Awesome tool! I gave it a spin last night and it worked surprisingly well.
But apparently the AI had a different rotation view on the item as the stl browser preview?
i tried to make a bottle-holder with the opening on top (which makes sense) and the whole element was rotated 90° to the side. i tried verifying with the AI and it said the opening was on top in their view when crosschecking against my screenshots.
was this a error on my side or did other have that too?
Text-to-CAD
31–40 of 50 posts
Re: Text-to-CAD
#32In the benchmarks, there is a strange lack of measurements that I'd expect in a CAD process (EG in benchmark 1, the positions of the 4 holes are not specified at all). I'm assuming that's why the gussets in benchmark 3 overlap the holes and make a part that cannot be used. Does it actually handle positions correctly? Also the through-hole in benchmark 7 doesn't actually go through by the looks of the gif
Re: Text-to-CAD
#33Not sure I understand ... no mention of an actual CAD engine backend ... did I miss it? Or is this capable of generating STEP files directly from an LLM (which I doubt)? [EDIT]: haha. the answer is hidden in: .agents/skills/cad/requirements.txt TL;DR: build123d ezdxf numpy trimesh vtk and the engine is build123d, which, from its home page: Build123d is a Python-based, parametric (BREP) modeling framework for 2D and 3…
I don’t think its time has come. I think there are a lot of software folks that don’t understand what the actual pain points of professional engineers and CAD technicians are. I think there is a niche where text-to-CAD is good: hobby users who don’t want invest in learning a CAD software UI. For professionals, where results have dollar values, there needs to be a much deeper understanding of the problem domain to und…
I think the primary strengths of a text based format would be in defining the assembly of parts and parameterizing them.
E.g. you want to build a gear box so you draw a sketch in the GUI with the positions of all the gears and name each axle where a gear would be attached, then you open a text editor where you specify all the gear parameters and to which axle they should be attached to. You then go back to the GUI to move the axles around. After assembly, you can start designing a housing for the gearbox.
The assembly could then be loaded directly into any simulation environment of your choice.
Re: Text-to-CAD
#34In the benchmarks, there is a strange lack of measurements that I'd expect in a CAD process (EG in benchmark 1, the positions of the 4 holes are not specified at all). I'm assuming that's why the gussets in benchmark 3 overlap the holes and make a part that cannot be used. Does it actually handle positions correctly? Also the through-hole in benchmark 7 doesn't actually go through by the looks of the gif
The actual prompts are more detailed than what's in the table on the main page:
https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/earthtojake/text-t...
I'm just wondering why anyone would bother describing CAD models in text. Language is imprecise and ambiguous. If you want to create a full part definition, you need to be extremely thorough with your description. At that point it's just easier (less mental load) and faster to construct the thing yourself. Not to mention, the model might still ignore your perfectly good prompt.
Re: Text-to-CAD
#35In the benchmarks, there is a strange lack of measurements that I'd expect in a CAD process (EG in benchmark 1, the positions of the 4 holes are not specified at all). I'm assuming that's why the gussets in benchmark 3 overlap the holes and make a part that cannot be used. Does it actually handle positions correctly? Also the through-hole in benchmark 7 doesn't actually go through by the looks of the gif
The actual prompts are more detailed than what's in the table on the main page: https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/earthtojake/text-t... I'm just wondering why anyone would bother describing CAD models in text. Language is imprecise and ambiguous. If you want to create a full part definition, you need to be extremely thorough with your description. At that point it's just easier (less mental load) and faster t…
Oh, that's a bit misleading then when the prompt on the main page is "Create a centered 100 x 60 x 20 mm block with four 8 mm vertical through-holes. Add only a 2 mm chamfer on the top outer perimeter"
Looking at the L-bracket one, the specification is actually instructing the gussets to overlap the holes, so it actually performed both better and worse than I expected
And yes, as someone who CADs mechanical parts a reasonable amount, you have to be very precise, hence me wondering how the given prompt could be useful
Re: Text-to-CAD
#36In the benchmarks, there is a strange lack of measurements that I'd expect in a CAD process (EG in benchmark 1, the positions of the 4 holes are not specified at all). I'm assuming that's why the gussets in benchmark 3 overlap the holes and make a part that cannot be used. Does it actually handle positions correctly? Also the through-hole in benchmark 7 doesn't actually go through by the looks of the gif
The actual prompts are more detailed than what's in the table on the main page: https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/earthtojake/text-t... I'm just wondering why anyone would bother describing CAD models in text. Language is imprecise and ambiguous. If you want to create a full part definition, you need to be extremely thorough with your description. At that point it's just easier (less mental load) and faster t…
I think it could potentially be useful. Sometimes I need "simple" shapes that still are somewhat annoying to create. And I think you don't need to one-shot these, the process is permitted to be iterative! The skills can be improved by time by revising AGENTS.md, e.g. "when I say L-bracket, I probably mean..".
I think going from a picture to an initial starting point with well-"thought"-out structure for CAD purposes could potentially be very useful. Optimally you could just enter the measurements and be done.
Re: Text-to-CAD
#37anyone here know about any simple CFD simulation software , I tried the popular ones but none of them are easy to use
Re: Text-to-CAD
#38Hi all, repo author here, appreciate the kind words and feedback! I'm brushing up on robotics after spending the last 10 years working in software land. After being humbled by modern CAD tools like Onshape, I built this harness / skill to help me generate some basic CAD models for a 7dof robot arm I'm designing. It ended up working much better than I expected, particularly on the latest GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7 models. I…
Proud of you
Re: Text-to-CAD
#39This is dope! I made https://github.com/zacharyfmarion/openscad-studio to do a similar thing. Using AI for CAD has so much potential but sometimes the model failing to understand spatial concepts is really tilting
Re: Text-to-CAD
#40> Create a vertical engine-cylinder form with a central barrel, 12 cooling fins, a base flange, and a top cap. Add a 35 degree angled spark-plug boss with a coaxial through-hole.
I don't feel like text-to-CAD is a viable workflow for me because of the "language barrier". I would need, like, a visual dictionary of terms.
I'd almost be more excited to see the opposite, a benchmark/dataset of ME-blessed CAD-to-text descriptions so that I can build up vocabulary.
Absent that, what's the best I can do, find a machine design book secondhand with a glossary?