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CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

mattferraro.dev

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Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#141

Post by aiksiongkoh »

alright2565 wrote: post #29

I think this is amazing. I'd love to get to the point where we are with open source EDA with open source physical CAD. > Another downside is that solving this kind of matrix equation gets prohibitively slow when you have a lot of unknowns, which gives rise to the conventional wisdom that individual sketches should be small and simple. I've gotten quite deep into this, and this is really not a problem in practice[1] 1…

OndselSolver at https://github.com/Ondsel-Development/OndselSolver can do redundant constraint removal and handle under constrained systems readily using direct Gauss Elimination on sparse matrices. It is used in FreeCAD and Ondsel ES for Assembly constraints.

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#142

Post by prokoudine »

ghostpepper wrote: post #91
loughnane wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had 10y or so experience with CAD when onshape showed up around 2014. You could tell from the beginning that they cared a ton about usability and had their minds wrapped around how people use CAD. It’s only got better since. I highly recommend the cadmium folks just soak themselves in onshape’s UX.

Why is open source always so bad at UUX - it's so frustrating. I believe the people who say FreeCAD is powerful but I'm skeptical I will ever experience it.

> Why is open source always so bad at UUX - it's so frustrating.

To illustrate why... There's a certain "artistic" FOSS project (before you ask — not GIMP) where the community, incl. former lead dev basically say this:

- UX is bullshit, it's just opinions (verbatim quote)

- No two people agree on what is the right way, so anyone willing to improve UX in this project will have to fight everybody else, don't hold your hopes high (almost a verbatim quote)

- We don't like drama in this community, so we tend to just accept patches that change UI (you'd think this contradicts the previous statement, but somehow the impossible is possible)

They'd also mock a person who wrote a very elaborate first impressions blog post about the software, claiming she is an idiot who didn't bother learning the software.

I don't think the FreeCAD community was ever this bad, but there certainly was a strong element of chaos before. Things are considerably better today. There's a design working group working its way through various incosistencies, for one. It's a long-term project, no doubt about it, they are slowly getting there.

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#143

Post by WillAdams »

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #137
onthecanposting wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The biggest reason this hasn't happened so far is the lack of a truly capable parametric kernel" Does parasolid not fit this requirement? The capabilities I've seen in Plasticity are very impressive. Or do you specifically mean FOSS? The more I use CAD platforms, the more I develop the sense that general-purpose CAD is much less useful than single-purpose applications that provide tailored solutions to narrow proble…

I think this is a great point. When looking at ‘best practices’ for constructing robust parametric models I keep thinking “this is so much like software engineering where the programming language is the CAD system” (as an aside, I’ve tried OpenSCAD but found the rendering UI waaay too slow even with simple stuff to be usable for me). So as a model builder you end up trying to build these higher-level abstractions int…

For OpenSCAD, try the nightly build and enable MANIFOLD --- that's an order of magnitude (or two) of increase in the performance.

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#144

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

rjsw wrote: post #8

We spend a lot of time working on the correct type system for STEP, I don't think that using an untyped format like JSON is a good idea. I know that ISO 10303-243 uses JSON but in hindsight I think that was a mistake.

Agreed.

I saw “CADmium will use JSON for everything.” and cringed a bit.

This seems like a mistake.

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#145

Post by prokoudine »

phkahler wrote: post #140
geph2021 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know a lot about these tools, but I've used QCAD[1] for home improvement projects, drawing schematics and layout diagrams, and been very happy with it. It seems quite powerful. It's also open source, although not browser based. I'm just wondering why QCAD doesn't seem to get much if any mention on HN when CAD tools and open source comes up. 1 - https://www.qcad.org/

Qcad is commercial software. The author is doing his best to ride the line between commercial and OSS, but most free software developers don't want to play. LibreCad was forked from an earlier version of Qcad and fell behind. Now they're doing a whole new LibreCAD but it's been years in the making.

LibreCAD v3 is very nearly abandoned. I could be wrong, but the vast majority of the new code there came from GSoC students who didn't quite stick around for long except just one who did multiple GSoCs but also eventually left.

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#146

Post by pyb »

onthecanposting wrote: post #114
samwillis wrote: post #30

I'm very excited about what Matt is building, the world desperately needs a good open source parametric CAD package. One where the UI/UX is designed to be as "easy" to use a SolidWorks. The biggest reason this hasn't happened so far is the lack of a truly capable parametric kernel, Truck, the kernel that Matt is using looks like an incredible project and exactly whats needed. The only other kennel till now that been…

"The biggest reason this hasn't happened so far is the lack of a truly capable parametric kernel" Does parasolid not fit this requirement? The capabilities I've seen in Plasticity are very impressive. Or do you specifically mean FOSS? The more I use CAD platforms, the more I develop the sense that general-purpose CAD is much less useful than single-purpose applications that provide tailored solutions to narrow proble…

100% agree. The future of CAD consists in more specialized CAD platforms, not tweaks to general mechanical CAD. Cabinet Vision is one good example.

