This is a neat idea and I quite like some of the syntax, but what is this for? I have a hard time seeing this gaining traction over traditional sketch-based CAD for a number of reasons, so is it just meant to be a toy?
I would personally prefer to work with a language-based CAD than a strictly graphical one. Especially for parametric kinds of objects. Now that 3D printing is going mainstream, I am certain that new and interesting things are still to come in CAD.
Curious. How much experience do you have with any form of CAD? Is the preference based on that you tried graphical CAD software and you found them lacking, or is it based on imagining how they might work?
Last week at the hackspace someone asked me to quickly design a manifold which holds together a scuba mouth piece, a 48mm diameter valve and a nato 40mm screw fitting. They wanted to minimise the internal tidal volume of the manifold, while keeping enough clearance for the tubes connected to it. We ended up connecting the 3 fittings in a Y-shape and lofted the pipes together. Without seeing the resulting shape I can’t even start to guess how many edges it would have. And I have no idea how I would refer to which edges i want filleted. How would you approach something like that with your prefered method?
I have a lot of experience with openscad. I design a lot of small, simple-to-moderate parts. I want to use something like fusion instead, but the GUI learning curve is a huge blocker for me.
I'm not a CAD professional, I can't seem to find the time to watch hours of video to get the basics down. With code based CAD, the way to start is usually obvious. When I run into a blocker, I search online, find examples, and try them out. Then, crucially, I copy and paste code snippets into my design, and modify them, to solve my problem.
In a GUI cad tool, I find that I spend most of my time hunting for buttons in the UI, often finding UI layout discrepancies between my version and whatever video I found.
In code, I do have to repeatedly solve little trig or geometry problems, and I'm always aware that a constraint based GUI tool would eliminate that completely. But I always know that I can just spend five minutes with pencil and paper and get it done, whereas switching to fusion means adding an hour or more of work to multiple designs.
I really want to design more effectively, with better fillet flexibility. But for my simple tasks, the barrier to becoming productive in a GUI is just too high.
I believe the "command palette" in e.g. VS code solves this well, perhaps a GUI cad with that would be workable for me.
Maybe what would really help me, is a larger more complex project which I can develop over a longer time in fusion while I learn to use it. Too bad I don't have anything that naturally fits that bill.
To me it sounds like it would be worth it for you to learn the basics of Fusion or FreeCAD. You would probably quickly recover the hours spent on learning with increased productivity.
I recommend going through some basic tutorial (written or in video form) to build a simple part. The tutorial should teach view navigation, drawing and constraining a sketch, extruding or rotating it to create a 3D body, modifiying that with chamfers / fillets, creating sketches on top of that to add or cut away parts, add holes, create patterns from features. I don't think you need to learn surface modeling at this point. After that you should be good to go on your own projects. You will still need to look up how to do something (as you do now), but that will improve quickly.
I'm hitting the same problem, getting stuck on simple things in FreeCAD mostly because I'm a novice and don't have hours and hours to watch videos and learn.
I'm generally very much for open-source software, but after my brief experience with FreeCAD and Fusion, I think if I'm going to sink 10+ hours into learning one of them, it will be Fusion. I bookmarked this recently and plan to try it out but have not yet started: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=desktop&list=PLrZ2zKOtC...
I adopted bosl2 recently, it's wonderful! Anchoring is a huge improvement, which does eliminate a lot of that work. But it's a very large library and I am slowly expanding my knowledge of it.
I've also been asking myself what people do with programmatic CAD. I've used OpenSCAD once to create a simple, cylindrical object, but about 80% of the things I create (using conventional CAD, like Fusion 360) would be way too complex for that. And even the simplest shapes are just much faster to create and modify in Fusion.
Maybe this is the "everything looks like a nail" problem for programmers who have never tried CAD?
I recently used this https://makerworld.com/de/models/1765102-10-inch-mini-rack-g... to generate various mounts for my home lab mini rack. The idea is that everything needs to fit into the same width of rack, but every device is slightly different so custom creating these becomes annoying quickly. This generator was a godsend
So the appeal for you, as the "user", is that you can easily customize the parameters which are made customizable by the designer and get a suitable model without requiring proprietary software (or any software at all). I can see the appeal of that.
