K-Factoring a Gumbo

Hello and welcome to the macro fab engineering podcast. We're your hosts Parker, Dolman.

And Steven Gregg.

This is episode 245. So before we get started today, we are seven years at macro fab.

Oh, that, yeah, seven years since the beginning.

Seven years was I came on board, October 1 was my first day. So I call that as like the start of macro fab. Church Chris churches other founder says Genesis is one Parker shows up. The official, I would say the official is like when the paperwork went in. Yeah, it was like sometime in the middle of September. But we didn't actually really do anything until October 1, which is when church and I, like got together around the table and like, tried to figure stuff out. Nice. How's it? How's

it feel? Seven years?

Um, Phil's like, been doing this for a long time? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I was there for two and a half of those seven years. And that felt like a long,

it feels like a long, it's almost like, Yeah, I know, I did stuff before that. But like, at this point, that stuff doesn't even matter. Or I remember a lot of anymore. It's like, when you when you get at college, you remember college a lot. But like, maybe remember, still a little bit of high school. But you don't remember much in middle school. As you get, at least for me, as I get older, like my rolling memories, like maybe 10 years. And it's averaged really hard. Yes. And so like, Yeah, before that was dynamic perception and working in Oklahoma and oil and gas, and then college. But like, I might remember, like, the last couple years of college, like my freshman year, I don't remember too much besides like, not liking it, because I was in petroleum engineering at the time.

You know, it's funny, I was thinking about, I was thinking about myself in college, just just the other day. And like, if I could go back in time and tell myself, you know, oh, you know, in 10 years, this is what you'll be doing. And I think myself in college would be like, Oh, that's cool. You know, that's, that's really cool. But also think about myself going back to talk to myself in college, I'd be like, Man, you were way smarter in college than you are now. Like, I couldn't do half the crap I did back in college, like, like some of the some of the advanced math that I was doing back then. Like that. I was just, you had to do it. Like I could, oh, no, you that no, no, no, I was actually talking to my dad about that. And because he's a chemical engineer. And I'm like,

if you put a a derivative in front of me and told me that, you know, to, I can't remember, derive it will not drive it. But what's the inverse? I can't remember what that was called integrate. Integrate. That's right, that that function ought to be like a. Whereas like, you know, 2020 year old Parker would be like, done.

Right. Right. Which is funny, because you could do that. But I bet you some of the, some of the stuff that you're asked it, like, I guarantee the stuff that I'm asked to do right now, I would have just been like,

oh, yeah, exactly. You know, it's what you, you, you, you're good at what you always do, like repetitive things. Sure. Back then math, you know, you went to a math class, like, you know, four times a week, and you are doing that every single day. But then you get to college. And if you're not doing like heavy research, design work or doing academic work, you're not running calculus by hand. No. Now, understanding what those things are like derivatives and integrations, I think it's more important learning, knowing what those are, what that means. Yeah, what it means for sure. You can always look up how to accomplish something. Yeah. Or, Yeah, cuz our phones do that for us now. But yeah, understanding like how those play into formulas and like rates of change, and that kind of stuff and systems, that's more important than actually deriving it by hand.

So let me let me let me ask you this. Have you in your professional career use something that you would say is direct calculus, not just like understanding it, but like, write out something that you did in calculus and it applies directly to your job?

Not at macro fab? Actually, not a not not a job at all. 100% never a job. I have done projects on my own that yes, like implementing complex functions in in in Verilog, and stuff like that. Yeah, sure. Sure. Yeah. Or figuring out Like, you know, rates of change during the integration or best fit kind of stuff. But yeah, not for. I mean, it's manufacturing man.

Well, right. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. Sure. I mean, so much of it is like, derived from that. So like, everything you do has calculus behind it. Right. But yes, you're not having to do the fundamental portion of it. Correct. Yeah. So sorry. Sorry if that makes anyone depressed who's in calculus right now being like, I need to know this for the rest of my life.

