Tips & Tricks

Table of Contents

Handy hints when doing the FA.

  • every week neil links to featured assignments. check those!
  • peole with good documentation & learning from their mistakes:
  • Krisjanis: When documenting it is like painting a picture: think about the picture as already being there and you are just finishing it.
  • set up tracking page for final project!
    • for others to show your development. like a personal journal
  • MIT students can be seen [https://fab.cba.mit.edu]

Shortcuts

FreeCAD

  • Ctrl + Tab: switching tabs
  • Alt: disable auto constraints

tipps for freecad

  • you always want to keep your sketches as easy as possible!
  • build sketches hierarchically

interesting software

  • BIMP: GIMP for batch editing
  • image magick: convert anything to anything else
  • geeque: image manipulation
  • mypaint: emulate various sorts of media (oil, coal etc) when sketching
  • u can use notion for doing your notes and most importantly: export html page from it.

What I would like to learn during FA

  • how to draw on paper and build pcb from it!

Documentation Workflow

How I do my documentation.

Peparations (to be done once):

  • Fotos
    • smartphone
    • set up to name images after date and time
    • set up to take images of aspect ratio 4:3 (largest area, can be cropped afterwards) of a reasonably large size (so that the editing software does not take too long later on).
    • foto directory is set up to be synced with a directory of the same name on my laptop using syncthing
  • Screenshots
    • spectacle, set up to name images after date and time.
    • peek for capturing GIFs
  • Bookmark directories for camera, screenshots, website in the file browser for fast access.
  • Software for batch editing images:
    • using shotwell
    • used to scale down to 1200px width, 90% quality, jpeg
    • choose hero shot and crop it

Procedure:

  1. Create a page for the current week’s documentation from a prepared template.
  2. Check reference documentations of 1 to 2 previous year’s students for the current week for orientation.
  3. Work, take notes, take fotos/screenshots.
    • For every step:
      1. Take picture/screenshot.
      2. Take a note.
  4. Refine pictures.
    • Import all pictures in Shotwell.
    • Go through all pictures: crop, edit, delete (the ones you do not need).
    • Export the pictures to the directory of the current week.
      • If needed, the pictures can be exported in subfolders corresponding to the subsection they will be used in. This makes it easier to find them later on.
      • Batch rescale to 950px width + convert to jpg, 90% quality + exclude metadata.
    • Choose week’s title picture & crop that to 5:2 aspect ratio.
  5. Add pictures to the document at the location where they shall be.
    • Have a file browser open where you can browse the pictures. Check the picture you want to add, copy its name and paste it to the .md file.
  6. Refine notes to be prose from top to bottom.
    • Make use of Language Models. Be sure to document their use. Find example prompts below. Only use for small sections, do not edit a whole chapter in that way, it gets unhandy, since you cave to double check!
      1. Paste section along with respective prompt to LM.
      2. Paste output of LM to md, render, proofread
    • Italicize latin abbreviations: 
      # vim commands
:%s/ etc\. / _etc._ /g
:%s/ i\.e\. / _i.e._ /g
:%s/ e\.g\. / _e.g._ /g
    • Use aspell for spellchecking.
  7. Check file size before you push 
    du -h

Prompts

Form bullet points to prose text. 

Take the following bullet points and form prose text out of them. Do not add any additional information. Only use those words used in the bullet points and, additionally, those that are absolutely necessary to build grammatical sentences out of the bullet points. Formulate everything in past tense. Correct spelling mistakes:

<insert bullet points>

Summarize Bullet points to text. 

Summarize the following text in one paragraph:

<insert text>

Refine bullet points. 

Take the following bullet points and form grammatical and orthographically correct new bullet points out of them. Do not add any additional information. Only use those words and letters used in the original bullet points and, additionally, those that are absolutely necessary to build grammatical and orthographically correct new bullet points out of the original bullet points. Formulate everything in past tense. Correct spelling mistakes:

<insert bullet points>

Fix tense, spelling and interpunctuation. 

Take the following text at the bottom and return it unchanged. You may change it, but only if it is necessary so it meets the requirements listed below and do not change under any circumstances the content inside a <highlight ...> ... </highlight> code block where ... is a substitute for arbitrary text and do not remove any curly brackets and do not consider valid markdown syntax as an mistakes and do not add line breaks yourself:

Requirements listed below:
- The text is written from the perspective of "I".
- The text is in general written in past tense.
- The text is free of spelling and interpunctuation mistakes.
- The text is free of grammar mistakes.

Text at the bottom:

<insert text>
summarize longer texts: 
Summarize the following text in one paragraph:

<insert text>

Scripts & Commands

batch converting & resizing 

mogrify -resize 1000\> -format jpg -quality 90 *

#!/bin/bash
# pscrot - periodic screenshot


# Check if a command line argument is provided
if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
    # Use the provided argument
    sleepsecs="$1"
else
    # Use a default message if no argument is provided
    sleepsecs=5
fi

echo "taking one screenshot every $sleepsecs seconds."

while true
do
    scrot -f ~/Pictures/Screenshots/pscrot/$(date +%Y-%m-%d__%H-%M-%S).png
    sleep $sleepsecs

done

Major Pitfalls Regarding the File Size

  • read the general essentials
  • notes from julian (IT maintainer) on filesize
  • comments in chat where I asked what would be a good file size. answers:
    • 500MB max for the entire FA2025 course
    • about 10-20Mb a week
  • images
    • has changed over time
    • minimum is when you can’t see what it’s about
    • something between 900 and 1200 width
      • 1200px is quite big. Depends on how much detail you want to show.
      • Unless you need the detail, but then its better to focus and crop the image
    • image size depends on what you use them for. e.g. 820px for title pages is okay. for images that are displayed bigger, you can see if you save them as such
    • Filesize should not exceed 100/150Kb
    • on ferdi’s website all images are 950 images wide. 1200 is also ok
    • how to edit them?
      • it’s best if you take large photos and then downscale them with ffmpeg
      • 4:3 is quite nice as default then I can adjust.
        • if the photo is as high quality as possible, 90% is enough.
        • if i then want to downscale the stuff:
      • have little information in images! Otherwise, they might be large
    • post-processing: - 90% is ok. - should be small enough in most cases. - 950 width with 90% compression is a good guideline
    • throw out exif data, but sometimes this is also useful.
  • videos
  • 3d files:
    • not a problem, since these are mostly only text files (stl)
  • big file sizes are then 3d scanning week. but there it is saved somewhere else