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randusernameyesterday at 10:24 PM5 repliesview on HN

3D printing has been humbling for me.

I can express myself well spatially in code, but that doesn't help much in CAD where you have to figure out what combination of buttons and parameters will do what I want.

I can manage dependencies well in code, but that doesn't help much in CAD. I continually struggle to design parts with geometry that is dependent on the spatial relationships and constraints of how multiple parts connect together.


Replies

WillAdamsyesterday at 11:54 PM

FWIW, I crashed and burned with pretty much every 3D CAD tool I tried (though I did make it through the tutorial for Dune 3D which was a first), but OpenSCAD has been quite workable, and the development of a Python-enabled version:

https://pythonscad.org/

has allowed me to extend it to do things which would be quite difficult in other tools:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

n00shieyesterday at 10:39 PM

Have you ever tried https://openscad.org/?

sokolofftoday at 3:20 AM

Do you by any chance have over a decade of coding and under a year of CAD? You might have forgotten how hard coding was when you had under 200 hours of experience with it.

qazxcvbnmlpyesterday at 10:42 PM

Cad in general isn’t good at modeling spacial relationships between parts as a graph.

swagmoney69today at 4:31 AM

Open SCAD is great, but also give cadquery a shot. It's my personal favorite right now