[Cad] Which CAD Kernel Should the FOSS and OSHW Communities Focus On?

[Matt Carney]

Bryan, those are all great examples! Though I still don't see anything of
sufficient detail or complexity (this conversation is probably best forked
as a discussion of feature usages):

robotic arm:
> http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:65081
>
> https://thingiverse-production-new.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/32/38/e4/5a/93/RoboArm.scad
>
> Still all static parts just attached to servos. What I'd like to see is
the servo itself designed in openscad.


> automatic transmission:
> http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:34778
> http://www.thingiverse.com/download:100324
>
> Planar parts, and no bearings.


> 5-cylinder radial engine (single part?)
> http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:54404/#files
>
> That's sweet! But, no demonstration of moving parts, clearances, etc. Very
impressive though.


> rover (although this looks mostly 3d printed?):
> http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:10057/#files
>
> Cute, but not really anything happening there.


I think that AutoCAD's autolisp used to be popular back in the day. It was
my understanding that many complex machines were specified with piles of
lisp scripts? These days I would expect the equivalent to be VBA I guess,
since nobody knows lisp in the modern office.


I imagine folks used autolisp as they do VBA. For architectural things I
think there is a lot of repetition that leverages scripting well. SW does
have support for VBA, that's how all models you download from McMaster and
SDP/SI are sized and generated. I've poked around at it but gotten
frustrated at dealing with VBA. Again, it's useful if you're designing the
same thing repetitiously.

It's the mechanical design stuff where there're many unique cases where it
gets tricky to take advantage.  Yet there are applications where the two of
them would be great.  For instance, tabbing or tongue-groove interfaces are
a drag to design in SW. It'd be great to have a little script that evenly
spaces tabs between two lines and to use it all you have to do is click on
the two vertex constraints and the face you want to apply it towards. In
code you adjust the parameters, but you don't have to search through your
lines of code to find where you had defined those interfaces, you can just
see them on the screen and click on them to use them. Rhino + grasshopper
does provide nice tools for this kind of scripting.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/cad-rg/attachments/20151112/ceb8874e/attachment.html