But I assume the designer spent quite a lot of time, creating this in OpenSCAD and make it customizable. He was also restricted to making shapes which are easily described in OpenSCAD, where he might have gone for a more elaborate design if it was easy to do.
For me, I've never done well w/ traditional 3D CAD (need to find time to try Moment of Inspiration 3D), and I've been working on wood joinery where a test joint which was 1" x 2" x 1" took some 20 minutes to do CAM, and created a ~120MB file --- programming the tool movement directly seems a better approach, so I've been working on:
Agree with this. I've tried the various programmatic CAD options before, and creating initial shapes is relatively easy, but figuring out how to refer to parts of those subsequent shapes - to e.g. modify further, or build from, or connect to other shapes, is really complex and clunky.
Neither is 3D printing going mainstream nor do I see any reason why it would push people away from industry standard CAD software.
CAD is already complex. Why would giving those people an extremely underpowered programming language, which makes creating even the simplest 3D models a chore, cause change in the CAD world.
The hard part with 3d part creation isn’t the graphical interface or language, it’s actually describing and translating part requirements to a manufacturable design, weighing material, weight, fit, geometric, and cost tradeoffs. Openscad, opencascade, etc have been around for a long time and have specs for describing features in a way that llm should be able to handle, but if all the part constraints were available it’s far faster to make accurately in Solidworks.
This is my experience too. I took a course a long time ago in design for manufacturing, and it became abundantly clear that just because you can conceive of an idea doesn't mean that you can build it. That requires a lot more work and technical know-how that isn't always put into books or other "training data".
Just yesterday I had an LLM write an openscad module for generating a 2d rounded rectangle. It worked great! I then tried to get it to write a module to extrude a 2d shape into a 3d shape and it failed spectacularly several times before I gave up.
Interesting. I’m building a SaaS around this idea. And I managed to do things waaay more complex than that using LLMs. Especially “several times”. My AI can do a parametric trophy cup from one prompt in a couple of attempts, I would be shocked if it didn’t know how to make rectangular cube…
I'm a much more capable of designing useful models by programming than I am in using CAD software. The way I think about the construction of models is much more suited to standard programming techniques. I freely admit there is probably immense value in using the industry standard tools instead... I've printed a few projects now which I used OpenSCAD to design, and it went fairly well, and I'm confident in them. OpenSCAD is a bit of a PITA though.
I have no idea if this approach might gain traction over sketch-based CAD, I doubt it; yet this approach has a strong chance of expanding the space.
If there was a real possibility of folks being willing to use this sort of UI in industry, BRL-CAD would be far more popular, and writing AutoLISP scripts wouldn't be an obscure specialty.
> The books in the West in general kept getting less rigorous, with time.
I wonder if it's because more people are going to college who would have otherwise gone to a vocational or trade school? If the audience expands to include people who might not have studied calculus had they not chosen to go to college, I feel like textbooks have to change to accommodate that.
Generally that's what it means. And also when proofs are presented, a rigorous book will go through it fully, whereas a less rigorous one might just sketch out the main ideas of the proof and leave out some of the nitty gritty details (i.e. it's less rigorous to talk about "continuity" as "you can draw it without lifting the pen" as compared to the epsilon-delta definition, but epsilon-delta is pretty detailed and for intro calculus for non-mathematicians you don't really need it).
It doesn't look like they've made any drastic changes that would impel anyone to leave Arduino tomorrow, or in the foreseeable future, but if they keep going down this route I imagine the community will move to RPi. They've always been vastly more performant than Arduino and they can run linux, which is somewhat more approachable than the concept of programming a microcontroller and only being able to talk to it over serial.
I disagree, I think for the average hobbyist Arduino is an abstraction of "thing that can talk to sensors and actuate motors." You're right of course that RPi (excl pico) is very different from Arduino, but for the hobbyist it makes no difference if the processor on the Arduino is an Atmel or an ARM.
> but for the hobbyist it makes no difference if the processor on the Arduino is an Atmel or an ARM.
