from Hacker News

Show HN: Cadseer. a parametric solid modeling CAD desktop application

by blobfish01 on 3/31/23, 6:35 PM with 32 comments

Cadseer is in the same genre as: solidworks, inventor, freecad etc... Cadseer is alpha software, so lots of missing features, bugs, crashes, file incompatibilities etc...

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.

  • by mitthrowaway2 on 3/31/23, 11:44 PM

    Very cool! I always like to see more activity in the open-source CAD space.

    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?

  • by akiselev on 3/31/23, 10:20 PM

    I haven't tried it out yet but screenshots are available here: https://gitlab.com/blobfish/cadseer/-/wikis/screenshots

    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

  • by aetherspawn on 4/1/23, 3:27 AM

    I watched your video and I just wanted to say that it looks really good. It could very easily be used instead of i.e. SolidWorks to make basic parts. I am very impressed that you were able to do this mostly on your own.

    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.

  • by vonnieda on 4/3/23, 9:39 PM

    Wow, I've been looking for something like this for years! Thanks for posting. I fired it up on an M1 Mac (Rosetta 2) and it runs quite nicely. Watching through the screencast now, and looking forward to using this.

    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!

  • by solarkraft on 4/1/23, 2:46 AM

    Wow, it looks pretty advanced! How does it generally compare to other (free) software in terms of features? What are the advantages over other systems, what are its disadvantages?

    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?

  • by carterschonwald on 4/1/23, 2:24 AM

    Very cool! What internal rep are you using? B rep or sdf or other? It does seem like the choice of data structure has a huge impact on what’s easy vs not.

    I’ll try it out!

  • by rcarmo on 4/1/23, 7:29 AM

    Very impressive. I’ve been struggling to get off OpenSCAD and into proper parametric modeling (am using Blender with CAD Sketcher since I just can’t abide FreeCAD), and after taking a look at the screencast you linked to, I will be giving this a go on both Mac and Fedora.

    Do you/will you support STEP files?

  • by rafamvc on 4/1/23, 12:28 AM

    What is the difference between this and openscad?

    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.

  • by georgeoliver on 4/1/23, 12:27 AM

    As someone who just started with FreeCAD last week (and have never used CAD tools previously) I'm wondering what its major pain points for you are?

  • by RobotToaster on 4/1/23, 9:16 AM

    This is definitely something the 3d printing community would be interested in. The lack of a good open source cad program has been an issue.

  • by eternityforest on 4/1/23, 10:22 AM

    Looks like a CSG type modeler, but visual instead of code based, and with some kind of really cool blend operation?

    Pretty neat!