My impression of FreeCAD as a project is that for much if its life it has suffered from a certain amount of developer churn and lack of focus. It's like somebody builds a workbench and gets it working just good enough using a workflow that makes sense to them, but then nobody ever really bothers to flesh out the rest of it, so if you try to do things in a different way that may be perfectly sensible to you the result is a broken mess. Eventually somebody decides they can do better, and maybe they do, but the replacement still has a lot of rough spots that never get finished and the cycle starts again.
It seems like the development team has gotten much more organized in the last couple years, so I have a lot of hope for the future. I think that good open source parametric CAD is something the world really needs.
I hope. I only use Windows at this point because of CAD and FEA software and it gets worse every version. For FEA there are options on Linux but for CAD you have been SOL since most major CAD suites dropped Linux support over a decade ago.
We did as well for about 20 years. It is a very solid program and does everything it promises. Unfortunately it lacks modern features, and development is sparse to say the least, so we ended up moving to Knot. I'd still recommend tinydns for really simple deployments, though.
That is to say, if you misconfigure it, or try to turn it off, you will have an invalid domain until the TTL runs out, and it's really just not worth the headache unless you have a real use case.
> If bad actors can create valid tls certs they can solve the dnssec problem.
I think you have it backwards: by not running DNSSEC it can mean bad actors (at least a certain level) can MITM the DNS queries that are used to validate ACME certs.
It is now mandated that public CAs have to verify DNSSEC before issuing a cert:
If you mean MITM between DNS Server and CA (e.g. letsencrypt), thats on a level of BGP hacking (means for me government involved) and means they can just use a CA (e.g. Fina CA 2025 with cloudflare).
I think the risk didn't change much (except for big corp/bank).
Neat, I've used lego (https://github.com/go-acme/lego) but will certainly have to give uacme a look, love me a simple ACME client.
acme.sh was too garish for my liking, even as a guy that likes his fair share of shell scripts. And obviously certbot is a non-starter because of snap.
Certbot has earned my ire on just about every occasion I've had to interact with it. It is a terrible program and I can't wait to finish replacing it everywhere.
The new setup is using uAcme and nsupdate to do DNS-01 challenges. No more fiddling with any issues in the web server config for a particular virtual host, like some errant rewrite rule that prevents access to .well-known/.
I mean certbot handles the just issue me a cert via DNS-01 and I'll do the rest flow just fine. Massive overkill of a program for just that use-case but it's been humming along for me for years at this point. What's the selling point for uACME?
> don't expect it to automatically set up your webserver to use the certificates it obtains.
This makes me so happy. Acme and certbot trying to do this is annoying, Caddy trying to get certs by default is annoying. I ended up on a mix of dehydrated and Apache mod_md but I think I like the look of uACME because dehydrated just feels clunky
Holy crap. That's a whole series of bad ideas extremely well executed. That guy probably has never seen what a lead acid battery can do when it explodes. He keeps hiding away from the hot metal but in the path of ~half of those batteries. Ignorance is bliss.
Maybe if by "same voltage" we mean DC voltage the same as AC peak voltage. When we talk about AC voltage we are referring to root-mean-square (RMS) voltage. It's kind of like saying the average, though for math reasons the average of an unbiased sine wave is 0. Anyhooo, 1 VRMS into a load will produce the same power as 1VDC. If AC delivered less power than DC at the same voltage then life would be very confusing.
Really depends on what we're talking about. A lot of electrical safety equipment has a DC rating, usually something like 90VDC/300VAC. Also, most DC equipment just isn't going to have the stored energy to generate a big arc. Well, except batteries, and we're already piling them all around us.
I mean it depends, but for dual rated stuff has both a voltage and current limit, both of which are way lower.
Like typically a 230V/20A AC switch can switch 24VDC/2A. And the energy is not in the equipment, its in the mains (or batteries like you said, or PV panels)
Right, but that's why I mentioned safety equipment. Your common DIN-mount UL-489 branch circuit breaker will be rated for the same trip current, same short circuit current rating (SCCR), but lower voltage. So you can use the same wiring and breakers as you might have with AC and your 48V battery bank won't vaporize the $5 hardware store toggle switch that somehow became a shunt.
I mean, most AC circuit breakers use electromagnets to trip on overcurrent (as well as bimetallic strips using thermal methods for sustained high current).
Electromagnets dont work for DC, so your breaker will never trip. For thermal protection, you need current, so that checks out, and it would make sense for it to be rated under 50V as thats considered the highest voltage thats not life threatening on touch.
PV Batteries in general have a very high current (100s of A) at ~50Vish volts, so I dont think there's a major usecase for using household breakers for them.
Im still not getting your point BTW, switches and breakers are two separate things, with different workings, and household (and datacenter) DC would be I think around 400ish V, which is a bit higher than the peak voltage of AC, but still within the arc limits of household wiring (at least in 230V countries).
The advantage of DC is that you use your wiring more efficiently as the mean and peak wattage is the same at all times. Going with 48V would mean high resistive losses.
> Electromagnets dont work for DC, so your breaker will never trip.
If electromagnets don't work for DC then what am I supposed to do with this pile of DC solenoids and relays? ;)
> PV Batteries in general have a very high current (100s of A) at ~50Vish volts, so I dont think there's a major usecase for using household breakers for them.
That's what the SCCR rating is for. When there's a fault you're going to have a LOT of current flowing until your safety kicks in. Something like the grid or a battery bank will happily provide thousands of amps almost instantaneously. Breakers designed for protecting building wiring are rated for this. Now, most household breakers aren't dual DC/AC rated, but you can actually buy DC rated breakers that fit in a home panel (Square D QO series).
> Im still not getting your point BTW, switches and breakers are two separate things, with different workings, and household (and datacenter) DC would be I think around 400ish V, which is a bit higher than the peak voltage of AC, but still within the arc limits of household wiring (at least in 230V countries).
My point is that there isn't any material reason why DC can't be as safe as AC, all the proper safety equipment already exists. Extinguishing a DC arc during a fault is a solved problem for equipment at household scale.
> The advantage of DC is that you use your wiring more efficiently as the mean and peak wattage is the same at all times. Going with 48V would mean high resistive losses.
I just mentioned 48V because it's a common equipment voltage for household DC systems. 400V would be good for big motors and resistive heating loads.
Regarding DC vs AC and wiring efficiency, talking about mean vs peak wattage just confuses the issue. 1 volt DC is 1 volt RMS. It is an apples-to-apples comparison. If you want to say "we can use 170VDC or 120VAC with the same insulation withstand rating, and at lower current for the same power", then that is absolutely true. But your common 600V THHN building wire won't care if you're using 400V AC or DC, so it's mostly immaterial.
It seems like the development team has gotten much more organized in the last couple years, so I have a lot of hope for the future. I think that good open source parametric CAD is something the world really needs.