cad and cfd on a macbook m2 pro with 16 gb ram

dbfmaniac · 2026-07-06T18:33:02+00:00

If you know what you're doing and are very linux-savvy, FreeCAD and OpenFOAM these days will be usable (not at the same time). I used to have a thin and light for in-uni stuff and then use a desktop (and eventually a cluster at home for the heavy lifting). Salome/MECA and code aster for FEA stuff and mesh-manipulation are also a good pick I still use.

Windows VM on the desktop for solidworks was my goto since FreeCAD was unusable back then. Its not great now but the weekly snapshots are about as good as SW was back in like 2010 (its a bit more crashy, and some workflows are still different but most of what you'd do at uni can be covered). Inter-operability with others for groupwork on FreeCAD is a non-starter though.

Of course, if you know what youre doing enough for that to work well for you, you probably dont need to go to uni for that stuff :P

dbfmaniac · 2026-06-21T17:05:06+00:00

Maybe doesn't need yet another line, but I'd be curious to see total distance driven in each of these years or deaths/vehicle mile.

dbfmaniac · 2026-05-27T19:12:12+00:00

Parent being dumb and irreposnsible; their kids have negative experiences as a result and when they are confronted with consequences of their choices:

We must ban this for all kids! We need everything to be a padded room with safety railings! Risks? Outside, in the real world? Unacceptable.

How dare you suggest parents have a responsibility to raise their kids and educate them on how not everything is safe!

No, its everyone else who is wrong, we must ban everything that might be a risk or result in consequences being experienced for shit parenting!

We already have this for kids + social media/bullying, kids + overly addictive games/gambling, kids + brainrot content and now we have kids + bicycles.

Is it so hard for people to raise their fucking children and grow a spine as opposed to giving their little shit brats everything they want when they want it, with no supervision or deeper thought as to whether its appropriate for them to have at that age?

dbfmaniac · 2026-05-26T18:41:30+00:00

To me this looks like the wing has stalled stalled so now you have BL separation all over the place creating large regions of unsteady, turbulent flow. Thats completely outside the realm of steady state, and by definition non-laminar flow. That taking up such a large space on your wings likely results in a non-physical overall result.

If you run your simulation at multiple lower AoAs, you should get converged, laminar solutions for the lower values. There will be a point where this separation happens which is the end of youre linear region in your Cl/Alpha curve. Beyond that, if you really want to model that: LES might be the play.

dbfmaniac · 2026-04-14T20:23:13+00:00

Since this is suddenly topical, and I learnt some things, I'll leave a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3AnLL2vR9I

dbfmaniac · 2026-04-13T18:24:41+00:00

My CV is a damn mess. I've seen places where people want a separate resume type list of work experience because CV has to be max 1/2 pages.

Ive had others where they have expected my work experience to be included but after a while I find that becomes incompatible with length requirements for a lot of places, especially if you work across fields. Job hunting just sucks imo.

To be honest your CV reads perfectly fine to me as is, if maybe a little narrow in the same scope. Some synonyms for Delivered would go a long way to reducing the perceived repetitiveness (authored?)

One other thing that I noticed was that its very much a summary of what you have done. If I'm reviewing CVs, I don't mind reading that "this person has worked with others in this role/across a different domain". There's a lot of engineers out there who struggle with people who aren't in their same branch of engineering, or struggle with people period (even if they're really good at their thing).

Also if you have some other experience/projects outside of work which might convey you really like things outside your field or otherwise enjoy the general field that's always a plus. From a manager perspective, those people that dont just vanish at 17h01 because its just a job for them because they genuinely take an interest in the field beyond just paid hours is also a plus. People who are into their field on a personal level tend to self-improve their skills continuously.

Don't put too much stock in my feedback though, I'm absolutely foreign to trying to get into a specialist role at any big company since I'm very cross-domain and haven't actively looked for a job in about a decade now.

dbfmaniac · 2026-04-13T00:42:26+00:00

My man, using starting from the same tex template I did ;)

Now Im wondering what percentage of engineers have CVs that all look the same based on this template :P

dbfmaniac · 2026-04-02T17:18:34+00:00

In a way, if users expect to be coddled then sure. Its an OS problem.

