It's actually really limited, based on a needlessly simplified data model and using a kludged up DSL syntax instead of a proper software development environment.
Look at CadQuery and build123d, both of which are python packages build on top of OpenCASCADE[1]. They have wildly different syntax[2], but very similar capabilities. You can do the same CSG work in them that you do in OpenSCAD with similar complexity, but have access to a far more expressive underlying toolkit and a real programming language with which to manage your own parametrization needs.
[1] A CAD-focused boundary representation toolkit, which you can actually use directly if you want but which is aimed more at "build a CAD tool" use cases than "design a speaker cabinet".
[2] Truthfully I don't love either, but CadQuery is at least explicit in most cases about what is happening where build123d relies on some dynamic scoping tricks that irk me. Seems like most of the community disagrees with me though.
Really it's just an odd area, without solid conventions, and so any API in the 3D space is going to look weird in some places. But IMHO build123d leans way too far out on the "clever" end of the spectrum for my taste. OpenSCAD is limited, but has the advantage of having stuck to a dry, dumb, obvious API.
My compiling never takes more then a minute, usually it's less than a second.
Waiting over an hour to compile a CAD drawing seems untenable to me.
https://ochafik.com/jekyll/update/2022/02/09/openscad-fast-c...
To be clear, it was an hour years ago, now it's 1m40s. This includes all post processing and PNG rendering too.
How far are we in 2025 from defining a Differentiable design, setting a target (e.g. maximally flat frequency response for a certain speaker placement in a certain room) and solving this automatically?
https://www.comsol.com/blogs/6-examples-of-simulation-driven...
Those examples wouldn’t be differentiable in the sense of automatic differentiation. “Just” parametric CAD + FEM/BEM + optimizer.
Though differentiable FEM has kind of been done for a while under the name “adjoint method” for topology/shape optimization. It’s not super common outside of academia though.
Personally, I’m keeping an eye out for projects like https://github.com/deepmodeling/jax-fem to make some waves in that space.
There are ways to improve the bass situation, and one is by implementing "directional bass", aka a Cardioid array. This could be achieved with multiple individual speakers (add-on/upgrade existing system), or could be integrated in to 1 "speaker". Examples of the latter have been around for a few years - see Dutch & Dutch 8c or Kii Three. They are relatively expensive (which you could consider an early adopter tax), but affordable competition is starting to mature with speakers such as Mesanovic CDM65 [3].
There is another way to improve things too, and that is via "Active Room Treatment" [4] as Dirac calls it. Basically it uses excess capability in various speakers to "clean up" the audio of other speakers in the system by outputting "cancellation waves" (to cancel the problems). The results appear amazing, but they are taking their sweet time getting it released on to affordable equipment.
There's also "spatial audio" like Dolby Atmos that should/could work around room problems in a similar way to Dirac ART. So good speakers (like already exist) + ART + Atmos + AI "upscaled" 2 channel source music could be the final frontier? But that's just for "mechanical" sound reproduction. Maybe in the future I can just transmit the song straight in to my brain, bypassing my ears and the need for speakers entirely?!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_acoustics [2] https://www.kaliaudio.com/independence [3] https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/m... [4] https://www.dirac.com/live/dirac-live-active-room-treatment/
I tried three times (over two years) to use it but it was absurdly difficult to build a piece, with something that looked like "callbacks from hell" in JS (boxed in boxes in boxes of code. I had to keep track of the position all the time and there are no constraints.
Compared to that I tried Onshape (the free version which is almost the full one but all models are public) and it took me an afternoon to create my pieces. It was really simple, on a generic laptop without any power (a Lenovo P14s)
Visual programming language but can also use straight Python
Excellent environment for playing
I feel like such a noob still using SketchUp but it works, Fusion360 is on my list to learn at some point
There are some great tools like GLB export (Khronos) for ThreeJS and STL mesh check for 3D printing.
I never could "get" SketchUp. (Didn't they also kind of become more of a walled-garden after Google or whoever sold them off?)
Went with FreeCAD instead. I'm pretty sure it is grossly inferior to Fusion (the Mac version crashes on me periodically) but is free as in Blender. It has worked for the simple things I have been sending to the 3D printer.
