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Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

hestus.co

71–80 of 88 posts

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#71

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.

If any founders are interested I'd be happy to go into more detail.

Feel free to get in touch with me at chad@constructural.ai -- I'm a civil engineer turned software engineer myself, focusing specifically on this space.

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#72

My brother in law is in construction and has built and project managed dozens of houses, small apartment blocks etc. He said that if a building job doesn't require planning permission (small extension, temporary structure, certain farm buildings, large sheds, pergolas, verandas, sunrooms etc) then the customer might ask if he can save money by skipping the architect and engineer. A competent builder can generally wor…

>He said that if a building job doesn't require planning permission (small extension, temporary structure, certain farm buildings, large sheds, pergolas, verandas, sunrooms etc) then the customer might ask if he can save money by skipping the architect and engineer.

Very interesting. Where are you located? I guess the US.

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#74
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FWIW conda-forge packages cadquery and it's dependencies, including on macOS-arm. So micromamba/mamba/conda can easily be used to install it. build123d is being worked on.

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#77
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.

Many of the existing tools will automatically add constraints as you go. Certainly the tangent, horizontal and vertical constraints can be done while sketching with a tiny amount of care. Some systems will look for other circles and try to set equal diameters. Most systems have shortcut keys which can be used to quickly set missing constraints - taking a similar number of clicks as the UI shown in the demo video. I hope there are cases where their tool is faster or smarter, but it wasn’t evident from the demo.

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#78
post #30

Nice work!! I tried to run it, but got an API Error: Due to some internal changes made to the Fusion API, the Add-In: 'sketch_helper' from 'Hestus, Inc.' cannot be loaded. You need to install a new version of the Add-In that is compatible with this version of Fusion. Can you just put it up on the Autodesk app store? I struggle with this model, because of the capture by Autodesk and the other CAD providers. If you rea…

> If you read the Autodesk EULA, I think it prohibits use of any open-source software in these add-ins.

That would have surprised me, as most add-ins I am using are open source and the most popular Fusion apps state that they are open source in their store listings and shouldn't have passed reviews if that were the case.

I took a look at the publisher agreement and it does have this section:

> no Open Source Software is or will be included, incorporated or embedded in, linked to, combined, distributed, or made available with or used in the delivery or provision of Your App in a manner that could cause any Autodesk Assets to be subject to any Open Source License.

There is also a definitions section about this that specifically goes into detail about copyleft licenses, so it seems like they just want to stay very clear of the issue of "copyleft poisoning" and exotic licenses, and ensure that if there is any breach of software license terms that liability is on the add-in author.

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#79
Some things I’d love to see in AI for CAD that would be above this are 1) Is it manufacturable - where it analyzes different mfg methods, for feasibility and estimated cost. So many engineers design impossible or expensive to manage parts. AI could help make this not the case 2) as others have said, BOM/SAP/etc. 3) make the drawing for a machine shop

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#80

Was a Mechanical Design Engineer for about a decade. Personally, the CAD part was the easy and fun part (Used Solidworks, Creo, Inventor, Catia v5 extensively. Professionally trained in all four as well). The “tedious” part was SAP (part number and material management), drafting, ECN/R/O, BOM handling, etc. I would be more excited for “AI” for PLM like Windchill, TeamCenter, or Cadedge (or whatever SAP PLM packages y…

I've been a Mechanical Engineer for a similar length of time, using Solidworks and Creo, and I concur. I've released many thousands of parts over the course of my career, and I don't think of the modeling itself as a major time sink (provided you have some decent training, and are using a thoughtful approach and not fighting the software). If the AI copilot could actually do all the modeling based on prompts, that would be pretty interesting, especially if it could create a feature try that I could tweak.

Automatic drafting is something that I think might be a good target for doing some AI research on. Your prompt exists in the form of the solid model, and it's feature tree and parameters. The output is the lay out views and annotations. It's okay if the output isn't perfect, as I would expect to be reviewing it and doing some tweaks.

Helping with all of the ERP processes involved with releasing and maintaining engineering documentation would be a HUGE time saver. If I could ask a copilot program to start a change request, and give it some basic descriptions of what I'm changing, it would be massively helpful if it could start pulling relevant files, and auto-filling the right requests/forms/whatever to do that process.

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