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Comment by ageofwant | Hacker News Reader

https://www.openscad.org/ Its not SchetchUp no - but its an immensely powerful tool if you like building parameterized models. Combined with https://pypi.org/project/openpyscad/ you can program your next project in Python :-)

You write your project in you code editor of choice, auto-run on save, and set the OpenSCAD viewer to ato-load on file changes. So you have the immediate feedback of a 'visual' tool, all text driven, git managed and you are probably already familiar with most of the tools.

Yea this approach is not for everyone I'm sure.

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This is great! I've been messing around with OpenSCAD and a Clojure script that generates an ergonomic keyboard for 3D printing: https://github.com/ibnuda/dactyl-keyboard/tree/refaktor

The Clojure - OpenSCAD script is amazing but also extremely slow (and I'm no good with Clojure even after staring at it for hours).

The Python OpenSCAD link seems way faster and that suggested workflow is great!

Happy to read this. It'll save me many hours. Seeing code getting converted into 3D renderings that you can actually 3D print (or woodwork) into real life is super cool.

If you want this, just go straight to FreeCAD and invest the time to learn it. It includes an OpenSCAD module but the interactive shape editing beats OpenSCAD for nearly everything (it's faster and more interactive).

I very much doubt a GUI interface is going to be faster than a text interface, in fact it will be the opposite. And then I'm wired to this one interface and have to poke around on lines with a mouse like its 1992. No thanks.

Also I can't easily compose or build composite objects, where is a one-line loop in Python. And how do I deal with libraries of components ? Dunno, seems like a step back to me.

Have not tried it though - perhaps you are right.

I think you should do a little more reading, first. In particular, GUI design of 3D structures is almost always "Faster" than text-based, for multiple reasons. What I meant was that FreeCAD renders the reuslts of complex operations faster (for exmaple I often have to wait many minutes just to render a basic CSG tree in OpenSCAD). More importantly, FreeCAD is just a GUI for a Python object model that permits simple construction of complex objects (probably not a single line). See https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Manual:A_gentle_introduction#Man... for more about the Python API.

What's nice is that since it's a true Python API, you have total control over everything, including iterating over named edges of the object, which openscad can't do at all.

I spend many hours a day poking at lines with a mouse, and it's really more productive than typing a few things, rendering to make sure the result is what you want, etc etc.

Oh yes. I think a sw dev looking at CAD will really like OpenSCAD. Atleast I did. The only things I found lacking was a measure tool and a cutlist generator. Sure, you can write the code with OpenSCAD to echo dimensions but having a measure tool can be really useful. No need to elaborate on cutlist.

And I put my plans in git too!

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