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ponyoustoday at 2:34 PM4 repliesview on HN

Does this use its own backend/engine? I've been working on LLM to CAD tool[0] and have realised there are so many backends and options to choose from. Since the realisation I'm trying to find the best representation for an LLM. I think OpenSCAD is currently the best and most feature complete choice, but I definitely need to dig a bit deeper. If anyone has any pointers I welcome them!

[0]: https://GrandpaCAD.com


Replies

markchenotoday at 4:57 PM

I just ran into this today: https://github.com/gumyr/build123d - seems like an LLM should have no problem writing python code...

ur-whaletoday at 2:47 PM

> I think OpenSCAD is currently the best and most feature complete choice

As much as I love OpenSCAD, I would strongly disagree with your conclusion.

All the OpenSCAD language can do is boolean operations and moreover, the engine can only implement those on polygonal (triangle actually) meshes.

That's a very far cry from what a modern commercial CAD engine can do.

For example, the following things are very, very hard to do, or even specify using OpenScad:

   - Smooth surfaces, especially spline-based

   - Fillets / Chamfers between two arbitrary surfaces

   - Trimming surfaces

   - Querying partly built models and using the outcome in the subsequent construction (e.g. find the shortest segment between two smooth surfaces, building a cylinder around it and filleting it with the two surfaces, this is an effing nightmare to do within the confines of OpenSCAD)

   - Last but not least: there is no native constraint solver in OpenSCAD, neither in the language nor in the engine (unlike - say - SolveSpace)
I might have misunderstood what you're looking to do, but, yeah, digging deeper feels very much like the right thing to do.
show 3 replies
yangchengtoday at 2:46 PM

I have tried OpenSCAD, it seems very slow to compile to display on web. are you using the official wasm or some other ways?

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IshKebabtoday at 3:18 PM

Yeah it does. In fact I believe it was written to demonstrate improved sketch constraint solving (there's a 2D version too).

Unfortunately aside from the better sketching the engine is not as capable as OpenCascade.