I'm, like, cursive.

I think it's more important than cursive. In my opinion.

Yeah. No, you're right. But it's similar. It's very similar.

Yeah. And, yeah, it's very similar in terms of, you put it in front of someone and someone can't read it. Right.

Yes. 100% on that. So yes, seven years. And another interesting fact about that was also 245 weeks in a row with a Mac five engineering podcast. You

know, I was just thinking about that. So I came on board in 2015. I don't remember when it was in 2015. But that means we've been doing this for almost five years now. Getting close there. Yeah. Oh, my God. That's crazy. Yeah,

that's that's the crazy like,

if you would have asked me I would have said like we'd probably do this a year and a half.

According according to algebra, and not calculus, that's four and a half years.

Yeah, approaching five. Wow. That's incredible. Yeah.

And I think there's only been one episode you were not on. Two or two was oh, the back to back because you were one

was it? I was in Tijuana. That's where manufacturing and then the other one. I think I was driving up to you were actually like, in a car somewhere, like in the middle of nowhere, Texas, right? Yeah. Yeah, so you need to miss two of them now so we can balance the force.

balance the force out. Okay, Stevens,

you got something really,

really awkward here, right. Oh, my topic, your topic or unless I want to go into my topics and leave your topic first. Not to scare off the viewers. Yeah. If this is your first episode. This is your first extra episode. We'll do Stephens first. And then we'll do mine. Because I mind is really good. I think it's a really good topic. It's

really it's a great topic. It's just weird. It's just weird. Okay. Yeah. So it's just something I've never thought about. But yeah, okay, go. Yeah. Okay, so Well, okay, I've got I've got two topics, and this, both of them are fusion 360 related. But the first one is very much directly talking about fusion 360. So on October 1, actually, they announced this a while back, but on October 1, Fusion 360 changed their personal license subscription model. And they made some pretty hefty changes that kind of upset a bit of the community. hacker community

fusion 360 is a

it's a fusion 360 is just kind of a combination of of like your AutoCAD and your SolidWorks and all your simulation tools. And, and even cam generation for CNC stuff. So it's kind of like the all in one package. And for a while they had a a personal license that you could get, or they had a license. That was basically, if you were a small business, but you had not made yet $100,000 Then you could you could utilize their software for free. Well, they changed a lot of elements about it, that make it it's it's fine. The things that they changed, but it makes it very much like feel way more like trial, as opposed to like, what what you're actually getting. So a lot of things are things, things like you can only have 10, active editable documents, which 10 is is fine. If if you're doing like simple one off things, but it's very easy to go past 10 Let's

just, I did look into this, because I use Fusion 360 lat as well is on this one is you can go over that 10 limit, it just archives them. Yep. But then all you have to do is go into it and unarchive and then so it's not like it limits you to hard 10 It just older stuff gets archived. And then you have to go back and unarchive it when you need to work on it.

It just it makes assemblies with more than 10 things

difficult. Yes, that's the main limitation is that

it makes you it makes you spend more time if you wanted to, like kind of defeat that you couldn't have 10 individual things, you'd have to design them all within one and consider them one. And I don't like that I the way I run all of my things is every individual thing has its own drawing and then they come together into an assembly the quote proper way, and it just got and I say proper because like fusion 360 kind of it pushes you towards doing things that way. So yeah, 10 active editable documents, it's easy to go over that. But if you're just trying to use this for like, I don't know, Cam generation for your CNC or your 3d printer at home, then that's probably fine, right? One thing that kind of sucks is they they limited exports. So they still have STL files, but they got rid of dx F, DW D and PW F. And that kind of cripples it, if you asked me, especially if well, you could still use it for a lot of your 3d generation and design work and things. But getting rid of dy dx F and PDF just kills your opportunity of making drawings and sending them out for manufacturing and getting quotes. So they also cut back on cam support. So if you were using this to control some of your larger CNCS, with more functions, you no longer get that capability. But it still works for your 2.5 axes. Guys, so I don't know like if you were using a free copy of fusion 360 to control your five axis CNC like your your CNC machine that

cost more than what the limit of the license was previously Exactly.

