Interesting but silly title both as noted in the opening paragraph and as the 'd' in 'CAD' means design already (computer aided design design)
Automated CAD
11–20 of 24 posts
Re: Automated CAD
#12If you're interested in parametric CAD, Genworks open-sourced most of their system (except for the third-party commercial SMLib library) under the AGPL: https://github.com/genworks/gendl
Re: Automated CAD
#13That's awesome. I've futzed around with OpenSCAD a bit, and the OP is talking about a workflow similar to what I had in mind for my projects. What's neat is that you can generate a set of parts once (in code). You then assemble those parts (functions, really) into 3D shapes for visualization. And you lay out those same parts in a plane for 2D fabrication. The main difficulty I had was that it seems to be necessary to…
> If there was some way to specify and capture the position of that point (or whatever), then it would be much easier to connect parts together. This is usually done by a constraint solver. The most popular one in the industry is D-Cubed 3D DCM by Seimens: http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/open/d-... I do not know any open source equivalents for 3D constraint solving. There is a few 2D ones that ar…
https://github.com/genworks/gendl does this by having you describe parts and sub-assemblies as objects, and then generating geometry commands from the object graph.
Re: Automated CAD
#14Interesting but silly title both as noted in the opening paragraph and as the 'd' in 'CAD' means design already (computer aided design design)
Oh man, I should have known better. You are right.
I wasn't thinking of it in that way, when I wrote the title, I was thinking of the second "design" as "the thing", and the "CAD" part of it as the name of the technology area. The more I think about it, the more I think it is a little awkwardly titled.
Re: Automated CAD
#15If you're interested in parametric CAD, Genworks open-sourced most of their system (except for the third-party commercial SMLib library) under the AGPL: https://github.com/genworks/gendl
Oh, I didn't know Dave had put Genworks on Github. Interesting.
Re: Automated CAD
#16If you're interested in parametric CAD, Genworks open-sourced most of their system (except for the third-party commercial SMLib library) under the AGPL: https://github.com/genworks/gendl
Do you know if gendl includes geometric constraint solving?
I've been playing around with using geometric constraint solving with FreeCAD's "sketcher" mode, but the GUI interface on that is awful, I'd love to experiment with it using a proper GDL of some sort.
Edit: Nevermind, it sounds like it does. I should have read the whole discussion.
Re: Automated CAD
#17Very interesting. I heard that OpenSCAD isn't fully reliable for production use though. We've love to integrate this into https://Clara.io in some way.
Would love to see a 3D print button on your site sometime as well! printtopeer.io/api
Disclosure: found of P2P
Re: Automated CAD
#18As much as I like OpenSCAD for its scriptability, the OP is really pushing the limits of what you can do with it. I'm hoping FreeCAD takes off eventually in this space (hobbyist parts design).
Of possible interest to those reading this, I worked on a project in college that did a similar thing with AutoCAD for full-size water treatment plants. A web interface[1] accepts input which is sent to design scripts, where equations of fluid dynamics and other physical constraints are used to scale components appropriately for the size requested. From there, the AutoCAD command prompt is accessed to generate a 3D model and various construction-oriented section views.
Re: Automated CAD
#19I've been messing around with OpenSCAD for a little. I am working on some 'art' projects that would make heavy use of geometric shapes and I love the idea of generating these things in code. Another alternative that I've found, and like a lot, is OpenJSCAD. Very similiar to OpenSCAD but with javascript: http://openjscad.org/
There's also ImplicitCAD, which is Haskell and actually more powerful in some ways. Unmaintained as of this summer, though.
Re: Automated CAD
#20I've played around some with OpenSCAD and I do find it super super cool. I've also played around with Autodesk Inventor (got a student copy for free) and if the code portion of OpenSCAD is causing you trouble, you can do a huge amount of the parametric type stuff in Inventor too. It seemed pretty unapproachable at first, but it's really as easy as adding a dimension like "WALL_HEIGHT=5cm" the first time, and reusing "WALL_HEIGHT" as your dimension everywhere else. Change one, badda bing, the constraint solver goes through and updates your model everywhere.
I'm so glad to see this stuff all taking off. For the longest time, I was shocked at how hard it was to do, and now that I'm back into it, it has gotten much much easier!