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.
Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
71–80 of 88 posts
Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
#72My 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…
Very interesting. Where are you located? I guess the US.
Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
#73Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
#74Earlier 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.
Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
#75Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
#76Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
#77I'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
#78Nice 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…
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
#79Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD
#80Was 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…
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.