Comments on: In Which OpenSCAD Wins Me Over

By: OpenSCAD: A Love Story « Project Blog

OpenSCAD: A Love Story « Project Blog — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:53:39 +0000

[...] a belly fully of thanksgiving turkey I tried it out. I agree with the Make post and the referenced Thingaverse post : In the right hands, designing the right parts, this is a game changer. I played around with it [...]

By: OpenSCAD: Constructive solid geometry CAD at long last | china online business,e business,e-commerce consultant

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 01:47:01 +0000

[...] I was really stoked this morning to read this post over on the Thingiverse Blog about the advent of OpenSCAD, which does for 3D CAD what POV-Ray did for raytracing. At long last, [...]

By: failrate

failrate — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 06:12:42 +0000

Well, it’s open source. I’m only presuming that the language is not essential to the function of the application. It may be practical to bind a different language to openSCAD or provide an API that could then be SWIG-i-fied for any given language.

For example, I generally work in either Python (standalone apps) or JavaScript (where the scripting language needs to be embedded). In the case of the latter, I’ve embedded the SpiderMonkey runtime into both an openGL-based renderer and a libSDL-based additive sine synthesis engine. It may be relatively easy to replace the ad-hoc language of this with Your-Language-Of-Choice.

By: Allan Ecker

Allan Ecker — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:46:16 +0000

Mm.

I have lots of little gripes on this tool, but the core of it is so promising that I have little doubt it’ll attract many users and ultimately enthusiastic coders to fill in the cracks.

By: Bruno Rivard

Bruno Rivard — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:44:11 +0000

Elegant and Useful, but not a game changer. NURBS (and now T-splines) have done that too. In free-form graphics and the command line. You can do the same sorts of ultra concise scripts.

Unfortunately there is not any pure and dedicated open source application that utilizes NURBS. Rhino3D (www.rhino3d.com) has an opensource API however.

The new Mac port will use Python for scripting the API. Making an open source “glue” would be a good start.

But till then OpenSCAD does it.

By: Revar

Revar — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:43:29 +0000

Hmm. I played with openSCAD a while longer, and yeah, recursion is impractical as yet. So fractals are a lot harder. I don’t see any vector stack support like push/pop/insert/append, so it’s hard to even fake recursion. Oh well. I’ll have to wait for later releases for that particular fun, I guess.

By: zignig

zignig — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 08:34:03 +0000

Freecad ( http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/free-cad/index.php?title=Main_Page ) is also does parametric.

It uses python.

I’ve not tried it yet but it uses a well known cad core and does fillets and chamfers as well

By: Revar

Revar — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:03:39 +0000

Sadly, I wasn’t able to get module recursion to work, so I wonder if it’s just not implemented yet, or if I need forward module declarations. I was able to implement a limited simple Sierpinski tetrahedra sponge to five levels, but I should have been able to do it in far less code!

module tetra(rad=10) { sval = rad*sin(60); cval = rad*cos(60); pt1 = [sval, -cval, -cval-rad]; pt2 = [0, rad, -cval-rad]; pt3 = [-sval, -cval, -cval-rad]; pt4 = [0, 0, 0]; polyhedron( points = [pt1,pt2,pt3,pt4], triangles = [ [0, 1, 2], [3, 1, 0], [3, 2, 1], [0,2,3] ] ); }


module sier1(rad) {

	rad = rad / 2;

	sval = rad*sin(60);

	cval = rad*cos(60);

	tetra(rad);

	translate([sval,-cval,-cval-rad]) tetra(rad);

	translate([-sval,-cval,-cval-rad]) tetra(rad);

	translate([0,rad,-cval-rad]) tetra(rad);

}
module sier2(rad) {

	rad = rad / 2;

	sval = rad*sin(60);

	cval = rad*cos(60);

	sier1(rad);

	translate([sval,-cval,-cval-rad]) sier1(rad);

	translate([-sval,-cval,-cval-rad]) sier1(rad);

	translate([0,rad,-cval-rad]) sier1(rad);

}
module sier3(rad) {

	rad = rad / 2;

	sval = rad*sin(60);

	cval = rad*cos(60);

	sier2(rad);

	translate([sval,-cval,-cval-rad]) sier2(rad);

	translate([-sval,-cval,-cval-rad]) sier2(rad);

	translate([0,rad,-cval-rad]) sier2(rad);

}
module sier4(rad) {

	rad = rad / 2;

	sval = rad*sin(60);

	cval = rad*cos(60);

	sier3(rad);

	translate([sval,-cval,-cval-rad]) sier3(rad);

	translate([-sval,-cval,-cval-rad]) sier3(rad);

	translate([0,rad,-cval-rad]) sier3(rad);

}
module sier5(rad) {

	rad = rad / 2;

	sval = rad*sin(60);

	cval = rad*cos(60);

	sier4(rad);

	translate([sval,-cval,-cval-rad]) sier4(rad);

	translate([-sval,-cval,-cval-rad]) sier4(rad);

	translate([0,rad,-cval-rad]) sier4(rad);

}

rotate([180,0,0]) sier4(30);

By: Allan Ecker

Allan Ecker — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:11:56 +0000

Wasn’t sure about argument passing since I hadn’t tested it, but that’s another big thing: generating a TearDrop of any size.

With this CSG program we can parametrize everything.

By: Andres

Andres — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:03:04 +0000

It gets better, the teardrop module itself can get parametric, this isn’t entirely so, but some quick changes and putting holes of various sizes, pretty easy.

module TearDrop(radius)
{
union(){
cylinder(h=200,r=radius, center = true);
intersection(){
rotate(45,[0 0 1]) scale([1 1 20]) cube(size = 2*radius, center = true);
translate([1.75*radius, 0, 0]) scale([1 1 20]) cube(size = 2*radius, center = true);
}
}
}

difference(){
cube([50 300 100], center = true);
translate([0 -100 0]) rotate(-90, [0 1 0]) TearDrop(10);
rotate(-90, [0 1 0])TearDrop(20);
translate([0 100 0]) rotate(-90, [0 1 0])TearDrop(30);
}

hope that comes out.