Designing PCBs is typically decoupled from manufacturing. And once you get a feeling for it, modern PCB design is like playing Legos, as you just pick and connect a lot of different ICs together (unless you’re doing some very specialized analogue stuff).

Thanks!! I worked in hardware engineering for about two years, designed PCBs, did testing and so on, but I thought it was quite boring to be honest, which is the danger of turning your hobby into your profession, I learned. You don’t end up doing the fun things (designing circuits and layouting) and most of your time is spent with documentation, meetings, and reading and following technical standards. I always wanted to do RF professionally but it didnt quite work out, which is OK. I somehow slipped into writing embedded software and some embedded Linux things. Anyway, this is good because I now enjoy doing hardware as a hobby a lot more while still having some professional knowledge to apply. (am OP, this is an alt account)

oh I have not heard of Dune3d before, I’ll definietly check it out. According to the docs it was initally created for electronics enclosures, which is is also my typical use case. Let’s see! I also missed chamfers/fillets in solvespacd which is why my recent creation looks a bit rough. I tried to import it into freecad to do it in post processing but that caused all kinds of other issues haha. (am OP, this is an alt account on-the-go)

This opens up the Ship of Theseus thing again.

Auch hardware guy hier. Du sprichst mir aus der Seele :D Ich frage mich ob das so ein deutsches Ding ist. Jedenfalls finde ich toxische Klugscheißerei trifft es 100%