Just mashing together shape primitives and Thingiverse parts in TinkerCAD is entirely underrated. It’s still primarily what I use unless I need particularly curvy corner.

Fusion360 and FreeCAD are the CAD versions of Photoshop and GIMP (if Photoshop had a restricted free tier). They’re both trying to be a legit piece of CAD software, so there’s a bit of a learning curve coming from TinkerCAD. I found it easier to “feel my way around” Fusion360’s UI. FreeCAD has a layer of, “How did Open Source devs decide to be different here?” on top of learning something new.

Are you looking to build a keyboard from a kit, or design one from scratch?

SplitKB.com has forked a few popular open source keyboard designs like the Corne or the Sofle. Even if you don’t end up purchasing their kits, they have some excellent build guides and documentation. If you’re a keyboard or DIY electronics beginner, it’s a good way of seeing what sort of techniques and tools you’d be in for when soldering things like microcontrollers, switches, and diodes. https://docs.splitkb.com/product-guides/aurora-series/build-guide

If you’re interested in designing a keyboard, I’d recommend looking into the keyboard layout editor Egogen. https://github.com/ergogen/ergogen

Reminds me of when a recent sci-fi author wrote a first person novel with an androgynously named protagonist. They didn’t ever directly refer or allude to the character’s sex in the novel. Fan communities and book clubs spent months realizing they’d subconsciously given the protagonist pronouns in their head. (It’s less awkward than it sounds due to the sci-fi premise.) The author only addressed it months after it came out. They got both Wil Wheaton and Amber Benson to create identical audiobooks for the sequel.

Modern satellites are protected by various means of encryption, but there’s an enthusiast community that tracks down and communicates with very old unencrypted zombie satellites. There’s even been an NGO which managed to fire rockets on an abandoned NASA/ESA probe (with their approval.)

The Voyagers benefits primarily from the lack of groups with an adequate deep space network to communicate with it. Their communication standards are otherwise completely open and well documented.

I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.

That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.

It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.

Zac Gorman’s comic with the original dialog: https://magicalgametime.com/post/48470399171

Someone made this into a comic! https://mythjae.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/fated-3/