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Comment by Lerc | Hacker News Reader

I am a strong proponent of visualisations. I also have a tendency to write things in JavaScript that others might choose a different language. I'm now wondering if those things are related. Having the browser to provide an interface can make that a lot easier. Recently I have been doing a fair bit of transformer and NNet stuff so consequently Python. I have found it a bit of a step back when it comes to visualisations. It's easy to used canned techniques to plot data, but not as easy to knock up a custom interactive visualisation.

Hmm, I wonder what python raylib is like, that might be the ticket.

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Visualization is actually one of the reasons I've been successful with my current project (creating a 3D modeling library which uses 3D tool representations and movement as afforded by G-code to write out G-code or DXFs) --- the tool which makes it possible is:

https://pythonscad.org/

Being able to just plot something and see the algorithm on-screen has been an incredible benison.

I'm hopeful OpenPythonSCAD will be merged into OpenSCAD presently.

So you are working on a way to generate toolpath gcode from python? I need that.

I have a python workflow for my laser cutter, I can make a drawing with drawsvg and then cut it with lightburn.

I have used build123d to make 3d models in python but not yet found a way to generate toolpaths for my milling machine.

Yes.

Give the code a try!

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

If you can describe a simple part I can work it up for you and add it to the examples.

EDIT: Alternately, try pyCAM, or Kiri:Moto w/ an STL?

I'd love to see what is the easiest way, for a hardcore backend guy with completely dumb part of brain responsible for visuals, to quickly visualize things in JS. I would pay for a "d3/p5 tutorial".

Author here. I would recommend booting up React Cosmos[1] and prompting Claude to "generate a react app that...". You can visualize inside of Claude then when you're finished, drop the output of Claude into React Cosmos as a file. This is great for prototyping algorithms and recording the progression.

For example you might say "generate an interactive react app that implements a simple pathfinder that uses A* with a penalty for going near edges". You can also just drop in a paper or pseudo code of an algorithm you're ideating on.

Here's an example how we use react cosmos for our autorouter[2]

[1] https://reactcosmos.org/docs [2] https://unraveller.vercel.app/?fixtureId=%7B%22path%22%3A%22...

This is why I use python with Jupyter notebooks.

Though admittedly animations are quite arduous.

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