About me: I spent 15 years designing stamping dies on a high end cad system. During that time, I also developed and marketed extensions/plugins toward that cad system. Through that experience, I came disillusioned with 'vendor lock-in' and proprietary software in general. I basically retired, took the vow of poverty and moved all my computing to open source. I have since, and continue to, try and improve the open source cad environment.
It must take a lot of motivation to create your own CAD. Were you dissatisfied with other open-source offerings, or do you have a different philosophy you're shooting for, or did you want to try it yourself for the satisfaction?
Looks pretty advanced already! It would be great to have more screenshots of the sketch mode though
Did you write your own geometric modeling kernel or are you using an existing one?
Edit: The git history goes back at least seven years! That's a lot of dedication
Maybe you could get some momentum with it in the 3D printing community if you made a nice website for it and did a YouTube series i.e. "How to design and print a phone holder" or things like that.
Does it have assembly mode? I imagine implementing Assembly constraints would be very difficult.
I've had an interest in writing an open source 3D CAD for some time, but I would far rather help with an existing project. Are you interested in PRs, and are there specific things you'd like help with?
One thing right away, I'd be happy to help with Mac M1 builds if that would be helpful. I maintain several open source projects and provide binaries for many platforms.
Great work!
Sure any PRs for bugs are great. If you want to take on something ambitious, I would like to talk about it first so we waste as little developer time as possible.
Have you been working on this thing by yourself? Have you ever shared it before? This looks like it has gotten very little attention so far, especially in relation to how good it seems.
What was your main motivation for building a new program rather than improving an existing one like FreeCAD?
A list of advantages and disadvantages should be done by somebody without bias. I will give you an example: I have incorporated 'git' revision control. With every update, files are wrote to disk and a git commit is made. With this git setup, I decided to exclude the typical 'undo' command and have no temporary files. I consider this an advantage because you get revision control and very little, if at all, loss of work when a crash occurs and the code base is cleaner and eliminates a fruitful source of bugs. Others might consider this a disadvantage because there is no traditional undo command.
Yes this is my pet project and haven't done any type of promotion until now.
I actually worked on freecad for a while. People familiar with freecad will recognize some of the things I made for freecad that I used in cadseer. I think freecad is great, but I wanted the freedom to do my own things, for better or worse.
The git integration sounds brilliant and reminds me of Fusion 360's timeline functionality with which you can go back to an edit you made, change something about it and have the change propagated through all later edits: Sounds a lot like rebasing!
Now that you're promoting it and still calling it "alpha software": Are you putting effort into polishing it up? Doesn't make mucb sense for people to invest in it if it's going to remain in alpha state, after all (though it seems like you're using it successfully, so maybe it's not that bad?).
I’ll try it out!
Do you/will you support STEP files?
I want to love openscad but it is hard to encapsulate and distribute code, as the library system is non existent.
Why is this better for stamping dies? I don't know much about it, but often wondered why there aren't cads specifically made for every fabrication style.
Cadseer is not better for stamping dies. That is just my background. I think cad is getting more into specialized industries now that the foundational stuff is more concrete. I don't think most people appreciate what it takes to develop a solid modeling kernel.
I like the idea of programming geometry, but never got the hang of the OpenSCAD language. I eventually settled on JSCAD.
Pretty neat!