Like, if you have a big CNC that's more than this, like there's a chance you already have other software that you're using. So I don't know, that doesn't seem like a huge issue. One of the things though, that was funny is they actually limited the exports of step files, or they eliminated it. And there was a huge pushback from the hacker community on that. And they eventually came. Well, they said that they fixed that by by allowing you to continue to do step by exports, which step files are kind of the generic 3d file that most 3d rendering software can use. So it's sort of like the one language that they all speak. And getting rid of that really sucks because then you can't talk between any of your other 3d programs. So in a quote from them, they they claim the reversal was due to unintended consequences from the hobbyist community. So in other words, like a bunch of people bitched about,

we got some angry tweets. Yeah,

well, and the thing was, like, at first, when I saw this, I was like, oh, man, that kind of blows like, because I want to, I use Fusion every day at work. And I pretty much use it almost every day at home for a lot of my projects, because I do a ton of drawings in there. And I realized that I've been using Fusion at home, at least for free for like a year and a half. And I really liked the program and was like, You know what, I should support this anyway. And on top of that, they were offering 40% off of the subscription service. So I ended up picking, picking a subscription up. And it makes a lot of sense, I kind of got into Fusion at just the right time, because I got a year and a half to learn it for free. And so when I bought my subscription, I'm like, I bought it and I can do everything, everything with it. So like I didn't have to spend a few $100 and then learn it. So it does, it does kind of suck. But eventually these things happen. You know, like, you're not going to get free stuff all the time. You can't get a free lunch every day. Right. Right. So

that's the biggest thing. I when I was reading about people complaining about this online, especially Twitter is Yeah, it sucks that the people who are makers or hobbyist, but the thing is, it's still very capable of a piece of program. Absolutely. Really the only thing that really hurts makers is that 10 active project thing. Yeah. And in reality, if you're doing something way more complicated, you should probably own a subscription.

Right, right. I really wish there was a I wish it wasn't subscription. I'm not huge on subscription models. I don't I don't relish the idea that this time next year, I'm gonna have to do this again. Yeah, you

got what? It's basically you never own it.

Right? I never write exactly. I never own it. And, and now,

what if it was so this is this goes back to the old Adobe, Adobe Suite, like Photoshop and stuff. And this was a big deal. With graphic design shops and stuff like that is you would buy the Adobe license for like all your computers. And you and you would do it by like, let's say Adobe eight, Adobe Suite eight, but you would skip nine and then buy 10 Because you couldn't afford buying all of them. Well, Adobe saw that and when is like, Okay, how do we get people to continually pay us now? And so the subscription models what because I think Adobe was kind of like the first company that tried to do this with like, tools tool software. I think Autodesk is as as is, is getting there. Because Eagle eat when Eagle got bought out by Autodesk, they moved to a subscription model. Oh, yeah, that's right. Since you have fusion 360, you now have a license of Eagle?

Yep. Yep, I have Eagle now.

But um, yeah, I'm kind of torn on it. I because I did the same thing with Eagle is I would only I would skip versions. Just so that because I couldn't afford the full license every single year. And so I would skip a year and then buy it next year. But now the great thing with the license subscription all is I can afford it. And I get all the new goodies all the time. It's not like, oh, I have Eagle six. I can I can't get seven and get all its, you know, all the fancy bells and whistles yet. So that's actually my question to you would be, it's kind of a big roundabout way of putting this question out is if you could just buy fusion 360. But it was locked into the current feature sets that you could get right now. Would you do it

would depend on the price. But yes, I probably would, because I there's so much about fusion that I don't need. And it does everything I do right now. And everything that they add ends up being quality of life improvements, and not feature releases, where it's like, oh, great, it finally does this thing it does

chamfers now, right?

