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Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

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Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#51

Post by SubiculumCode »

s1mon wrote: post #27

I've been using parametric CAD (Pro/E / Creo, Solidworks, and Onshape) for 30+ years. Automatically adding sketch constraints is nothing new. Just about any 2D sketching tool out there will have some sort of snapping and/or auto-constraint-adding system. What's often more frustrating is fixing things when they get accidentally over-constrained. Solidworks tries to help with this in the form of cycling through what it…

Your experience, I do not doubt. However, I believe you misrepresent what the authors are claiming. They do not claim that constraints are new, rather that setting all the constraints manually can be tedious, and tools that intelligently select sets of constraint options can be useful at the practical level.

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#53

Post by digdugdirk »

syntaxing wrote: post #28
blackguardx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do now? Did you switch to software?

Yup, had the opportunity to switch to full time software a couple years back so I jumped at the opportunity.

I'm looking to do the same. What did you jump to, and how did you make the switch?

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#54

Post by WillPostForFood »

progbits wrote: post #9
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure there will be some value, especially as the LLM systems become capable of doing more of the work, but as a professional robotics engineer with a focus on mechanical engineering, OpenSCAD just cannot perform appropriately to serve as a primary CAD platform for professional mechanical design. Parametric GUI based design has so many advantages, a key one being that you can click on a feature and change it easil…

I think both approaches have merit, I find the ability to have proper libraries/functions (such as "place M4x8 socket head countersunk bolt here") is really nice, though I'm faster with the click&change approach for exploratory design. However the thing holding OpenSCAD back is the fact it is CSG (basically booleans on primitives) which is just not good enough for non-trivial parts. More interesting tool is cadquery[…

Been trying to install cadquery on a mac (M1) but ouch, not easy, and not working yet.

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#55

Post by syntaxing »

digdugdirk wrote: post #53
syntaxing wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, had the opportunity to switch to full time software a couple years back so I jumped at the opportunity.

I'm looking to do the same. What did you jump to, and how did you make the switch?

I’ve been debating writing a book about this to enable hardware to jump to software. I work on a bunch of infrastructure related code (make sure everything is running correctly). As for the switch, it takes a bit of luck and hard work. Luck wise, my employer has an opening and I happen to fit the need. Hard work wise, you still need to prove your worth. I was coding about 50/50 in my previous role so it was easy to sell my case. I went on some interviews lately and it’s important to know the game. Being able to Leetcode and system design is for the better or worse the de facto standard if you want to land a SWE role.

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#56

Post by gcr »

gerdesj wrote: post #48
delhanty wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been using parametric CAD (Pro/E / Creo, Solidworks, and Onshape) for 30+ years. True - I implemented the first Solidworks Autodimension sketch as a contractor around 2002 based upon earlier work that I'd done for a consultancy client at D-Cubed in the late 1990s. I'm sure it could be improved with AI and a large data set of sketches though. > Solidworks tries to help with this in the form of cycling through w…

I am not an expert but surely an under constrained sketch is not a completed sketch. Does "fully constrained" mean the simplest set of constraints that yields a shape (volume/hypervolume)? Or something rather more complicated? A simple yes or no, with a pointer to a paper will do!

In Fusion 360, you can drag underconstrained parts of the sketch around with the mouse. So the “degree of freedom” is still specified, but by accidental placement of how you drew the sketch. Fully-constrained sketches show a black outline and can’t be changed without explicitly editing a constraint or dimension.

For a quick example, see slide 10 in https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TiVoKF7mLlF360Oxy8hN... This is just a quick doc I made to show a friend how to use Fusion 360.

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#57

Post by mianos »

I have been using fusion360, at least once a week for 7 years. I don't find I am ever bogged down in tedious, repetitive tasks. The sort of thing in your video is completely second nature to me and the least of my problems.

This said, it sure looks cool.

What would be good would be something more like "I want to make a shape centered on this object on this other complex object, what's the best way to do it with the simplest constraints". With Fusion there are many ways to do anything and I often watch videos whose producers are way less experienced than me but they often have some really good hints, they have come across themselves or from others.

Like when you ask ChatGPT: "What's the best idiomatic way to do XXX in C++", or similar, say in a language I don't use every day, like TypeScript.

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#58

Post by WillAdams »

alexose wrote: post #24
zackangelo wrote: post #4

I wonder if the prevalence of coding LLMs will bring renewed attention to code-based modeling systems like OpenSCAD. It seems much easier to get them to generate code vs. translating into GUI interactions or modifying some other internal state directly.

I've been wondering the same thing. Unfortunately, I've found that GPT-4o is much less good at OpenSCAD than it is at Python. It feels totally untrained on the step-by-step logic you need to build things in a programatic way. This is likely a problem with not having enough training data.

There is a version of OpenSCAD which adds support for Python:

https://pythonscad.org/

That said, the bigger problem is that OpenSCAD is easy for things which are tractable to being described mathematically, and that the boundary for what can be described is one's fluency with mathematics --- once one gets beyond those things which can be described by rectangles, cylinders, and spheres, it gets quite difficult, and getting elements aligned often requires trigonometry (I have one backburner project which needs for me to get up-to-speed on conic sections).

There are some folks who are able to write code to generate point clouds or polygons which describe surfaces (see recent discussions on the OpenSCAD mailing list), but not many, and there isn't much such code, and when it does exist, it tends to be quite special purpose and hard to apply to different shapes.

It would help if there was a Bézier curve primitive in OpenSCAD, or better some support for a NURBS surface as a core primitive so folks wouldn't constantly be rolling their own options.

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#59

Post by chadnorvell »

christkv wrote: post #21

Is anyone doing something in the space for architecture mockups? I was talking with a friend who is an architect and he would love a tool that could iterate designs.

Yes! I'd love to better understand what your friend has in mind. Feel free to get in touch at: chad@constructural.ai

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#60

Post by saintradon »

This is cool but I'd like to see some focus for civil engineers doing land development. 98% of them use autocad, and are stuck with it, but also they only really use no more than 100 different commands - it's just the scale of everything that's difficult and really matters.
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