What are the ambitions of CadQuery ?

[Jojain]

Hello everyone,

Even though I had discovered CadQuery a little while ago, I really started to dive in not so long ago. However by getting myself into the ecosystem I have really seen how quick CadQuery was evolving and how involved are the people about it.

This is really cool to see the project getting better and better so it made me wonder,

what is CadQuery actually aiming to be ?

Even though the documentation specify that it's firstly intended to be a python lib, I feel it's used more as a CAD environment like FreeCad or others commercial products.

So I would be glad to here what people think of it, what they think it is and what they think it should be !

Also even if it's not totally related, I am curious to know who are the people using CadQuery and why they use it.

Personally I am a mechanical engineer and a long term goal of mine is to create a full opensource automatized design workflow that would make me able to do optimizations on design using FEM analysis and since I only know how to code in Python I have come to the conclusion that CQ would probably be a good starting point :)

That's all for me, feel free to react and have a nice day !

[drshi...@gmail.com]

Hi Jojain

I am another CQ user and just wanted to chime in to say the community and core developers have been super supportive and the project has developed really well in the 1.5 years I've been using it. There are also some great associated projects like jupyter-cadquery.

The project I work on (paramak) uses CQ to create parametric 3D geometry for fusion reactor design scoping / optimisation. While I tend to stick to carrying out neutronics analysis on these models I am super interested in taking a looking at at any open source FEM and I have used FEniCS which you might also be interested in.

All the best

Jon

[Dave Cowden]

Hi, Jojain, and welcome!

The dream of CadQuery is to enable internet-scale sharing and re-use of parametric CAD models. By 'parametric', I mean models that retain the original design intent, configurability, and precision ( NOT STEP and definitely not STL).  

Cadquery is well-suited to this task because it uses an enterprise grade BREP kernel, and a well understood, standard programming language. No other solution offers both of these features, including and especially commercial cad systems.  

As a frequent Solidworks/Onshape user, it's incredibly frustrating that to share it I have to either (a) neuter my model by removing its configurability and export to STEP, or (b) make the recipient pay a Solidworks license.  It's incredibly frustrating that sharing models via lossy formats like STL is still the norm because it's such a pain to find good content, even when you're sure it's been modeled thousands of times before.

Github libraries of cadquery code could enable internet-scale, assemblies that are configurable, precise, and open. 

Of course as you point out, cq models are also very well suited to automated design and analysis-- this is gravy on the broader goal of democratized model sharing. I could imagine that a typical component repository might have scripts that build the model, and also produce optimal parameters for various load cases.  These would be available to people integrating the model as guidance about how to configure it when they use it in their system.

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[Jojain]

@Jon I had a glance at what you did on paramak and that's really amazing ! About opensourced FEM solver I am considering using Code_Aster which you might now considering your workfield. It's the FEM code used to design French fission powerplants. The commands files are python files so it can be used together with cadquery. And the documentation is in french, which is nice since i'm french :D

@thebluedirt, I can't agree more, I'm always so frustrated about all the time we as analyst loose to clean up geometry like removing fillet or small holes etc. While it would be so much easier to have access to the CAD file to be able to make the modifications upstream rather than downstream.

Actually we often end up recreating geometry because it's simpler than to try to modify a "frozen" step file !

So actually in the end you would like to see cadquery being some kind of file extension, meaning we could download from a marketplace like grabcad, models in python-cadquery format ? It is interesting !

[Dave Cowden]

So actually in the end you would like to see cadquery being some kind of file extension, meaning we could download from a marketplace like grabcad, models in python-cadquery format ? It is interesting !

Replying to the thread this time (doh!)

Definitely! @jmwright a curated set of plugins started  This also defines a way of sharing plugins that can work at internet scale, with various plugins distributed and maintained separately, but then available for use by installing and registering.

It's exciting to think about what is possible when everyone can do work once, and anyone using cq can easily benefit! Whats even cooler is that we get all of the great python dependency management tools for free! IE, i can use poetry or similar to manage the dependencies of my model, including freezing them to keep the dependencies stable. 

When you think about it, the economies of leveraging established software tooling for CAD models becomes more and more powerful.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cadquery/31056255-d14c-4609-be50-bbb5d26232ban%40googlegroups.com.

[WillAdams]

The things which I'd really like to see happen here are:

 - support for an interface like to the Customizer from Thingiverse/OpenSCAD

 - a web site where one could upload designs which could then be customized using the customizer interface, and where one could export an STL, DXF, and/or SVG or arbitrary text files w/ user-defined extensions --- I'd really like to be able to export a B.O.M., or G-Code file

 - installing CADquery and the matching editor being as simple as installing OpenSCAD

William

[Adam Urbanczyk]

1 + 2 sound like parametricparts.com (offline - see https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/another-3d-printing-start-up-parametric-parts-8637/). I was not involved, maybe other devs have interest in reviving it.

3. What is difficult about unzipping and running: https://github.com/CadQuery/CQ-editor/releases/download/0.2/CQ-editor-Windows.zip (or similar for linux/osx)? Cannot get much easier than that.

Best,

Adam

[Jeremy Wright]

CadHub is currently under development by Kurt Hutten. It currently only supports OpenSCAD, but Kurt has been open to the idea of adding CadQuery support. I think time is the challenge for that project, just like with the rest of us. If somebody has the time and drive to contribute CadQuery support, I don't think Kurt would say no.

https://cadhub.xyz/