Now it's done the stuff that I need it to do. It's already far past my requirement capabilities, right. So you know, if if I could pay say twice as much as I did,

and only basically two years of subscription, but then you basically get it forever, I would probably do that.

But that just couldn't work. You know, like, that's not how fusion works. Especially because a lot of your I mean, your files are stored in the cloud and all that jazz. So like, I it's nice to have the updates and everything. And they change things to mainly make things better. I've seen some things go away that I was like, like that before. But most of the time, they don't actually get rid of things, they just move them around and put them in like sub menus and things. You know, one thing I have to kind of praise them about that I think that they do a surprisingly good job. somehow they've set up their software that they don't let me choose my words carefully here. They don't have an obvious support team. In other words, like you can't go to their website and like, call someone up and be like, I need help. somehow they've set it up where their own community, like there's just forums out there, and people will just help each other. And what I mean by that, then being brilliant in that is like, they don't have to have a support team that, you know, a lot of these other companies do. I'm sure the support team at SolidWorks SolidEdge is probably huge. In fact, one of the one of the engineers that that worked at macro fab while he was getting his engineering degree at the time, he went on to work at a company like that. And they hired a full time engineer just to help people with their software support. Yeah, and it seems like confusion, the community just helps the communities. And in fact, it's funny, if you go to the fusions website, they'll be like, Oh, do you have a question, go to the forum and just post the question. You know, it's like, how is that support? But it works? You know,

I wonder if they have a because there's different tiers of the subscription model? Yeah, I wonder if one of the higher tiers is like enterprise support, where like, you can just call and someone will be on the line,

maybe, because so I ran into an interesting issue that I searched around, and no one else is running into this issue. Basically, some, a lot of the programs I do are flat sheet metal where I do engraving and cutting on them. And you can do a thing called a pattern where you basically select one thing, and you make an array out of it. So it's like give me 15, wide by four high, and then tell my CNC to step and repeat all of these things. And that's what I do at work for production. Well, there's a built in maximum file size that fusion seems to crap out on. So when you go to generate your your G code, if it's above a certain physical size on your disk, it'll just fail. Well, what that means is I have to cut back my production if my production is exceeds that limit, and it also seems to change because like programs that I ran in the past and I regenerate Wait now fail, because they're too large now and that that size is 250 megabytes. And some of my programs are 350 megabytes, and I have to break them up into, you know, a left side and a right side, and I have to tend to my machine more often. And I was just wanting to call them up and be like, is this a certain? Is there just a value somewhere? I can say, like, make limit 500 megabytes or something? And I doubt that there is a limit, but I can't find out. I've had I've had my CNC manufacturer look at it, because at first it looked like it was there an issue with their machine, and they looked into it, they're like, oh, no, this is a physical limit from fusion, because I'm generating the thing from fusion, and fusion fails at a certain point. And so like, I don't want to post that on a forum because who on earth is going to know the answer to that? You know,

so I was checking, apparently, if you have a paid subscription, you can get a you can, you can get a Autodesk Support Specialist.

Okay. So I have a paid subscription myself personally, and one at work. And when I was just browsing around to get that answered it, it wasn't super apparent out,

I actually went, I went to the subscribe page and went like, subscription benefits and clicked on that and was reading them like, okay, they actually offer paid support, if or support that comes with your subscription.

Sure. So I just need to dig a little bit further. It's just not like, very apparent. Yeah, it's not like a button that says Get help. Right, right. It's got like a technical phone number. You know, it's like

a Amazon. The moment you have to talk with a human at Amazon, it's like impossible to find where you need to go, because they always move that button around.

They got to pay their developers

and they changed it. Well, yeah. But yeah, but they changed the name of it, too. So like, usually, if you can't find it, you go Ctrl F contact, where is contact on this page, but they changed that. It's not called contacting with cobalt, something else. You can't do that anymore.

Maybe, maybe I'll download Eagle, and just look at it.

