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Organizing your OpenSCAD code: Part I
- Buttons840 13y agoI saw OpenSCAD mentioned in another HN comment, and thought it looked interesting. I was wondering though: How does OpenSCAD compare to other free CAD programs like FreeCAD? Is it just that it's more focused on programming?
- dlau1 13y agoAlso interested in this as someone who is looking to make some 3d printed prototypes just as a hobbyist (i.e. I have an idea and a drawing on paper and I just want to draw it up in a CAD program)
- Jtsummers 13y agoThe primary difference: You don't drag stuff around to create your models. You write code for it. Now, you can import existing models for a variety of formats, then move them around (with transforms, still in code). It's more like POV-Ray, for instance, than Blender.
- dgrnbrg 13y agoIf OpenSCAD isn't powerful enough for you, there's a Clojure wrapper that lets you leverage Clojure to generate SCAD code: https://github.com/farrellm/scad-clj https://github.com/farrellm/scad-clj. OpenSCAD automatically re-renders the model when the file changes on disk, so you can essentially have a 3D modeling REPL with this setup.
- Jtsummers 13y ago> OpenSCAD automatically re-renders the model when the file changes on disk, so you can essentially have a 3D modeling REPL with this setup. I love this feature of OpenSCAD. I've tried 3d modeling tools in the past, they just don't work for me. But code, I can do that. With a Mac Mini hooked up to my TV (primarily for watching videos, listening to music) I ssh into it and edit the files with emacs, and every save I get an updated view. I need to take a look at this clojure wrapper, however. I'm not hugely familiar with clojure, but CL and scheme I've got so it shouldn't take me long.
- jglauche 13y agoI made a framework to write OpenSCAD code in Ruby. Helps a lot to keep yourself sane on big projects: https://github.com/Joaz/CrystalScad https://github.com/Joaz/CrystalScad
- krasin 13y agoThere's also a similar project for Python [1]. That said, do I understand correctly that the way you assume the users will share their OpenSCAD models is to share the generated OpenSCAD scripts? [1] https://github.com/SolidCode/SolidPython https://github.com/SolidCode/SolidPython
- jglauche 13y agoMy work is heavily inspired by SolidPython. SolidPython, unfortunately has some shortcomings at the syntax (resulting in too many braces to read properly). I do hope that the people will share the ruby code and not the generated openscad code, as that would be hardly readable.
- bmslieght 13y agoI not (yet) got ruby installed. Have you an example how https://github.com/Joaz/bulldozer/tree/master https://github.com/Joaz/bulldozer/tree/master Builds in openSCAD format or .stl or even a jpg ? Thanks, Brendan
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- iamwil 13y agoOP here. Lemme know if there's other topics on OpenSCAD that you'd like to see and read about.