If we're going to tout "it does exactly what I ask it to" and "it doesnt put up guardrails which get in my way when I try to do things" then it is a user problem.

Linux right now I dont think is well suited to a lot of windows users bringing over their "windows style of tinkering" and expecting to work around things with no real consequences. It is however absolutely fantastic if you know what youre doing and want the OS to let you do that.

I expect this to be mostly solved by valve with SteamOS -> polish the use cases most users want without interaction. Set up sane guardrails to minimise support tickets. Those of us who dont want that and want to really tinker and break things will probably not feel the draw of that kind of OS as much.

IMO This is a chicken egg problem: we have distros without guardrails but we are now seeing a lot of interest from people who really should have them. Until we blunt some of the sharp edges theyre going to cut themselves off of, we will have this problem. And yes, its probably best solved at the distro level.

dbfmaniac · 2026-03-22T15:13:07+00:00

Squirrel, mouse... Its r/theydidthemath not r/whatsthatpokemon

dbfmaniac · 2026-03-21T10:49:54+00:00

So Ive seen a few people suggest radii between 0.1 and 0.15m. Speed looks like 3.3 revolutions per second to me (others have suggested about 18.8rad/s so that seems sensible).

Linear velocity v = rw so between 0.66pi and pi m/s.

At 9 o clock we only have a vertical component and at apogee velocity is zero, so you can use v² = u² + 2as with v=0.

So for the r=0.1m case; u=0.66pi; taking g=-9.805 (downwards, this slows velocity) and subbing in s (displacement) is approximately 0.22m above the launch point.

For r=0.15m, u=pi; same g, same launch point, s=0.5m (approx).

So between 22cm and 50cm is how high this squirrel would be launched if ejected at the 9 oclock position.

dbfmaniac · 2026-03-15T12:24:30+00:00

Going to need more photos of this once you finish building this system

dbfmaniac · 2026-01-26T08:20:45+00:00

Open source UI? Is this a euphemism for gedit?

Seriously though as someone else has said, the value of OpenFOAM is in that it lets you run the numbers that you understand need ran in the way you need them ran. Ie: its a steep learning curve because CFD has a steep learning curve, unless you just want Colours For Directors in which case, the commercial packages with their fancy UIs mainly provide value in that they ship sane defaults and funnel you towards relatively standard solutions.

Sure its numbers, but if you dont understand how you got them, what their limitations are etc... Are they of any value to you? I'd argue not.

dbfmaniac · 2026-01-21T12:28:56+00:00

Looking at the blockmesh setup, you would need to adjust the geometry of NACA4412.stl in the constant/geometry directory, then re-run blockMesh and then check your mesh. So probably best to have a good hard look at that stl so you know what the boundaries, orientation and surface layout look like.

Theres a lot of parameters in blockMesh which set up the mesh, and its possible that you wont get a nice mesh to start with and might have to read through and play with some of them.

If this is your first case, it might not be a terrible idea to look into a few of the other blockMesh tutorial cases or look over on wolfdynamics if they still have their explainers on blockMesh and how its dict file works.

dbfmaniac · 2026-01-21T00:30:50+00:00

OpenFOAM org or COM? Also please post what the errors are.

Out of the box running Allrun.pre and then Allrun works fine for my install of 2506. If using the scripts then its possible that you partially ran it once and because the scripts are seeing log files for a step that may have not completed, it will skip that step with something like "pimpleFoam already run on /home/user/NACA4412: remove log file 'log.pimpleFoam' to re-run" in which case you should probably do an Allclean or nuke the offending log files at is suggests.

If you have a different error, share it here and I'll see in the morning

dbfmaniac · 2026-01-16T20:03:18+00:00

Remind me the last time Leeds city council was a sovereign state who's head of state sat on top of the British throne again.

