If you have to design a door block for your home, programming is no the first thing that comes to mind. Creating geometry with programs is less intuitive and has a steeper learning curve than designing in a CAD soft with a nice UI. When the project becomes more complex, the steeper learning curve is worth taking up. You will be fighting an uncommon way to design stuff, sometimes unfriendly and cumbersome APIs but there are many rewards along the way.
When one thinks of CAD, clicking menus and dragging the mouse to create shapes usually comes to mind. Yet, this is not the only way to do it: you can actually write a program that creates shapes and geometry. This is called programmatic CAD and it has many advantages.
Since programmatic CAD is normally done using a CAD Kernel Library that keeps backwards compatibility, you are no longer dependent on vendor software versions. Even free CAD ‘click factories’ programs suffer from this: try to open a 5 year old model in the latest version …. And with programmatic CAD, anything you design is parametric. Change that radius, no problem, everything adapts.
The possibilities are not restrained by what the software vendor has in mind. You can connect to a server, retrieve some data that you use as input for your design. You can combine logic and data, or separate it (better). The choice is yours.
But the best is yet to come: you can version your CAD geometry generating programs like any other program. Your CAD project is versionable with git or any other version management tool. An this opens the door to asynchronous and heterogeneous collaboration. That’s better suited to open hardware projects; when any contributor might be working on improvements anywhere, at any time and with a different set of tools.
Programmatic CAD is also great to learn programming: the feedback is visual, 3d shapes, arrays of cubes … make the learning more fun than console outputs. And thanks to the great OpenCascade and its PythonOCC bindings, it is free !
Up to date and outside of proprietary CAD scripting, the most famous programmatic CAD initiative is OpenSCAD. And it is great and used. CadRacks goes by the same philosophy as OpenSCAD, trying to add an industrial-grade CAD kernel and ways to assemble parts as intuitively as possible.
Pros
- Get out of the click factory
- Software version independence. Only depend on kernel that normally keeps backwards compatibility.
- Parametric by design
- Higher abstraction and possibilities
- Versionable like software projects
- Easier asynchronous and heterogeneous collaboration
- Good to learn programming
- Free
Cons
- Less intuitive / Steep learning curve
- Uncommon approach
- Sometimes unfriendly APIs