I don't think anyone was arguing they cared about Atmel vs ARM. In fact, the point of Arduino is to make that not even something a user would need to know.
The argument is Linux vs Bare metal Arduino are vastly different user experiences and complexities.
It won't be just one big move that kills the community. Eventually, I could see it as locked down as the STM32 ecosystem. Nor do I see them continuing to sell the same parts for over a decade. They'll just want to use it to promote new kit. Nor do I see them keeping to board designs open over the long term. That will come one little step at a time.
The patent language would worry me a lot. It would be tough to have to admit, up front, "even if this widget becomes popular I can never build a business on it."
The cool thing about an Arduino is you can just buy the boards and use them in a commercial product. This isn't something you can do with other boards. Some people have said the license requires you to disclose your firmware, but that's not the way I read it and I've never heard of anyone being compelled to release anything (unless they modify any GPL covered code).
Not all platforms give you the right to do this. For example, if you buy a dev board from STM - it's only licensed for research and development. Also, because you might want to continue to sell the same thing for years, and the board designs were open-sourced, you could buy the same part for years and years. So you can continue to sell your CNC kit that uses an Mega 2560 without worrying about Arduino coming after you or that they'd discontinue that part.
Not in the short while since they've purchased Arduino, but I could see them restricting the licensing for commercial use, while keeping it freely usable for education. Like STM.
> "even if this widget becomes popular I can never build a business on it.
With the exception of a handful of applications for their higher-end boards, I would think most of this flotilla of ships has already sailed, just on a cost basis?
There's believing Arduino isn't useful for anything serious. And that might be true, I don't know. But then there's buying the company and making sure it isn't good for anything serious. It's that second part that confuses me.
I often use picos because they're much more capable when it comes to interfacing with hardware.
You can do gpio, pwm etc from a linux pi but the hardware is worse at it and you'll be fighting against the system quite a bit. It's a lot of boring complexity to be allowed to do something simple; and the next update might break it.
If I need a linux system AND hardware interfacing, I'll usually use a regular pi + a pico for the hardware stuff and connect them via serial or something
It looks like they have modern options that run Linux now; it’s no longer the realm of 8-bit Atmel MCUs.
I’m not sure what the value proposition is overall, though. The IDE, perhaps? I never particularly saw the draw, but it clearly met the needs of some real market niche.
Maybe two different things here: SBCs that run Linux versus microcontrollers (MCUs).
MCUs are lower power, have less overhead, and can perform hard real-time tasks. Most of what Arduino focuses on are MCUs. The equivalent is the Raspberry Pi Pico.
In my experience, the key thing is the library ecosystem for the C++ runtime environment. There are a large number of Arduino and third-party high-level libraries provided through their package management system that make it really easy to use sensors and other hardware without needing to write intermediate level code that uses SPI or I2C. And it all integrates and works together. The Pico C/C++ SDK is lower level and doesn’t have a good library / package management story, so you have to read vendor data sheets to figure out how to communicate with hardware and then write your own libraries.
It’s much more common for less experienced users to use MicroPython. It has a package management and library ecosystem. But it’s also harder to write anything of any complexity that fits within the small RAM available without calling gc.collect() in every other line.
Yes. One looming concern here is that if the new Arduino is happy locking stuff down, the Arduino IDE story could end up being murkier like the PlatformIO story.
Wow thanks!!! I've been trying to find a cheap flex pcb supplier but the cheapest i found was $150 for 10. They are way cheaper making my project viable!
Neat! I just sent out an order to JLCPCB for an ESP32 based board. I don't have a rework station or any experience with SMT so I decided to go for their assembly options. It's 80 per board, but would probably be cheaper per board if I got more than 2 (I also have more components on my board than you).
Question about the instructions in your README, you say that once you're done with the top side, repeat for the bottom, but when you're working on the bottom side, what stops the elements on the top side from falling off once the heat passes through the board and melts the solder on that side?
Working on the bottom side I only used the heat gun really carefully on the resistors then used a soldering iron with a fine tip for the usb-c connector since the leads are fairly large.
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