I don't care. I just think it's I think it's funny that now you own a copy of it, even though you don't want it.

I I'm super jelly, that that eagle integrates like seamlessly with Fusion. I wish I had that capability.

The speaking of your EDA tool that you like, dip trace. Do you know that dip trace outputs or exports? ODB plus plus now? Oh, they've done that for years now. Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah. And so I actually just updated documentation for Mac. And I actually tested it, I downloaded the trace circuit tester output, exports. And it works great with with our macro fed platform.

Yeah, yeah, they, they they implemented that. I think not long after we moved shops at macro fab. And I was like, Oh, finally, do you know, dip trace does this and everyone's like, no one cares about dip trace. And so I didn't push on it. Well, I just had

a I had a customer that was using dip trace. And they gave us the ASCII file, which is our old way of importing it. So it gives the ASCII and the Gerber's and the ASCII formats course change. So our parser doesn't work anymore. And so I'm like, I wonder if dip trace exports ODB plus plus yet and I looked in Yeah, it's in there. And they're supported exports. So I downloaded it. I actually imported the guys ASCII file, and then exported the ODB plus plus, and then drop that into the platform. And it did everything perfectly. And I'm like, Yes. Finally, finally. And I updated all documentation. Good to go.

One of the things that was always super, super, super annoying about the way dip trace and macro fab work together. And this isn't a macro fat problem. This is more just like, it would take so much development time to fix this. But dip trace eskies spit out vias as an element and they show up on the bottom so you'd have a bomb item that just said static via

static via key CAD did that for a long time as well. Oh, really? Like if you look at before. Back when we used to have a key cat parser that we we had this is before like KitKat had any kind of like scripting capabilities. This is this is like five six years ago now. Yeah, keekaboo had the same thing because the vias were like elements that were on the bomb in the bomb section of the file. Really weird. But then we switched over to basically we running key cat on a server. And

oh, right. There's always a copy going in the back. Yeah. The secrets.

Yes. Now if only Eagle could could output ODB plus plus. Oh, I thought that it did. No, it doesn't least last I checked.

Yeah, but you guys have all your fancy commands that run in?

Yep. The great thing is Eagle also runs really well. It's like KiCad. It can run on the server really well. So we just run that.

How long has that copy of Eagle been running?

Oh, I don't know. I actually I think it spins it up. Like, when you it's not like, on it's not like idle. Oh, I thought it was just sitting there. Wait, no, no, it's not idle. It's I think it spins up when someone put spacey puts a queue in for processing. Whatever.

Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. At least him why faster if it was idle?

Ah, I don't think so. It's pretty quick already. No one complaints. All right. Okay, my weird topic. security flaw left smart chastity, six Tor users at risk of permanent lock in. That's the actual title to the article. Right. That's the title of the article. So I didn't know this was a thing. But it's called cellmate, which is a pretty good name for this. But yeah, it's a chastity, Bluetooth, IoT, chastity belt thing. So it works by allowing a trusted partner to remotely lock and unlock the chamber over Bluetooth using a mobile app. So the app could communicates with the lock using an API. But the API was left open without a password. And basically, it allows anyone to take control of the user's device. Yeah, this is like if you were like, you know, if you're driving down the road, and you like, so if you're ever in traffic, start scanning on the Bluetooth and see if you can connect to people's radios. Oh, yeah, that's like a pastime of mine, sitting in traffic. So that's basically what this is, right? Is basically, if you're if the other app isn't connected to it right away. Anyone could log into your chastity belt.

Like, I mean, these somebody's got to had to have thought of this. In terms of being like, I don't know, a security issue.

Maybe some people are into that.

