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Comment by calvinmorrison | Hacker News Reader

look at OpenSCAD, it's a scripting language to generate models. I used this a lot to generate subpieces and build off of that. easy as saying Bolt("M5", 1.5) or something

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As a regular OpenSCAD user, I wouldn't bring it up as a good solution for anything. It exists, you can solve problems with it, but it isn't a good design. It should just be a library in a real language.

> It should just be a library in a real language

The last thing I want to worry about is having malware in an M5 bolt.

From a security perspective, it does help that ato is not executable!

I've found CadQuery to be a pretty good replacement for my purposes, but I haven't done anything complicated with it yet, just designing 3D printed/laser cut electronics enclosures.

Ya OpenSCAD is great for in/cross project re-usable components.

The only issues I've had is how it outputs circular things for cutting - it does a series of polygons (configurable number), rather than an arc/circular - places like send-cut-send won't accept it, claiming it causes issues with their machines.

Old issue, but annoying nonetheless. Less of a problem when outputting STL files (for printing) which only support polylines and not arcs/circles. Funnily enough, 3D printers nowadays support arcs natively in G-code, so some slicers support detecting rounded polylines and converting them back into circles or arcs.

Found a script[0] that does this for DXFs in a github issue[1].

[0]: https://github.com/nophead/Mendel90/blob/master/dxf.py [1]: https://github.com/openscad/openscad/issues/4605

I actually opened that issue - I'm ukd1 on github too. I looked at fixing it at some point, but it tbh didn't seem that easy or like they had time to help, I should probably revisit. The script I couldn't get working right last time I tried, but I should give it a re-look!

I have used it, I think its great. I am excited to see whole products defined in code.

I found OpenSCAD's 3d model representation to be very challenging for anything complicated. I used FreeCAD, which is scriptable, but also uses a brep representation instead of CSG, which IME works a jillion times better.

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