CadQuery/cadquery

I had some good results using CadQuery [1] with CQ-editor [2] for visualization driven by Claude Code enhanced by a cadquery-llm-skill [3]. I didn't make anything too complicated, just cases for various ESP32 projects I am tinkering with, but that was very easy just describing what I want and iterating and refining until I am satisfied. It was much easier than doing it manually in FreeCAD and more dynamic as the changes were cheap and not tedious to do. [1] https://github.com/cadquery/cadquery [2] https://github.com/CadQuery/CQ-editor [3] https://github.com/jmwright/cadquery-llm-skill

I had been using Gemini to build OpenScad models. The other day Gemini mentioned CadQuery as an option. It's essentially OpenScad for Python. The big plus is b-rep modeler. https://github.com/cadquery/cadquery

Some other open source 3D CAD tools: Code-based - CadQuery - https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery/ - build123d - https://github.com/gumyr/build123d - OpenSCAD - https://openscad.cloud/openscad/ GUI (browser-based) - Cadmium (abandoned, cool idea) - https://mattferraro.dev/posts/cadmium

Having played around with this a bit, I recommend using https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery as the CAD language instead. I'm pretty sure it could even transpile to OnShape / Solidworks models as well, though it might require some funky hacks with their extensions frameworks

Try cadquery also! https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery

…r. It's why STEP files are a standardized format and can be imported / exported from most GUI based CAD builders. I think. Given that SDF also seems like it builds only STL files (I could be wrong), wouldn't learning build123d or CadQuery work better if one cares about compatibility with existing GUI based CAD modeling software? Additionally, atleast build123d offers a similar conceptual model to using Fusion360 and FreeCad - I have limited experience here - but essentially you sketch something in 2D on a particular plane, and then apply some operations to convert it to 3d in a particular manner - the simplest being extruding. This means the mental modeling of how to construct something is…

Keep in mind that OpenSCAD doesn't support exporting .step files. Ticket to add support has been open for a long time but it's a hard to implement. https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery is much more capable in that regards. It's based on more capable Open CASCADE Technology and Freecad also uses it. As for use cases, the only viable use case I see is to ask it to make a model based on a picture. Or ask it to fix the topological error. In other cases it's much faster to model than to describe it to agent