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#147

Post by iancmceachern »

rcxdude wrote: post #115
bobby_the_whal wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeCAD suffers from the same issues that much open-source software suffers from: it has bugs. Bugs erode user confidence. Apparently, there are now > 500 bugs open. When commercial software has bugs, you don't even know they exist often. Sure, but there are also ways to make bug free software, but hardly any open-source software exists that uses those development techniques.

It has that in common with CAD software which has 5 figure annual subscriptions. Find me a CAD user who doesn't notice bugs in the software they're using and I'll show you someone who has <1 hour of experience.

This is true, but when I encounter a bug in Solidworks there is someone who's job it is to fix it,and they do.

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#148

Post by iancmceachern »

echoangle wrote: post #120
bobby_the_whal wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeCAD suffers from the same issues that much open-source software suffers from: it has bugs. Bugs erode user confidence. Apparently, there are now > 500 bugs open. When commercial software has bugs, you don't even know they exist often. Sure, but there are also ways to make bug free software, but hardly any open-source software exists that uses those development techniques.

You think professional software is bug-free? I have some experience with NX and I can tell you it’s not exactly bug-free either. It’s very likely better than FreeCAD, but requiring zero bugs is just unrealistic.

This is true, but for customers of nx, solidworks, etc it's someone's job to fix the bugs for you

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#149

Post by iancmceachern »

onthecanposting wrote: post #114
samwillis wrote: post #30

I'm very excited about what Matt is building, the world desperately needs a good open source parametric CAD package. One where the UI/UX is designed to be as "easy" to use a SolidWorks. The biggest reason this hasn't happened so far is the lack of a truly capable parametric kernel, Truck, the kernel that Matt is using looks like an incredible project and exactly whats needed. The only other kennel till now that been…

"The biggest reason this hasn't happened so far is the lack of a truly capable parametric kernel" Does parasolid not fit this requirement? The capabilities I've seen in Plasticity are very impressive. Or do you specifically mean FOSS? The more I use CAD platforms, the more I develop the sense that general-purpose CAD is much less useful than single-purpose applications that provide tailored solutions to narrow proble…

Parasolid is owned by Siemens, it's not open source really

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#150

Post by PetitPrince »

jonathankoren wrote: post #125
bobby_the_whal wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeCAD suffers from the same issues that much open-source software suffers from: it has bugs. Bugs erode user confidence. Apparently, there are now > 500 bugs open. When commercial software has bugs, you don't even know they exist often. Sure, but there are also ways to make bug free software, but hardly any open-source software exists that uses those development techniques.

It’s not just that. It’s also ugly and awkward to use. I tried to use it after learning Fusion360, and it’s just lacking. I wasn’t even trying to do anything particularly complicated, and it just kinda sucked. You see the same problems with a lot of “flagship” oss ware. Gimp seems to have the same awkward feature set for 25 years. Apparently the only thing that has changed is they no longer compile against Gtk 1.0, a…

Very recently (well: yesterday and today), I made the same non trivial shape for an electronics project, and I tried Fusion360, OnShape and FreeCad.

I basically want to extend the base of an Ikea lantern (Enrum); this require creating an (irregular) octagonal shape, and then creating a slot so that the lantern base can sit on it.

I had some distant memories of modeling stuff in Solidworks for a project back in university, so I'm not starting from zero.

I was able to finish my design in Fusion and redid it in one evening in Onshape. As for Freecad... I still don't know how to do it. Or rather: I could probably do it, but only with so much more googling on how to do basic stuff that it is discouraging to even thing about it.

I think the main issue is that Freecad generally expects you to know exactly what to do, and has very poor affordance.

Let's take the very few steps for instance. In order to create my lantern "shoe", I first need to recreate its base. It's some sort of octagon, so the plan is to draw an octagon, extrude it and then probably repeat the operation with several other octagon to carve a slot for the lamp.

So the very first thing is to create a sketch on the xy place. In both OnShape In both Fusion and OnShape, the very first menu item in the toolbar is the "create new sketch" one [1][2]. So you can immediately click on it, then chose you plane, then start to draw.

[1] https://ibb.co/4YMtDnD

[2] https://ibb.co/ZMCf1Yy

In Freecad though, the first thing in the toolbar are.. the camera controls (which are somehow redundant with the interactive cube view of the main area). In fact, you cannot even create a sketch from the default toolbar; at best you can create a Part.

[3] https://ibb.co/ww791Bd

In order to create a new sketch, you need to go to the dropdown menu. This menu is ordered alphabetically. So the first item is "Arc", then "Draft", then "FEM", ... If you do not know the jargon and/or is just starting out, good luck finding where to next ("what's the difference between Draft and Sketch ?" they would say). And even select Sketcher from the combobox, the first controls you see are still the camera ones. Worse: the "create parts" button from earlier is still there ! [3] And so the "new sketch" button is hidden on the right side of while it's probably the very first thing you want to do.

[3] https://ibb.co/xXrTd6t

And for the very short time I spend trying Freecad, issues like were constant.

There's seems to be some open issues related to this in the Github issues viewer, but no tangible commitment as far as I know.

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