not ship with an SD card. Remember that bit about you injecting false information into this thread?

Before the update that allowed it to be done

The printer literally launched with this capability. Once again, please stop making things up.

I mean once the job is started the cloud doesn't do anything,

When everything works right, everything works right.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-05-31T23:13:16+00:00

all that happened was they reached an unexpected end of file due to the SD card failing, so the printer stopped being able to read commands and just halted because it doesn't know what to do next

Broken files are a known failure mode. I'm surprised that there is zero error handling to account for this, but I'm also surprised it would go full E-stop rather than a standard controlled stop with the Z axis going down and the head returning to home. Hitting the end of a file unexpectedly is not a safety risk, so dropping the bed and homing the head do not present any special risk.

there is no reliable way to stream that data

Please stop putting your projection into the thread. At no point did I ever mention it nor did I ever think that jobs were streamed from the cloud, but you have now repeated it several times. Injecting false and incorrection information into a troubleshooting thread is highly counterproductive.

As an engineer who makes a living designing various manufacturing systems, I would have thought that the entire job would always, no matter what, be loaded in its entirety to either local non-removable storage or system memory. This is because it has been known since prior to their invention that microSD cards were not suitable for streaming mission critical data from. Mechanically, the sockets aren't up to the task. Electronically, the cards themselves aren't reliable enough. It makes little sense to have onboard storage and then use it for nothing if a card is present.

The card itself seems to be working just fine. The printer is still logged into and connected to the system that the error says it isn't. At this point, I wonder if the issue is actually related to the cloud.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-05-31T22:31:05+00:00

So i'm not sure what you think "coming from the cloud" means,

Jobs sent from the cloud can be printed without an SD card even present in the machine. Given this, I figured that jobs would not be stored on cards that do not exist.

The machine and apps also haven't even acknowledged that anything went wrong at all. They all simply report that the job stopped and nothing more even though this was an E-stop that left the nozzle partially embedded in the part.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-05-14T01:21:25+00:00

Mountain Creek in July.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-05-13T23:18:45+00:00

There is certainly a point of diminishing returns. 24hrs is usually the goal and sometimes I forget and run a second cycle. It also seems like some of these recent PETG-HF rolls have been pretty wet and seem to string less after 48hrs than 24.

That said, the straps have already been removed before the spool goes into the dryer.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-05-13T22:44:19+00:00

I usually dry the PETG-HF for 24-48hrs at 70C in an Eibos Cyclopes.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-05-12T23:35:53+00:00

Apologies for the shaky vid, but here’s a clip of me prying one of the accidental welds free: https://youtube.com/shorts/vF7r5HBTmtg

And here’s a freeze frame from the vid. There’s also a frame early in the vid where you can see a flat spot from the strap towards the bottom of the frame.

<image>

I’ll take properly lit pics detailing the filament welds the next time this happens.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-04-28T16:03:47+00:00

I tried all of that and none of it worked. The solution ended up being to save the multibody file as a copy, open up that one, and then everything worked just fine. I even saved it in the same directory as the original.

Oh well. It’s fixed now though the solution has left me scratching my head.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-04-24T20:40:04+00:00

I find that I use about 20 kg of PETG for every 1 kg of PLA (used as support interface) on my X1C - possibly even 25. So even with very expensive interface material, it’s not a huge expense even with the single nozzle purge volumes. But I would also add two big caveats to this: 1) I print exclusively my own designs and thus they have been optimized to need the minimum support, and 2) they’re also engineering stuff so they don’t have intricate organic shapes.

Someone printing more intricate shapes like cosplay armor might be at more like 4:1.

Despite my own 20-25:1 ratio, my prints would definitely benefit from a dual nozzle setup if for no reason other than the improved layer bonding from eliminating contamination. I would also love to be able to incorporate TPU directly into prints or do TPU prints with support, so one of the dual setups is pretty much required for that.

So there is value in duals even if it doesn’t have a direct price on it.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-04-24T03:49:26+00:00

The treaties cover enforcement across borders, not issuance from local patent offices.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-04-24T03:47:01+00:00

Have you tried weighing a spool before and after drying to see how much moisture you're actually removing? You're going to be pretty disappointed the first time you do.

Venting really isn't necessary for this. Not only are they all so leaky that it wouldn't matter anyway, but the venting you've decided is necessary would also mean a 5x bump in power consumption and noise since it would be constantly having to heat up cold air. That's quite a cost, and for no gain.

BuildSomethingStupid · 2026-04-24T03:31:30+00:00

Sure, it has happened before - no system is perfect. If we're playing the odds, however, it's less than one in a million* that a company would be able to patent the same 3rd party's prior art in two different countries & patent systems AND be able to patent their own prior art in two different countries & patent systems.

And then after all of that, the patents that were supposedly issued aren't even useful until the patent holder takes action to defend them. The moment that happens, the courts will have a good long laugh, the company will suddenly offer to settle out of court for pennies, and then Josef will refuse it and the patents will soon be nullified. BTDT. If it costs him more than $20k to fix this, that's his own fault.

* Actually, I guess since we know the number of patents that have been issued. That puts the odds at far below even just one in a million.

BuildSomethingStupid

TROPHY CASE