You're correct, I'm completely uneducated! Pull requests welcome :)
But don't actually delete it. It looks like a nice alternative to OpenSCAD. But like OpenSCAD it's really a niche thing for designs that are highly parametric like fasteners, gears, 3D printed boxes, etc.
Like OpenSCAD using it for normal "irregular" CAD is going to be extremely frustrating. Like editing an SVG in notepad instead of Inkscape.
I still feel like there's a unexplored space where you combine the benefits of both somehow though. Like a code-based CAD but it also has a GUI editor that stays in sync and avoids the need to type in coordinates by hand. That would be extremely difficult though.
I think you can do this if the data representation of operations and values is human readable. The simplest implementation would restrict the language/data format to operations representable in the gui.
Unlike trying to solve the "visual programming" problems, we don't need or desire Turing completeness.
Very interesting indeed!
https://moi3d.com/forum/messages.php?webtag=MOI&msg=11614.11...
Speaking of which, I would love to have parametric capabilities in Inkscape.
The GUI is really just using their scripting primitives, etc. You can access it the same as they can, actually.
Parasolid was v1 and old school C, then they got the C++ bug like many of us at the time and did ACIS as v2.
So I'm kinda not sure what you are going for here. The fact that they are all the same kernels under the cover is sort of irrelevant. It's not that thin a layer and the layer matters a lot since it is what you get to use. It's like saying all of userspace is just syscalls. That's not what users see or interact with, the layer they interact with matters a lot to them.
https://cad.onshape.com/FsDoc/
My surmise is that this is tightly coupled with Parasolid, so it wouldn't be feasible to create an implementation of this language using some other CAD kernel?
The code for the standard library is here: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/12312312345abcabcabcdeff/w...
(Click tab manager in the bottom left and you'll get a nicer list of the files involved)
The actual representation is essentially dictionaries. IE transform is a functon that looks like this:
/**
* Construct a [Transform] using the matrix argument for rotation
* and scaling and the vector argument for translation.
*/
export function transform(linear is Matrix, translation is Vector) returns Transform
precondition
{
matrixSize(linear) == [3, 3];
is3dLengthVector(translation);
}
{
return { "linear" : linear, "translation" : translation } as Transform;
}
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/12312312345abcabcabcdeff/w...
(The underlying fillet ops are opFullRoundFillet, etc. All of this is UI to generate the parameters and highlight the results and such)
The actual geometry ops are in geomOperations. Those are the geometry primitives you'd have to duplicate, and they are fairly standard. Fillets, holes, CSG, etc.
It would not be a ton of work (IMHO) to have a geometry kernel that supports what they support.
The UI related primitives, the query engine, etc, those are i think where you'd have real work to do.
1. These parts should probably be on McMaster. If you are not using them straight from there, you better have a _great_ reason as to why not when it comes up in the design review.
2. Solidworks has Smart Fasteners, Inventor has Spur Gear Component Generator, Sketch->Extrude->Shell takes 30 seconds, so not sure why 3D printed boxes would be faster or better with this for most stuff. Also, this stuff is easily solved by things like the component library and configurations.
Because I don't live in America?
There is also the possibility you think because McMaster is in the US they don't have metric parts. This is wrong, a lot of engineering in the US is done in metric - nearly all big manufacturing companies went metric 40 years ago, so they have plenty of metric parts that you should work with. Of course most manufacturing is small companies that still haven't gone metric, but they also deal with metric once in a while, and in any case you wouldn't be ordering from them anyway.
Draw your free-hand shape in Inkscape, export to SVG, import it in FreeCAD and go from there.
I used that trick to trace a part from an image and it worked surprisingly well. Not very efficient compared to commercial tooling, but despite the clumsiness its fairly intuitive and free.
Ouch. Please don't attack someone's work this way. It's too aggressive and against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I'm sure you didn't intend it as an attack, but it's easy to cross into poisoning the community without meaning to. Many people have been hounded into abandoning HN because of this type of swipe, or at least into never sharing their work here. We all lose when that happens.
It's a pity, because what you wrote was otherwise a fine contribution. if you had begun your comment at the good part ("It looks like a nice alternative [etc.]") it would have been great.