CAD

OpenSCAD and I have what you might politely call a love-hate relationship. On paper, the idea sounds slightly unhinged: why would anyone program a 3D model when FreeCAD is right there, ready to let you draw it like a civilised person? The answer turns out to be refreshingly simple: parameters. Now, to be fair, FreeCAD is a parametric modeller. I can work with spreadsheets and property sets, and I do. But every time I want to change a single value, I have to sit down in front of a full-blown CAD application, wait for it to load, find the right workbench, find the right sketch, and then remember which constraint I named Length001 three months ago and why. More on my naming scheme for FreeCAD in a future blog post (maybe). All of that just to make something two millimetres wider - just for a variable item that is entirely commodity? And trust me, there is the lazy moment and then a variable is exactly that: Length. Oh, which length btw? ...