Drátum

The prototyping mindset

I used to develop new products bottom-up. I'd come up with a perfect, complicated plan, think thoroughly every phase and wouldn't move to the next one until it was perfect. I would think really hard what I wanted and what it should look like. Then I'd figure out what tools I needed to 3D print. Next, I'd sit down and model everything, 3D print, test, aaand it didn't work. So I threw it away and started all over again. Usually I went through many iterations, before I was able to simplify it enough, so that it sort of resembled what...

March 20th, 2026

Challenges with wire

I work with ordinary iron wire. It's just iron burnt in an oven. It rusts naturally and has a nice black texture with mild blue and green reflections and rusty spots here and there. It often comes covered with a little oil layer to server as a protection against rust. The most prominent attribute is that it's quite tough and is a tiny flexible by keeping the inner tension. This means two things. When you bend it, the bend isn't distributed evenly, but often "breaks" in one of the weaker points resulting in uneven bent like the one in the...

March 6th, 2026

Experiments with wire forms

Recently, I've been experimenting with creating a form which acts as a guide for wire. You wrap the wire around, get it out and have a nice shape, which would take a lot of skills to create by hand. This would allow virtually everyone to create their own wire decoration with complicated shapes. My inspiration was this pot and the first idea is to create a pen holder with wires in similar curves. [model from Printables]https://www.printables.com/model/834831-sand-dune-plant-pot-and-planter-vase-mode-design Designing first prototypes was simple. Turns out AI as a guide with combination of several opensource programs (blender, inkscape, freecad, gimp) can go a...

February 27th, 2026

What's new in FreeCAD 1.0.0 for a 3d printer hobbyist

This is a summary from Release notes (https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.0). With FreeCAD 1.0.0 being released as stable, I read through the news and want to share with you what I found useful for creating models for 3d printing. I've been already using it for a bit, it's all great. Big thanks to everyone who contributed. more straightforward UIMany tools have been unified into more universal modifications which choose variants automatically based on context. It's more pleasant and faster to use. Measuring distance, lengths, angles etc. is now done by std measure (https://wiki.freecad.org/Std_Measure). It has auto mode which computes what you need based...

February 27th, 2026