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Comment by IshKebab

1 day ago

The pull request is to delete the project and open SOLIDWORKS or FreeCAD.

But don't actually delete it. It looks like a nice alternative to OpenSCAD. But like OpenSCAD it's really a niche thing for designs that are highly parametric like fasteners, gears, 3D printed boxes, etc.

Like OpenSCAD using it for normal "irregular" CAD is going to be extremely frustrating. Like editing an SVG in notepad instead of Inkscape.

I still feel like there's a unexplored space where you combine the benefits of both somehow though. Like a code-based CAD but it also has a GUI editor that stays in sync and avoids the need to type in coordinates by hand. That would be extremely difficult though.

23 comments

IshKebab

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DannyBee  19 hours ago

This is actually what onshape is, under the covers.

The GUI is really just using their scripting primitives, etc. You can access it the same as they can, actually.

  • throwup238  13 hours ago

    Onshape is just a GUI over the Parasolid geometric modeling kernel, the same kernel used by Solidworks [1]. Whatever their scripting primitives are, they're at best a thin wrapper over Parasolid (which is true for the entire industry - it's all Siemens Parasolid and Dassault ACIS).

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasolid#Applications

    • DannyBee  8 hours ago

      Yes, this is all true, but the comment I responded to wanted to be able to basically code rather than GUI sometimes , but still have the GUI up to date. Because of how onshape was built it makes this very very easy. Solidworks very much does not. Fusion360 also has good enough python bindings but it's still nowhere near as easy or integrated to do this (or debug it) as onshape.

      So I'm kinda not sure what you are going for here. The fact that they are all the same kernels under the cover is sort of irrelevant. It's not that thin a layer and the layer matters a lot since it is what you get to use. It's like saying all of userspace is just syscalls. That's not what users see or interact with, the layer they interact with matters a lot to them.

      1 reply →

    • squeedles  8 hours ago

      And both of them were written by Ian Braid, Alan Grayer, and Charles Lang (and others) in Cambridge.

      Parasolid was v1 and old school C, then they got the C++ bug like many of us at the time and did ACIS as v2.

hyperbrainer  13 hours ago

> "highly paramteric like fastners, gears, 3D printed boxes"

1. These parts should probably be on McMaster. If you are not using them straight from there, you better have a _great_ reason as to why not when it comes up in the design review.

2. Solidworks has Smart Fasteners, Inventor has Spur Gear Component Generator, Sketch->Extrude->Shell takes 30 seconds, so not sure why 3D printed boxes would be faster or better with this for most stuff. Also, this stuff is easily solved by things like the component library and configurations.

  • IshKebab  13 hours ago

    > you better have a _great_ reason as to why not

    Because I don't live in America?

    • bluGill  6 hours ago

      Are you saying that you don't us McMaster because they don't ship to where you live? That seems silly - you can still download their drawings and then find an alternate source. They are a great listing of everything you might ever want to buy, but you can almost always find an alternative source.

      There is also the possibility you think because McMaster is in the US they don't have metric parts. This is wrong, a lot of engineering in the US is done in metric - nearly all big manufacturing companies went metric 40 years ago, so they have plenty of metric parts that you should work with. Of course most manufacturing is small companies that still haven't gone metric, but they also deal with metric once in a while, and in any case you wouldn't be ordering from them anyway.

    • dymk  12 hours ago

      Are ISO standard parts not used where you live? McMaster is in the US but the much of the parts and CAD are standard

jfindley  5 hours ago

All the good commercial parametric CAD apps have an API that allow you to define models programatically to avoid repitition, or do more complicated things like ensure gear ratios are exactly correct. I'm not sure I entirely understand what you're getting at with the "stays in sync" part though.

amelius  21 hours ago

> Like editing an SVG in notepad instead of Inkscape.

Speaking of which, I would love to have parametric capabilities in Inkscape.

prennert  11 hours ago

Ha! Since you mention SVG, there is a trick!

Draw your free-hand shape in Inkscape, export to SVG, import it in FreeCAD and go from there.

I used that trick to trace a part from an image and it worked surprisingly well. Not very efficient compared to commercial tooling, but despite the clumsiness its fairly intuitive and free.

aaronblohowiak  21 hours ago

>I still feel like there's an unexplored space where you combine the benefits of both somehow though. Like a code-based CAD but it also has a GUI editor that stays in sync and avoids the need to type in coordinates by hand. That would be extremely difficult though.

I think you can do this if the data representation of operations and values is human readable. The simplest implementation would restrict the language/data format to operations representable in the gui.

Unlike trying to solve the "visual programming" problems, we don't need or desire Turing completeness.

Very interesting indeed!