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Comment by WillAdams | Hacker News Reader

As a person who has crashed and burned with every. single. traditional 3D CAD tool (the only things I've been successful w/ are programmatic, so OpenSCAD and its ilk), this is _very_ interesting to me.

I am esp. grateful for:

https://github.com/AdaShape/adashape-open-testing/releases/d...

(given that I shelled out for the _FreeCAD Beginner's Handbook_ 'cause it had Version 1.1 prominently on the cover but the instructions have one download "v1.0 or later" and all the screen grabs are for 1.0 and the wiki is replete with pages tagged "This page needs to be updated for 1.1" or words to that effect).

I've been working on documenting a 2D program (for my employer and as part of a side project): https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing and if this is a good fit, will gladly pitch in using this for 3D.

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Much appreciate the feedback!

> As a person who has crashed and burned with every. single. traditional 3D CAD tool

I hear you, there are reasons for depth and complexity but not every program needs to be like that.

>if this is a good fit, will gladly pitch in using this for 3D.

I notice you are discussing specifically CAD/CAM for CNC routers. I don't know if this is applicable for your use case or not. Would be very interested to hear your opinion!

The output is a tessellated 3MF mesh. The tessellation accuracy can be tweaked to be as precise as needed, so if that's the only constraint this may be applicable.

Thank's for raising the manual! I'll have to invest more time into it :)

The commercial program MeshCAM has long been the poster child for using an STL for 3D CAM, and it can work well, though is vulnerable to faceting as discussed at:

https://www.cnczone.com/forums/benchtop-machines/132144-face...

see the image at:

https://www.cnccookbook.com/cnc-software/

https://www.cnccookbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/facet...

See my response elsethread for what I am hopeful of --- if it's a good fit, maybe I can take the manual off your hands?

Nice references!

The output resolution as such can be made "arbitrarily" precise if the model geometry is authored within AdaShape. So the facets in your image would not result from the limitation of the generated mesh (https://www.cnccookbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/facet...).

There resolution is currently fixed to presets for usability (see p. 28 of the changelog for the tolerance values - https://github.com/AdaShape/adashape-open-testing/releases/d...). I did not have CAM/CNC expert to consult on the details so those may be out of whack (but I'm happy to adjust them or add a user configuration).

"if it's a good fit, maybe I can take the manual off your hands?"

Would redistribution under CC BY 4.0 suit you?

Thanks!

Yes, being able to configure the STL output to match the desired usage is perfectly appropriate (and how many tools handle that)

Yes, that license would be fine for my working on the manual.

Got it launched, and it seems a bit sluggish on my i7 w/ integrated graphics (Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360) --- what are you using to run it?

I've been using as low end testing machine my Thinkpad T14 Gen2 i5. I think you have the same iGPU (Iris XE) but the resolution in the Thinkpad is 1920x1080 while I think you have 2880 x 1800 screen (guessing, please verify :) ) .

If you are inclined to continue testing dropping the resolution or making the window smaller _might_ help. Also it's expected the user has a SSD.

My other testing platforms are a desktop rig with 4k screen/ 3080 GPU and Windows Sandbox (the latter being super sluggish). I've not tested on igpu with WQHD+ resolution - will definetly add this to my test matrix in the future. But don't know if I can help you right now.

This is great feedback btw. for alpha version regardless to whatever conclusions you come on the applicability.

Correct, 2880 x 1800 (it's _awesome_!).

I'll try the smaller window at lunch.

The smaller window is much more performant, so it would seem to be the pixel allocation which causes this --- except, I'm getting a delay when dragging to rotate w/ a stylus which I don't see when using a trackpad.

Arguably, Moment of Inspiration 3D and Shapr3D have fully eaten up the "3D modeling program designed for use w/ a stylus (or Apple Pencil)" market, but there are _dozens_ of us! If possible, please test w/ a stylus and keep that usage in mind --- it's a good fit for the creative sorts who would use it.

If you want some "Blue Water Sailing", it might be that doing a version for Android would offer a market free of competition, and there are innovative devices there such as the Wacom Movink Pad 14 (which can also be used as a display tablet on Windows/Mac devices I believe).

Thanks for the input testing!

I agree supporting ”pointy” input modalities - pens and touchscreens is valuable.

I don’t think there will an android port in the near future but appreciate the sentiment.

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