I've said this so many times to my wife like, and I mean this in both a positive and potentially a negative way. Like, for any of these projects that are out there, or products or anything, there's a Parker or a Steven that's behind it, that was the guy or guys or group of people that were in charge of it. And so like, that's both a good and maybe not also a good thing. Like somebody has to think of all these things, and what happens when somebody doesn't think of all of the faults in there. And then you put on a chastity belt and you run into some serious problems, right? Yeah. I mean, we were talking about this a little while ago, something similar with them. Remember, there was that product that was a it was a garage door opener, and then the servers just went down?

Yes, sir. Or it got Yeah, the server just went away. Right? Yeah, cuz the company went out of business. Yeah. No, you can't open your garage door. Yeah, no one can open the garage doors. I can't that was yeah, that was a couple of years ago. Yeah. So now this is a garage door for your wing Wang.

Basically, right like, I mean, how do you how do you protect against this? You know?

Use a chastity belt that just has a regular lock on it.

Yeah, actually. Like I don't know. I don't want to get into though why you would need this kind of thing.

Let's So also this gets worse though, is apparently these cellmate chassis locks also have GPS and so so you know where your man Where's where's that quote?

Wait why

ah track log to monitor time and location of unlocking submissive will not be able to cheat and escape.

Ah, okay. Because this is

by the way this is a Chinese soulmate thing so like that's a translated

and what it never get had. Okay, frankly, this looks like one of those random things that show up on your social media feed from like, wish you ever ever see that? Were like just random weird crap shows. Yeah. So I don't know. This is a

but yeah, so it is not like just a piece of plastic where like, you could just like, take it apart or whatever it No, it's like it has like a metal ring and stuff. So you'd have to use like a heavy duty bolt cutter or an angle grinder to free the user from this device.

Shooting sparks all over the place.

The the writer of the article, Zack Whittaker, I think that's how you pronounce his last name says that the best press practice safe sex. Don't use a smart device.

Yeah, seems very reasonable. See, okay, the part about it is like, gosh, I don't want to get into the weird stuff here. But it's called a sex toy. So you would think it would be for like, play. Whereas like, the GPS thing would be more like, I don't know, like, if you had a partner that was cheating on you, and you were trying to make sure they wouldn't cheat on you kind of thing. So you could like check where they are. But, I mean, that's kind of extreme. Right, don't you think? I would think so. Yeah, at least seems highly extreme.

I'm not I'm not. We here on the macro of engineering podcasts are not going to kink shame. Anyone?

Oh, yeah. Well, no, I mean, I'm just that I would just go on off the fact that it's, it's labeled as a sex toy. Not as like a I don't know. is weird.

Lee was a what?

Actually, so the anti cheating device? Yeah, no, I mean, yeah. Anti cheating device versus sex toy.

Right. Here's a review. The app stopped working completely. After three days I am stuck.

Help bliss. You know, my, the Smart TV that I bought, when we were in? When my wife and I were living in an apartment in Houston. It just flat out doesn't have protection on it. And in? Well, I shouldn't say that. It came with the protections unlocked in terms of screencasting. So you know, you can take your phone and you can cast to the screen, whatever is on your phone or your tablet. Oh, like Chromecast? Yeah, yeah. It has the capability to do that screen sharing or whatever they call it. And, and by default, it was set to Always allow, as opposed to ask. And there was multiple times that somebody in our apartment complex were able to scan. And they put, they put some naughty stuff up on the screen. So I heard my wife screaming from the other room, like what's wrong? She's like, I didn't put this on the screen. I don't know what. It was just some kid trolling her, obviously. But yeah, so I was surprised because I had to go in and set it to like, oh, well asked me before just putting any thing on the screen, right.

Or some kid just got really lucky that it wasn't the screen that their parents were watching.

Oh, yeah, it was an accident. Yeah. All right. This is rough. Yeah, this is weird. Yeah. Okay, let's move on. Topic here.

