Show HN: Design/build of some parametric speaker cabinets with OpenSCAD

Showing OpenSCAD without showing any code, or even really talking about the code is a real shame - there are some cool ideas in here, but none are shown (e.g. "I even made an algorithm to calculate the screw positions evenly").

Fyi the latest builds of OpenSCAD have a new fast-csg library.

My compiling never takes more then a minute, usually it's less than a second.

Waiting over an hour to compile a CAD drawing seems untenable to me.

https://ochafik.com/jekyll/update/2022/02/09/openscad-fast-c...

Standard comment in these threads that, while OpenSCAD is a ton of fun and absolutely a breath of fresh air for code geeks wanting to apply their skills to the 3D world without having to hand-draft an object in scary GUI software...

It's actually really limited, based on a needlessly simplified data model and using a kludged up DSL syntax instead of a proper software development environment.

Look at CadQuery and build123d, both of which are python packages build on top of OpenCASCADE[1]. They have wildly different syntax[2], but very similar capabilities. You can do the same CSG work in them that you do in OpenSCAD with similar complexity, but have access to a far more expressive underlying toolkit and a real programming language with which to manage your own parametrization needs.

[1] A CAD-focused boundary representation toolkit, which you can actually use directly if you want but which is aimed more at "build a CAD tool" use cases than "design a speaker cabinet".

[2] Truthfully I don't love either, but CadQuery is at least explicit in most cases about what is happening where build123d relies on some dynamic scoping tricks that irk me. Seems like most of the community disagrees with me though.

> As the design was fully parametric, I could change a single variable to move to a floorstanding design.

How far are we in 2025 from defining a Differentiable design, setting a target (e.g. maximally flat frequency response for a certain speaker placement in a certain room) and solving this automatically?

Since then there's manifold. It's even faster.

To be clear, it was an hour years ago, now it's 1m40s. This includes all post processing and PNG rendering too.