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I love how specific yet comprehensive this package is. The manual appears to be lovingly crafted and from what I can tell, well written [1]. I don't know how m

I love how specific yet comprehensive this package is. The manual appears to be lovingly crafted and from what I can tell, well written [1]. I don't know how many people are specifically looking to draw CAD diagrams of steam locomotives, but I absolutely love that this was someone's itch to scratch and they put so much time into this. [1] https://github.com/oskardolch/SteamCAD/blob/master/SteamCAD.pdf https://github.com/oskardolch/SteamCAD/blob/master/SteamCAD....

swalsh 7y ago
I had a coworker with an autistic son who would obsess over trains. He probably would love this.
- pkaye 7y ago
  It looks like a general purpose 2D CAD though. I don't see anything specific to trains. Looks Interesting nonetheless.
  - avhon1 7y ago
    In some sense, I agree with you -- there is nothing about this package that is necessarily specific to trains. However, this seems more like an art program than a CAD program. All it does is draw and manipulate straight and curved lines. It doesn't keep track of any relationships or properties of the lines, and it doesn't know anything about areas defined by the lines. SteamCAD seems like a poor program for developing and exploring designs, but a good program for presenting designs in a particular style. I found this in the manual (page 23): "SteamCAD is focused on the presentation output, not for creating an asset for manufacturing. So each SteamCAD work should be more artistic work than engineering drawing."
    - chromaton 7y ago
      > All it does is draw and manipulate straight and curved lines. It doesn't keep track of any relationships or properties of the lines, and it doesn't know anything about areas defined by the lines. All 2D CAD software worked like this for a long time. It's "Computer Aided Drafting": a computerized way to do what used to be done with pencil and paper.
- codetrotter 7y ago
  If you have the contact info of said previous coworker, I would encourage you to contact them and tell them about this software. Small things like that can mean the world to people sometimes :)
avhon1 7y ago
One related thing that struck me about SteamCAD was this passage from (the last page of) the manual: "5.1 What Next? Some people may be interested in what are the future plans with SteamCAD. The answer is there are none. SteamCAD is finished software (the only one in the whole computer world?), there are no plans to extend it. It does everything it was supposed to do, if there are bugs in the software, they are now features of the software. Well, not quite so. Of course, if the software need some adjustment in the future to work on new operating systems, it will be updated. [...] Despite what was written in the section 5.1, we have published a bunch of patches in November 2018. The patch includes several bug fixes, improved precision when snapping to objects and improved handling of paralel curve copies when the distance grows beyond the smallest curve radius." This seems like a rare example of software that is not abandoned, but is "finished", and will suffer no feature creep. It is a romantic idea, for a piece of software to be conceived for an exact purpose, be programmed until it exactly fulfills that purpose, and then just be... done, a crystal molded to its niche.
- nogabebop23 7y ago
  I love the ideal, but unfortunately this is only a characteristic of software that is not (widely) used. In a combination of the Peter Principle and the Big Bang, software will be used in an every-expanding array of uses for which it will attempt to add first-party support until it collapses under it's own mass and dies a death of ten thousand vertical slice competitors and the process repeats.
  - userbinator 7y ago
    Knuth's TeX is somewhat widely used, yet has the similar characteristic of approaching stability.
    - thaeli 7y ago
      Only because LaTeX is separate and most of the development and new features happen there.
- tobr 7y ago

swalsh 7y ago

I had a coworker with an autistic son who would obsess over trains. He probably would love this.

pkaye 7y ago
It looks like a general purpose 2D CAD though. I don't see anything specific to trains. Looks Interesting nonetheless.
- avhon1 7y ago
  In some sense, I agree with you -- there is nothing about this package that is necessarily specific to trains. However, this seems more like an art program than a CAD program. All it does is draw and manipulate straight and curved lines. It doesn't keep track of any relationships or properties of the lines, and it doesn't know anything about areas defined by the lines. SteamCAD seems like a poor program for developing and exploring designs, but a good program for presenting designs in a particular style. I found this in the manual (page 23): "SteamCAD is focused on the presentation output, not for creating an asset for manufacturing. So each SteamCAD work should be more artistic work than engineering drawing."
  - chromaton 7y ago
    > All it does is draw and manipulate straight and curved lines. It doesn't keep track of any relationships or properties of the lines, and it doesn't know anything about areas defined by the lines. All 2D CAD software worked like this for a long time. It's "Computer Aided Drafting": a computerized way to do what used to be done with pencil and paper.
codetrotter 7y ago
If you have the contact info of said previous coworker, I would encourage you to contact them and tell them about this software. Small things like that can mean the world to people sometimes :)

avhon1 7y ago

One related thing that struck me about SteamCAD was this passage from (the last page of) the manual: "5.1 What Next? Some people may be interested in what are the future plans with SteamCAD. The answer is there are none. SteamCAD is finished software (the only one in the whole computer world?), there are no plans to extend it. It does everything it was supposed to do, if there are bugs in the software, they are now features of the software. Well, not quite so. Of course, if the software need some adjustment in the future to work on new operating systems, it will be updated. [...] Despite what was written in the section 5.1, we have published a bunch of patches in November 2018. The patch includes several bug fixes, improved precision when snapping to objects and improved handling of paralel curve copies when the distance grows beyond the smallest curve radius." This seems like a rare example of software that is not abandoned, but is "finished", and will suffer no feature creep. It is a romantic idea, for a piece of software to be conceived for an exact purpose, be programmed until it exactly fulfills that purpose, and then just be... done, a crystal molded to its niche.

nogabebop23 7y ago
I love the ideal, but unfortunately this is only a characteristic of software that is not (widely) used. In a combination of the Peter Principle and the Big Bang, software will be used in an every-expanding array of uses for which it will attempt to add first-party support until it collapses under it's own mass and dies a death of ten thousand vertical slice competitors and the process repeats.
- userbinator 7y ago
  Knuth's TeX is somewhat widely used, yet has the similar characteristic of approaching stability.
  - thaeli 7y ago
    Only because LaTeX is separate and most of the development and new features happen there.
tobr 7y ago