Okay, so let's go talk about nerdy stuff a little bit more, I wanted to talk about some sheet metal fabrication, things because I've been doing a little bit of that recently. And I've run into some, I've run into some things, specifically with Fusion 360. But just general things that I wanted to kind of touch on. So fusion 360 has like a whole sheet metal tool, or like module in it, which, what I've used it in the past, but haven't had a need to until recently. And I got back into it. And I was like, Man, this thing is really cool. Because it makes sheetmetal bending and making chasse ease and enclosures and whatever it makes it super easy. But I realized that

I realized that there's some there's some gotchas in there that make things a little bit difficult. So so first of all, whenever you use the tool, there's a lot of things that are already predefined for you, inside that tool, that if you're not, if you're not careful that you can you can step on a landmine. So when you when you draw something up, you have to tell it what the material is. And it gives you options, and they're just like default template options. And they're things like steel, aluminum, blah, blah, blah. And unless you go in and you edit those actual features, then you don't have control over a lot of things like the bend radius, and allowances. And if you're doing like unique bends that require cutouts and things like that, a fusion will automatically do those for you. And that's something that's fun, and it's cool and it lets you see shapes on the screen really easily. But those things that you're you're doing on there may not actually be real heal, they may not be manufacturable, they may not be something that you could tell somebody to go do. So I wanted to just basically say like, Hey, watch out for those landmines. Like, for instance, I was doing something with 20 gauge steel that has different rules than the steel that was as the template for, they only have one thing called Steel infusion. And I think the whole purpose is like, Hey, we're just giving you a template to show you how to do this. And I think that's something you can kind of get in trouble with real quick if you just look at it and say, Oh, this is steel, especially like a guy like me. And we're, I'm, I'm not a mechanical engineer, I don't know these things. But I know enough to not just rely on a template that's there that I didn't create.

So what did you have to change? Well,

there's so there's a handful of things in there. Well, first of all, like they don't tell you like a gauge, they just say steel. And you have to go in there and make sure that you're you have the thickness set to whatever the gauge is that you're going with. But also like there's there's a thing called K factor, which I'm not going to go much into because I bring back. I don't know, I'm just gonna say I don't know, because I'm an electrical guy. But I just I do know that steel has a k factor. And that has has to do with how steel gets bent, or sheet metal gets bent. And that each material has its own K factor. And really, they have a

raw this this article speaks my language, the K factor is like the root of a gumbo.

That sounds really technical, right?

I clicked on it, because it said that, yeah. fabricator.com.

So these things are all like they put default values into all of these fields. And a lot of these things are, I shouldn't say rule of thumbs, but they're like, your minimum bend radius is like your thickness times two. And a lot of a lot of things like that. What what I think is important, and I've kind of been saying this a lot recently on the podcast, but it's just keeps remaining true. Contact your manufacturer, or contact your local sheetmetal, provider fabricator and ask them what their machines can do.

See if they make a good gumbo?

Yeah, do you know the K factor? Like, honestly, if you call them up and ask them if they know the K factor? Like, I doubt they'd even be able to tell you that. But they could probably tell you, hey, for 20 gauge steel, we have this kind of these kinds of machines. And these are the things that you should do. Or better yet. Don't try to micromanage every little thing. And I think so fusion, and design software in general, I feel like there's two paths, or there's two users that exist in my mind. For these kinds of things. You got the user who wants the thing to be made, and somebody else has to make it. And then you have the other user who's being told to make it. They're the ones who press the buttons on the machine to different users. They're the guy who wants someone else to make it isn't the person who needs to assign all of the little intricacies like somebody who's running the pick and place machine at macro fab or the selective solder machine. They know the specifics of that machine, but the person who just wants their stuff through hole soldered doesn't need to know the specifics of those machines, right. Or they should know General specifics of selective solder machines. I think that's super true. When it comes to sheet metal design to like, you could use Fusion 360 To make your whole enclosure and then press the button where unfolds everything and it shows all the bends and things like that. But I guarantee you send that to 10 places and they're all going to be like well, this is great and all but these bends don't align with how our machines do this, we have these specific rules and you didn't follow those. So you got to go back and redesign it. So if you fit in the category of the guy who is like I want someone else to make this enclosure for me, design the enclosure the way you want the enclosure to be in terms of pre folded and the all the sizes correct. And then send that to your guys and say you figure out how it unfolds given your machines requirements. I think that's frankly the best way so in other words, you can use the sheet metal tool and things like fusion because it makes folding aluminum or materials and enclosures super easy. But don't try to micromanage all the little nitpicky little things because there's a good chance you're wrong, you know.

