I’m gonna need help, y’all. I’m a single-part amateur hack with a penchant for anything cheap. I don’t know enough to make it what you’ll want it to be, but I am very interested in the broader industry and also its impact on maker hobbies. You want Solidworks advice? To gripe simultaneously about enshittification and the limitations of free tools? Need to dive into Lasering or Machining or CNC’ing stuff and don’t feel like the 3D printing community is quite the right place? Come on over.
I will keep posting stuff that I find interesting, and I will mod as long as doing so doesn’t make me hate life, but if nothing else the name is now parked with an active user.
I got so fed up with the free CAD tools that I started making my own. I’m a few months in and while it’s still extremely experimental, It’s almost useful.
Would it be cool if I posted about it there from time to time to try and get opinions on its interface and workflow? I’m of the opinion that it’s still too young to advertise as a usable tool.
What sort of CAD tools are you making and how do they work?
It’s a script driven CAD program, inspired by OpenSCAD and CAD Query. It’s most noteworthy features are dimensional type safety and automatic unit conversion.
You can see some samples in the readme: https://github.com/IamTheCarl/CommandCAD
Currently you can make STL files to feed your slicer (and two other formats)
My more near term goals are to export svgs of sketches and produce gcode suitable for laser cutters. My more long term goals are to produce gcode for a variety of machines, add a package manager (for importing libraries and other models), and an interactive editor.
Absolutely! It sounds really interesting, and even if I don’t use OpenSCAD type stuff myself, many do and it would be super cool to see how the development progresses.