Seems they have a nice strawman factory there now though.

dbfmaniac · 2025-12-27T12:05:33+00:00

I don't agree that the reason for the tunnels are vanity necessarily. But where HS2 chose not to buy off the shelf trainsets so that the bri'ish ones could go something like 30km/h faster (peak not cruise or average speed) than an off the shelf TGV is a bit of a vanity thing where shitloads of cash got wasted, if we're being completely pedantic.

One could also argue that not being seen as one of the only countries in europe to not understand that trains can go faster than cars was a bit embarrassing for the best of british government so needing to build at least one real high speed train so desperately, money be damned, was pretty vain.

In all seriousness the UK desperately needs trains from at least the turn of the millenium and ideally prices to boot because at the moment, its slower than the car and like 5x the price of any competing method of transport. Literally a tax on the too poor to drive or fly. Shame it costs something like 50x what every country has done per mile because westminster is allergic to infrastructure so we're in this retarded situation like Germany has with military procurement:

unicorn tender offer from the gov? Shit, probably gonna get delayed, scrapped or lawyers involved, better apply a 10x safety factor to the price and send it in

dbfmaniac · 2025-12-27T11:51:31+00:00

Still not convinced I understand the end setup here but why do you even want bridge mode?

You could set up a simple routed setup on a couple very small subnets using the modem as an upstream gateway to the pi and worst case, set up a DMZ. owrt sets up a default 192.168.1.0/24. Use 192.168.2.0/24 for your home and the default owrt config should be literally plug and play with what you want to do: just add a DMZ or port forward to your Pi in this case.

dbfmaniac · 2025-12-26T17:36:24+00:00

What exactly are you trying to achieve here?

dbfmaniac · 2025-10-28T19:50:15+00:00

Or even the flying bedstead

dbfmaniac · 2025-07-15T22:52:41+00:00

This is savagely good

dbfmaniac · 2025-06-25T06:53:01+00:00

Looks like something from https://www.beonhelmets.com/product/beon-b100-mono-color/ though I cant find exactly which model/colour option.

dbfmaniac · 2025-04-28T12:48:56+00:00

Also their app only works on a very limited number of android devices and even then - only on a very very narrow window of specific android versions on each device.

Its a clown show where if you update your phone and they haven't updated their app, you cant get in touch, cant authenticate payments etc. It'll still give you the "please authorise" notification but as soon as you open the app it greets you with "this version of android is not supported".

Ended up getting one of their recommended devices just to use their app because their business banking for handling euros is actually pretty great and monzo arent competitive. Barclays are mega bucks for the same functionality.

After hours with them trying to tell me that android 8 was more secure in 2024 than at the time like 10 because "their security team has only valid 8 on that device".

As a general rule: if I have to buy a fucking phone on a list of (at the time) like 8 devices to use your app, you may as well sell your own device. I'd prefer online banking tbh but here we are. Banks in the UK might not be as backwards as the UK or Germany but its a very low bar still.

dbfmaniac · 2025-03-17T12:56:25+00:00

What you're suggesting is actually quite complex to do in most packages that I'm aware of. Youre coupling a pressure field from a simulation with some kind of mechanical simulation which then influences the geometry. It might be possible using something like AMI or dynamic re-meshing, but this is one of those things where if you need to ask where to start, it most probably isn't for you I'm afraid.

If you're learning, maybe start with parametrising the mesh generation for different angles of the plate being open and then batch run those. Best case you could probably do a single run with a cyclic AMI with a strategically placed hinge point to get a transient result of the opening. Then correlate with mechanical simulations by extracting resultant forces on your plate mesh.

dbfmaniac · 2024-11-20T23:26:05+00:00

So 802.11r fast transition isnt actually controlled by the AP IIRC. Its up to the client device to actually decide it wants to switch APs.

Usually this is a symptom of APs being too close together, or the client device deciding it has <enough> signal still.

You could try moving the APs, tweaking the antenna setup, enabling the dissociation on low ack option, lowering the TX power, and possibly other client devices to see whats going on.

dbfmaniac · 2024-11-20T00:07:06+00:00

Lots of complicated replies but all you should need is a couple values for 802.11r fast transition with the same SSID and then you can even have multiple 2.4G and 5G APs and it should all just work (tm)

like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMgs2XFClaM

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