And it just would create more back and forth between you and the manufacturer. delays and possibly like a redesign Right, right.

Yeah like take for Take for example like if say you had a box that you wanted it to be six inches by six inches by one inch, something like that and you wanted to be folded aluminum provide A drawing that shows that the outer dimensions are six by six by one, and they figure out how it gets bent such that that is true. Now you could establish a relationship, and then work out all the details and maybe they would provide you all of their bend allowances and all the all the K factors and crap and then you could, you know, micromanage it, but at the same time, that could change tomorrow, right? And you don't know that but a drawing that just says six by six by one doesn't change tomorrow. So

it's you have to get to know the person for them to share their their gumbo recipe,

right? The secret sauce, right? What's What's your oil to flour ratio? Like? Those are things that you know, people hold close to their heart. What is their flour to oil ratio?

For me? Yeah, I don't know. I just kind of mix it until it looks right. Yeah.

That works too. You know? If Funny enough, I went on like a gumbo excursion for the past like year and a half where I've been making Gumbo and trying to perfect my recipe. And it bothers the living snot enemy when people do everything off of volumetric measurement. Wait, as opposed to wait. Yeah. Like, or the or somebody will use a measuring cup to measure both their liquids and their solids. And then it's just like, oh, like, I don't know. That's part of being an engineer. I guess like, some sometimes you can get away with that. But like, you can't be consistent. Well,

floured just settles. Any powder. You can't measure by volume. Oh, right.

Yeah, yeah. And then, but but you'll get restaurants when you open up one cup of flour packed? Will everyone's gonna pack a cup differently than if you say 500 grams of flour. Like, you know, the only way you mess it up is if you don't read the numbers, right?

Or you're on the moon?

Well, yeah. Or are you 100 miles up? Right? I guess there's like a default understanding that you're on the surface is based off of sea level measurements, right? Sure. Gravity isn't 9.81

meters seconds.

Right? Right. If you're, like, I can't remember, it's, it's like, it's a really, really reasonable approximation for every place that humans live, right? Yes. Especially when cooking Gumbo is involved?

Because like, the sort of hard to get wrong. Now what's gonna happen in 100 years is people going to listen to this podcast and think of how of how, how silly we are of weighing food, because they're living on Mars and on the moon now,

I mean, eventually, eventually, human beings will just be able to feel the right amount just like understand like, will evolve to the point where like, we don't have to measure anything, we just know it's right.

We're all transcend into energy.

Yeah, actually, I had a conversation with someone a while ago about, we have language has a way of describing numbers, right. And we have a way that we can, I could say, any number that exists, and you would know what that number is, because we've come up with a way of describing it. And it boils down to a handful of noises that we make, right? But what if we evolved to the point one day where every number has its own unique sound? Where like, I could just say a number. And it made one sound and they can only represent that number? Oh, so

like, instead of multiple sounds making up? Some like 1001 000 is technically two sounds.

No, you're talking No, no, like the number 1000 would have its own sound and no other number would sound like it. And the number 1001 would have a different sound than 1000. Events, eventually we can evolve to that point. Right?

I think we don't want to go that way. That sounds overly complicated that to learn all those sounds.

Maybe we just evolved to the point where you don't have to learn it. You just know it.

That's like the matrix. I know kung fu. Well, with that, I think we should end this podcast

way off the rails.

So that was the macro fed engineering podcast where your host Parker Dolman and Steven Craig, litter everyone. Whoa, give me your give me a gumbo recipes.