31–40 of 70 posts
At the time of writing this there are 24 comments, of which 4 promote alternatives. I feel that recently the number of shameless plugs and check-out-my-SaaS's surged drastically https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47803846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47803475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47802988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47803416
At the time of writing this there are 24 comments, of which 4 promote alternatives. I feel that recently the number of shameless plugs and check-out-my-SaaS's surged drastically https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47803846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47803475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47802988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47803416
Such comments have become more useful recently, as a form of curated search, when standard Internet searching has started to provide an avalanche of garbage links, to Web pages that only summarize or repeat the primary sources, frequently with errors and failing to point to the original sources.
Even if inspecting the suggested alternatives may show them as worthless, finding this may still save time over using a search engine and having to filter an order of magnitude more misleading links.
Those not interested in such comments can easily skip over them and not visit any suggested links.
When I visit Wikipedia pages, the most frequent reason is for their lists of useful links. Similarly, when reading a HN comment thread, I appreciate links to more or less related content.
Today I value such sources far more than a few decades ago, when Google could easily and effortlessly find any desired information, while today you must struggle with any search engine, as they will provide you almost any kind of information, except that requested by you.
At the time of writing this there are 24 comments, of which 4 promote alternatives. I feel that recently the number of shameless plugs and check-out-my-SaaS's surged drastically https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47803846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47803475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47802988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47803416
Interesting. I have played with OpenScad a bit. This looks similar - i guess the difference is the syntax is python - any other major differences
OpenSCAD is all triangles and vertices. Fillets are difficult to do. Outputting circles/spheres generally requires you to for-loop over vertices a lot. Libraries like build123d and cadquery use OpenCASCADE, a boundary representation kernel. You think in terms of the enclosed solid and perform operations - boolean add/subtract, fillet/chamfer, stamp text, etc - that return a new solid.
Now I am off to see if anyone has ever built an export plugin for pov-sdl, either a 3d rasterizer(g-code slicer) for 3d printing, or a boundary layer mesh generator for import into another program. language wise it is probably equivalent to or better than the openscad sdl,
One subtle advantage to using python as the sdl is that it gets access to the vast corpus of python modules out there. Most of which are probably useless. but one thing I want to try is to see if I can use sympy to define a more declarative style of constraint.
Previous discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24520014 (6 years, 49 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30232344 (4 years, 43 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30219940 (on Hackaday, 4 years, 28 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17038257 (8 years, 16 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28083578 (a Show HN from 5 years ago w/ 1 comment)
There are a lot of tools in this space, esp. these days when "Vibe Coding" allows folks to knock one out w/ a prompt. Most folks jus use OpenSCAD which with its large user base and weaknesses which are (mostly) not exposed by 3D printing is great, so long as what one wants to model is easily described using mathematics/programming techniques which are familiar to the user.
I'd really like to see an interactive opensource project follow OnShape's lead where a scripting language (for OS, FeatureScript) is used as a wrapper around the geometry kernel, then the graphical UI creates the model using that language, and one can always inspect the resultant code. It seems to me that this should be workable given the observation:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31471109
>Parametric CAD, in my view, is a perfect example of "visual programming",
>you have variables, iteration/patterning reducing repetition, composability
>of objects/sketches again reducing repetition, modularity of design though a
>hierarchy of assemblies. The alignment between programming principles and
>CAD modelling principles, while not immediately obvious, are very much
>there. An elegantly designed CAD model is just as beautiful (in its construction)
>as elegantly written code.
but these days, I'm mostly using Open(Python)SCAD (which is in the process of getting merged in to the main project).
At the time of writing this there are 24 comments, of which 4 promote alternatives. I feel that recently the number of shameless plugs and check-out-my-SaaS's surged drastically https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47803846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47803475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47802988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47803416
Earlier quoted context omitted.
CadQuery can export STEP files, and is overall much nicer to use in my opinion.
Openscad can export to CSG, which can be imported by free cad or converted to STEP https://github.com/gega/csg2stp
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenSCAD works natively with triangle meshes. sphere() will create a spherical triangle mesh. These libraries on the other hand can natively represent a sphere for instance. This means that during CAD-ing you don't need to worry about resolution, that's a consideration for export only.
Do you mean that OpenScad performs boolean/other operations on triangle meshes, but these libraries don't until output? So they might instead use curved surfaces/edges etc as outputs for operations and only convert to triangles for output or export at the very end?
I create CAD instructional videos based on SolveSpace, and I sometimes try to get people interested in CADQuery as well, but many people interested in CAD will learn SolveSpace or another similar design program, but don't have the programming background for CADQuery. Too bad -- in many ways, for many projects, CADQuery gives better results, especially if a single design needs to be recreated in a range of sizes.
I'd be very interested if one of them compares/contrasts SolveSpace and CADQuery.