alt Hacker NewsCurious. How much experience do you have with any form of CAD? Is the preference based on that you tried graphical CAD software and you found them lacking, or is it based on imagining how they might work?
Last week at the hackspace someone asked me to quickly design a manifold which holds together a scuba mouth piece, a 48mm diameter valve and a nato 40mm screw fitting. They wanted to minimise the internal tidal volume of the manifold, while keeping enough clearance for the tubes connected to it. We ended up connecting the 3 fittings in a Y-shape and lofted the pipes together. Without seeing the resulting shape I can’t even start to guess how many edges it would have. And I have no idea how I would refer to which edges i want filleted. How would you approach something like that with your prefered method?
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I've also been asking myself what people do with programmatic CAD. I've used OpenSCAD once to create a simple, cylindrical object, but about 80% of the things I create (using conventional CAD, like Fusion 360) would be way too complex for that. And even the simplest shapes are just much faster to create and modify in Fusion.
Maybe this is the "everything looks like a nail" problem for programmers who have never tried CAD?
Agree with this. I've tried the various programmatic CAD options before, and creating initial shapes is relatively easy, but figuring out how to refer to parts of those subsequent shapes - to e.g. modify further, or build from, or connect to other shapes, is really complex and clunky.
I have a lot of experience with openscad. I design a lot of small, simple-to-moderate parts. I want to use something like fusion instead, but the GUI learning curve is a huge blocker for me.
I'm not a CAD professional, I can't seem to find the time to watch hours of video to get the basics down. With code based CAD, the way to start is usually obvious. When I run into a blocker, I search online, find examples, and try them out. Then, crucially, I copy and paste code snippets into my design, and modify them, to solve my problem.
In a GUI cad tool, I find that I spend most of my time hunting for buttons in the UI, often finding UI layout discrepancies between my version and whatever video I found.
In code, I do have to repeatedly solve little trig or geometry problems, and I'm always aware that a constraint based GUI tool would eliminate that completely. But I always know that I can just spend five minutes with pencil and paper and get it done, whereas switching to fusion means adding an hour or more of work to multiple designs.
I really want to design more effectively, with better fillet flexibility. But for my simple tasks, the barrier to becoming productive in a GUI is just too high.
I believe the "command palette" in e.g. VS code solves this well, perhaps a GUI cad with that would be workable for me.
Maybe what would really help me, is a larger more complex project which I can develop over a longer time in fusion while I learn to use it. Too bad I don't have anything that naturally fits that bill.