4 ms·
I spent quite some time in FreeCAD, then switched to makerjs. For the last two covid years "code cad" designs for laser cutter have consumed most of my free tim
by paulftw 4y ago
I spent quite some time in FreeCAD, then switched to makerjs. For the last two covid years "code cad" designs for laser cutter have consumed most of my free time.
I am also building my own online editor with focus on UX and live reloading [1].
Few key learnings I had about code vs visual (tldr it's complicated):
- It works great for flat laser cut assemblies, but once you start doing t-nut and finger joints you really need to see your pieces rotated and aligned in 3D. and that's a lot of extra code
- Writing a geometry library from scratch is really hard. I tried multiple newer JS libraries (that aren't ports of OpenCASCADE / CGAL) and all of them had numerous bugs in boolean operations, offsets, etc. There's just too many corner cases, compounding errors, APIs that haven't been thought thru and became a tech debt, etc.
- Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places or building a wrong thing, but there aren't that many users interested in "writing code for a 3d printer". Very few people dropping complex code cad projects on github. It feels like everyone who does is also building their own CAD platform ;)
[1] https://scriptcad.com https://scriptcad.com , https://scriptcad.com/paulftw/OpenSCAD.Tutorial https://scriptcad.com/paulftw/OpenSCAD.Tutorial