cadquery VS FreeCAD

OpenSCAD is my go-to. It's self-contained and AI coding tools know the syntax well enough to help you move fast. Unfortunately I keep hitting a complexity ceiling.

If it doesn't like how I'm describing something, it crashes. I have to load an older version of my .scad and try a new approach. This usually happens 70% of the way into a complex project, which is quite discouraging.

The Python ecosystem has CadQuery[0] and a few other tools built around the Open Cascade kernel[1] which is quite good in my limited experience. CadQuery is positioned as an OpenSCAD alternative [2], and I really want it to be. Unfortunately the user experience isn't there yet.

Making an object with CadQuery is writing a Python program. Which means you need a Python environment and dev setup. CQ-editor [3] is nice, but needs a Python environment first. I think CadQuery would be much more viable OpenSCAD alternative if it was packaged into a standalone CQ-editor application and published via homebrew, etc.

I'm also interest in Zoo [4](fka KittyCAD). They're trying to create a modelling tool that combines model-by-code and model-by-mouse. With some AI layered on top. They have an interesting architecture where they stream geometry to your local device from the cloud. Should be great for performance, but ties you to the cloud.

[0] https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cascade_Technology

[2] https://cadquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html#why-cad...

[3] https://github.com/CadQuery/CQ-editor

[4] https://zoo.dev/

There aren't many great production-ready open-source frameworks for code-editor components in Swift. I assessed quite a few but found that the feature completeness was far from what I needed. I tried to fork [CodeEditSourceEditor](https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery) and add the extra features I wanted, but I think it would have taken me 6-12 months to get it to an acceptable state, meanwhile not spending any time focusing on the rest of the product experience.

I decided to play around with Typescript and Electron over a weekend and ended up getting a really solid prototype so I made the heart wrenching decision to move over.

I'm messing around with writing my own text editor component in Swift now, but it's quite a big endeavour to get the standard expected for a production ready product.

I'm assuming a pure-swift CAD UI would be equally difficult. Would be really cool to see that tho.

I was thinking about cadQuery or DrawSVG. But maybe you have a better idea ? I'm beginner in python (started on november ...)

Last few months, I've made over 20 3D printed panels using the CadQuery Python library. Its syntax is pretty complex, so every time I wanted to make a panel, I'd just copy-paste bits and pieces from my previous panels. In the process, I learned what work and what doesn't, and I thought it was time to polish up this system to share it with others.

>Python for CAD

You might be interested in CadQuery:

https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery

Spicy! I'm also a solidworks user but I've been playing around with cadquery recently, that installed and performs pretty nicely on Linux for me. Haven't really pushed it though.

I am currently developing a pipeline for creating STL files, slice them and create a print job based on it. My setup at the moment is an Ultimaker S5, which offers a simple REST-API, for example starting a job with a G-Code or UFP file. I am using the cadQuery library for creating parametrized 3d shapes and export them as a STL file. I want to use the CuraEngine CLI interface (Backend for Cura) for slicing or their library libArcus (python bindings) but there is literally no documentation or any kind of examples, except the source code. There is also the prucaSlicer, which also offers a CLI interface for creating G-Code, but no support for the Ultimaker S5.

I'm a long-time FreeCAD user, and one of my annoyances is that long-running operations lock up the entire UI and can't be aborted.

So for my first contribution to FreeCAD I'm working on fixing this.

The underlying CAD operations are done by "OpenCascade", and at first I thought OpenCascade had no support for aborting operations part of the way through. So my first implementation was to move the operation into a child process and give the user a dialog box that would allow terminating the child process.

But it actually turns out OpenCascade does support aborting the operations! So now I'm working on doing it the OpenCascade way.

My PR is here: https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/pull/19796

I won't argue with that, but I would like to understand why.

If I'm on the right path with these forum threads, it looks like there were issues with how Debian packages python?

https://forum.freecad.org/viewtopic.php?t=67985

https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/pull/6753

https://ffy00.github.io/blog/02-python-debian-and-the-instal...

Rapid Merges: PRs like #14693, #14691, and #14688 were merged within less than a day.

Also this for people wanting to know more about FreeCAD.

https://www.freecad.org/

There was no link to the main site from the blog on mobile.

Last comment I promise.. https://www.freecad.org/ shows two gears that can never work together in the real world. This shows that the devs are coders first and know very little about real world design. That or maybe the intern got told to update the homepage. So much potential with FreeCad but the devs seem not able to prioritise killing the overpriced commercial SW. There are millions of $ on the table if Freecad made commercial use was a priority. Maybe they just like coding and not making money.

Fix was merged into mainline FreeCAD yesterday: https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/issues/8432#issuecomment-...