to be a bit tautological, openscad is nice but only for the things openscad is nice for. I prefer freecad for almost everything except highly parametric shapes. Plus you can do openscad inside of freecad.
The awful thing about OpenSCAD is that one's capabilities in it are bounded by one's fluency in using math to place or stretch cubes, spheres, and cylinders.
- Geometry: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58059196-make
- Trigonometry: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123127774-make
- Calculus: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61739368-make
https://www.makershed.com/products/make-physics?variant=5041...
I went ahead and placed an order.
Hopefully it will arrive in a reasonable timeframe.
If you want to make a complex gear that has to mate with another gear you can do this in two ways: you can start with two discs intersecting at the right angle and then to chop out the teeth so the resulting object will be a gear and then you could subtract via a similar operation from the other disc to end up with two mating gears.
The - in my view much more effecient - alternative is to start off with just the supports as the discs and then to parametrically add the gear teeth onto the supports taking into account all of the clearances and the contact faces. This will get you much better gears because you are parametrically describing the surfaces that really matter and it will allow you to do nice things such as small fillets on everything to make the object far closer to what eventually will roll out of your manufacturing process (machining, 3D printing). It is a bit more work to define all of the parameters but the end result is much better and far less likely to have imperfections because you are generating what you want, not removing what you don't want. OpenSCAD can be used for sculpting, but that's not the best way of using it.
And then the worse is better trap gets them and they don't even bother looking for true programmatic CAD like build123d.
I think that's an unfair assessment. It has rough spots (as I'm sure all CAD software does) but it's functional and UX is improving rapidly with every release. It feels like it's built up a lot of momentum since I picked it up a few years ago.
It can do everything I need it to do. I mostly use the Part Design workbench, Part, Sketcher, Assembly, Lattice2, Fasteners, Spreadsheet; occasionally Curves and Curved Shapes workbenches. If I run into an issue the solution is almost always easy to find on their wiki, on Youtube, or by asking in their Discord server - the community is friendly and helpful in my experience.
but what made me use scad was reliability. i knew the time i put writting in vim would translate (heh) into a viable stl file i could send to manufacturing. while with both other options half the time was dealing with bugs and crashes and bad exports.
but how did i miss some convenience tools indeed. most could be solved with opensource methods (e.g. bevel, joiners with easing, threads)
to be honest, my anger was much heavier on solidworks for being so expensive (i had a student licensw tho) and buggy.