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Comment by zargon | Hacker News Reader

> Every time I've used as a CAD GUI program I would get to this point where I would need to alter a single dimension by 0.25mm and realize that _all_ of my fastener holes, cutouts, etc have to be nudged with the keyboard or mouse to accommodate it.

There seems to be some fundamental misunderstanding of CAD here. I can't imagine how you could even design something in CAD in a way that you would end up in this situation.

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I wonder if he's using TinkerCAD or something similar? I often use that, 'cos it's quick for simple things that are one-offs, but it has exactly this issue as it's not at all parametric, just primitives and booleans (though it does have some basic sketch capabilities now)

When I'm doing something more sophisticated I use SolveSpace, but I'm a lot slower with that.

yeah, op here: it's exactly that. I've used most of the free or open source software options and it seemed like none of them are parametric. I know I could buy fusion or something like that, but I found OpenSCAD before I got to that point and feel like it fits the bill for me.

Fusion is free for personal use and in my experience at least was much faster experience than OpenSCAD.

I like Onshape. It’s free to use provided that you’re okay with your design being public.

You don't necessarily need to buy Fusion, it has a well hidden free tier for personal use, just gotta dig on the site a bit.

Sure, until the next time Autodesk decides to take a feature which you rely on out of the "free" tier.

Solvespace and Onshape are free and parametric.

Freecad is fully parametric, set constraints so it’s 0 degrees of freedom and you shouldn’t have that problem.

FreeCAD is open source and has parametric capabilities. Personally I find it unusably buggy, but apparently there are lots who don't - ymmv.

SolveSpace is open source and has parametric capabilities. It's much more limited in scope (e.g. you can't do filets) but good enough for my purposes.

I've not explored the commercial options beyond TinkerCAD, and that's not parametric. Super easy to bodge something together though :)

>I can't imagine how you could even design something in CAD in a way that you would end up in this situation.

Are all CAD programs parametric or make their parametric functionality obvious? If not, that's how you end up in this situation.

It's not about parametric functionality being obvious, it's that you can't draw something that isn't parametric in the sense described. At least I don't think I would be able to if I tried.

It's pretty trivial

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