Our great sponsors
-
partcad
The first package manager for CAD models to revolutionize Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
-
open-cad-foundation
A place to discuss open source CAD and how to create a foundation to support it.
-
-
They don't seem to be aware of https://github.com/nophead/NopSCADlib which has been around for an age.
I've wanted a package manager for openSCAD as well.
I really like using BOSL2, and so when I publish my scads for friends, right now I just include the copy of BOSL I'm using (I forked it the one time I needed to add a custom patch) as a git submodule [1]
[1] https://github.com/kelvie/scads/tree/master/lib
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/
I'm working on an MPL-licensed, free forever CAD environment for molecular nanotechnology. It is extremely early, indeed I hesitate to even mention it as it is currently undergoing the final stages of a rewrite to run on a game engine back-end, and it isn't much more than boilerplate at the moment. But we have a small community of people interested in this, and we are currently raising money to support further development, among other things.
The key point though is that the atomistic modeling is sort-of an add-on to a bog-standard CAD workflow. You still use boolean geometry to produce surface representations, even if those surfaces are discretized crystal structures.
I had intended that once it was up and running I would reach out to some people I know that are interested in a more modern alternative to FreeCAD. Perhaps it would make sense to combine efforts?
[1] https://github.com/atomCAD/atomCAD
I think PartCAD would take in packages like NopSCADlib and make them accessible in a unified way along with other part repositories. In that sense the goals of the two projects are orthogonal but complementary. A similar example would be Adafruit, https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_CAD_Parts. In fact there are many such repos out their that are very useful but in their own islands.