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Top 23 Cad Open-Source Projects
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FreeCAD
This is the official source code of FreeCAD, a free and opensource multiplatform 3D parametric modeler.
Project mention: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2025) | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-02-23I'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
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Project mention: OpenSCAD: The Programmer's Solid 3D CAD Modeller | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-09-14
Multi thread support is an experimental feature available on nightly build (and needing to be enabled). The bug tracking it is interesting to read, it has been a long journey... https://github.com/openscad/openscad/issues/391
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LibreCAD
LibreCAD is a cross-platform 2D CAD program written in C++17. It can read DXF/DWG files and can write DXF/PDF/SVG files. It supports point/line/circle/ellipse/parabola/spline primitives. The user interface is highly customizable, and has dozens of translations.
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Project mention: We are shutting down the Ondsel FreeCAD business | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-11-18
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/
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To add to delhanty's reply, a "degree of freedom" can be thought of as a dimension of the drawing that can be changed or "stretched" or moved without violating a constraint. In a CAD program, a fully constrained drawing can't be freely stretched or dragged around.
It's very intuitive if you play around with a CAD program for a bit. There is a free (GPLv3) 2D and 3D CAD program called Solvespace (https://solvespace.com/) that is probably easiest one to obtain and learn. There are detailed tutorials on the website, and you could probably download it and finish the first tutorial in an hour.
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Project mention: OpenSCAD: The Programmer's Solid 3D CAD Modeller | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-09-14
Fornjot[0][1] is also really impressive as a CAD kernel. It is written in Rust, and is still a WIP, but I think is turning out nicely.
[0]https://www.fornjot.app/
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> Can anyone explain where this blob of "assembly language" comes from?
Assembly language is definitely the right analogy: it's a low-level target generated by higher-level tools. In this case, the expression came from a Python script calling this text(...) function:
https://github.com/mkeeter/antimony/blob/f6a56dd7/py/fab/sha...
The font is hand-built from geometric primitives (rectangles, circles, etc) and CSG operations (union, intersection, difference)
> What is considered an acceptable preprocessing or transformation?
I'm looking for interesting ideas, and to mine the depths of PLs / compiler / interpreter / runtime research. Just returning a fixed image isn't particularly interesting, but (for example) I just updated the site with a compile-to-CUDA example that shows off the brute force power of a modern GPU.
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kicad-source-mirror
This is an active mirror of the KiCad development branch, which is hosted at GitLab (updated every time something is pushed). Pull requests on GitHub are not accepted or watched.
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atopile
Design circuit boards with code! ✨ Get software-like design reuse 🚀, validation, version control and collaboration in hardware; starting with electronics ⚡️
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qcad
QCAD - The Open Source 2D CAD. QCAD is a cross-platform CAD solution for Windows, macOS and Linux. It supports the DXF format and optionally the DWG format (through a proprietary plugin).
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Project mention: OpenSCAD: The Programmer's Solid 3D CAD Modeller | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-09-14
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Libfive is the closest successor. Blender also starts to support implicit modeling. https://libfive.com/
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OCCT
Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) is an open-source software development platform for 3D CAD, CAM, CAE.
Project mention: OpenSCAD: The Programmer's Solid 3D CAD Modeller | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-09-14OpenSCAD has been great for simple projects. It’s very easy to get productive with if you know basic programming concepts. However, I’ve run into frustrating limitations on more complex projects. The core geometry engine is skittish.
I still use OpenSCAD, but I’m diving into the OCCT ecosystem. It has a steeper learning curve, but seems to be significantly more robust.
https://dev.opencascade.org/
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That's why I had to a special Invalid CVE tag to some issues:
https://github.com/LibreDWG/libredwg/issues?q=is%3Aissue+lab...
Reporters barely can read nowadays and CVE centers neither.
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
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Index
What are some of the best open-source Cad projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | FreeCAD | 23,540 |
| 2 | openscad | 7,587 |
| 3 | LibreCAD | 4,808 |
| 4 | cadquery | 3,531 |
| 5 | solvespace | 3,364 |
| 6 | leocad | 2,544 |
| 7 | LibrePCB | 2,525 |
| 8 | fornjot | 2,145 |
| 9 | antimony | 2,125 |
| 10 | kicad-source-mirror | 2,106 |
| 11 | atopile | 2,044 |
| 12 | fosscad-repo | 1,635 |
| 13 | qcad | 1,580 |
| 14 | jsketcher | 1,567 |
| 15 | mayo | 1,558 |
| 16 | CADmium | 1,525 |
| 17 | pythonocc-core | 1,501 |
| 18 | libfive | 1,494 |
| 19 | OCCT | 1,469 |
| 20 | CascadeStudio | 1,134 |
| 21 | truck | 1,112 |
| 22 | libredwg | 1,066 |
| 23 | OpenAstroTracker | 995 |
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