After spending 5 minutes with Replicad, I canceled my subscription to Fusion360. Thank you @sgenoud!
Context: I have design and shipped physical products (injection mold plastic), but have found the parametric support in Fusion to be almost unusable, as it's tied to the order of operations. For a recent laser cutting project, I did the CAD in HTML—using JS to lay out SVG elements based on input fields for all the parameters.
Given the above, Replicad is a 100% fit for my philosophy and needs:
• Code-driven, so I can completely control how things are parameterized (and use arbitrary expressions)
• Text-based, so I can work in a Git repo
• Open source & web based, so I don't worry that I'll lose the ability to view or edit old files in the future
• Well-funded core (OpenCascade), so I have reasonable hope that it will continue to receive updates
• Human-friendly documentation, so I can find what I need quickly
afaik, FreeCAD is not code-driven or text-based. In the few minutes I played with it, it seems like a massive app which is sluggish on fast computers, and stores its data in an opaque binary format. So it's not really in the same category.
Context: I have design and shipped physical products (injection mold plastic), but have found the parametric support in Fusion to be almost unusable, as it's tied to the order of operations. For a recent laser cutting project, I did the CAD in HTML—using JS to lay out SVG elements based on input fields for all the parameters.
Given the above, Replicad is a 100% fit for my philosophy and needs:
• Code-driven, so I can completely control how things are parameterized (and use arbitrary expressions)
• Text-based, so I can work in a Git repo
• Open source & web based, so I don't worry that I'll lose the ability to view or edit old files in the future
• Well-funded core (OpenCascade), so I have reasonable hope that it will continue to receive updates
• Human-friendly documentation, so I can find what I need quickly
Really nice work!