When the day comes where I'm struggling with the limitations of OpenSCAD then I'll go find another tool. I didn't have to fork out any money for it and I can readily reuse my existing skills in writing C style code. Put another way, why would I spend all that money on a commercial tool to do the same job that a free tool does perfectly adequately? OpenSCAD is a tool, and at the moment it meets my purposes. Given that this is the RepRap forum and not the "I spent $10,000 on a commercial printer because I could" forum you can probably understand why we like the free stuff. Right, so now we're talking about the same features, one which is as you say provided by a free tool and one that costs real money. I doesnt really have any unique modeling features that arrent done better in other CAD programs. I dont expect a free tool to be better at this than a 6000+$ CAD program, but as far as I see ist the fact that its: free, small, runs on Linux, and easy to get into are its best parts. In here you can have drop down lists for example different rods or stepper motors which change the whole model if you select them. In big model assembly's you can lose overvieuw like this, so you have a design tabel (Excel) that holds and dictates all measurements in a model. This way if you change the steel rod model all dimensions in the whole assembly get changed. You can also insert equations like you always want to have the hole 10% bigger than the rod instead of a solid 0.5mm. This way the hole will always be 0.5mm larger. Say I have a steel rod of ∅5 and I want the hole in a plastic holder to be ∅5.5 than all you have to do is drag a dimension from the hole to the steel rod and add 0.5. This can be done in Solidworks by just linking one dimension to another. If it appears slow and clumsy then you're probably using it to do something for which a better tool already exists. That's a pretty powerful feature for anybody wanting to produce scalable parametric designs for actual objects without having to start over each time a small component changes. ![]() The ENTIRE model is then redrawn with the correct dimensions, holes, etc, plus it produces a bill of materials to boot. The benefit of doing this is that if we want to scale the model then all we have to provide it are the dimensions of a few basic components - the heated bed, the motors being used, the diameters of the steel rods, etc. Nophead's excellent Mendel90 is modelled entirely in OpenSCAD. ![]() Its easy and fast to get into if you have little CAD experience. Its however a bit harder to get into.Īnyways I get why its being used here now. Just the speed and complexity you can get is still unmatched. But in the end I cant image anyone using something that isnt parasolid or similar, based for 3d precision modeling. I used some other 3d programs for nice applications (Finite Element Analysis/Mould design). (Mainly Solidworks, Solid Edge and Inventor.) Im a Mechanical Engineer and work with CAD al day. Then again you could also do this with a simple dropbox account or a 10k$+ PDM system and design a machine containing 100's of parts with 100's of Jbernardis: I think you can still use GIT for models created by Solidworks and the likes. But it does seem kinda slow and cumbersome to model this way. ![]() I also happen to be Dutch so Nice blog! I happen to have a camper van myself too. Well like I said im just curious as for why people are using it.
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