NopSCADlib VS open-cad-foundation

They don't seem to be aware of https://github.com/nophead/NopSCADlib which has been around for an age.

If you're looking for examples of high quality openscad code, dotSCAD is pretty cool. nophead (old school reprap person and one of the openscad developers) has a parts library that I think is high quality.

As for now there is no library of parts for SolveSpace similar to NopSCADLib for r/OpenSCAD or FreeCAD library for r/FreeCAD.

This is exciting news. And I enjoyed to learn that some investigation on adding parallelism has been done. OpenSCAD is my main design driver, so when I hit these performance corners, it'd drive me nuts.

OpenSCAD and https://github.com/nophead/NopSCADlib is a winning combo.

It's going to take you more than a few days. There are a bunch of libraries out there: https://github.com/topics/openscad-library is a whole list of them plus https://github.com/nophead/NopSCADlib has tons of prebuild parts you can modify.

I cnc'ed the front panel of the box, but it would be interesting to have a tool for panels specifically. Best thing I could find that goes in the same direction is this project https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4947863 based on the ultimate box maker and NopSCADlib https://github.com/nophead/NopSCADlib/

All the designs we're drawing for https://wiki.replimat.org/wiki/Main_Page are done using our branch of https://github.com/nophead/NopSCADlib which contains some work yet to be upstreamed here: https://github.com/timschmidt/replimat

I've spent a lot of time improving the CAD situation around the system. All our core parts are now a part of https://github.com/nophead/NopSCADlib which automatically generates assembly instructions, bills of material, 2D and 3D CAD files for cutting and printing, etc. Eventually it will generate machine control commands directly.

Here's the code.

I suppose something like this might help too.. https://github.com/nophead/NopSCADlib#pcb

Great to see FreeCAD growing!

A few months ago after a tweet about open source CAD got way more traction than I would have expected, I started a discussion board using github's discussion feature to document some analysis of the open source CAD landscape and how best to achieve a professional-ready open source CAD system.

I did a fair amount of digging in to all the possible options, and ultimately came to the conclusion that FreeCAD and the fork by Ondsel are our best hope of good open source CAD for professional users.

If you are curious, take a look at the discussions and reasoning, captured here on that discussion board:

https://github.com/tlalexander/open-cad-foundation/discussio...

If anyone is curious I started a discussion forum [1] with the goal of researching possible paths to good quality open source CAD, after an off-hand tweet of mine about open source CAD got significant traction on twitter.

Based on what I know so far, it seems that FreeCAD might be finally getting the investment it needs to mature as a real option. There is an organization called Ondsel which is taking on a lot of UI and assembly bench improvements, and I have heard that their preview versions are worth checking out. [2]

Notably, the big question about open source CAD relates to the geometry kernel used. They take decades to produce, and only OpenCASCADE is even remotely mature enough. OpenCASCADE is also somewhat tricky to work with, but it seems to be our only choice. Even if we had millions of dollars of investment in open source CAD it seems unlikely we could do better than OpenCASCADE based on what I have learned.

So my next step when I get some time is to explore how the Ondsel branch of FreeCAD is going and see if I can convince myself this is the path we should all be supporting. I do see no other paths currently, so my hope is that we see FreeCAD mature enough that it becomes usable by professional mechanical engineers.

[1] https://github.com/tlalexander/open-cad-foundation/discussio...

[2] https://ondsel.com/download/