RapCAD

Last month I was saying I was going to hook the OpenSCAD back-end into RapCAD. It turned out to be simpler to just implement a backend myself. I started off implementing the GLView widget. I would have had to have done this anyway, since I didn’t want to hook any of OpenSCADs GUI code. I...»

I have been trying to understand and document the windows build process for OpenSCAD so that Marius and Clifford might soon be able to publish a new release. While doing this Marius and I got talking. Specifically he wanted to know whether the work I had done for RapCAD on variables would work in the...»

I haven’t done a lot with RapCAD recently, and its time for my monthly post. What I thought I would write about is my reaction to posts on the OpenSCAD mailing list regarding turning it into a Python language library. First and foremost I think the idea is a great way to provide extensibility. As...»

I have implemented syntax highlighting in RapCAD using the same lexical analysis engine as the script parser and evaluator uses. I wanted to do this for two reasons, firstly flex is comparatively faster than the example QT SyntaxHighlighter implementation which uses QRegExp’s. This is partly because the lexer is built at compile time, where as...»

RapCAD has now got to the point where scripts can be evaluated at a text level. What I mean by this is that modules functions statements and expressions can be evaluated and the results of those evaluations can be output to stdout using the echo module. There is no 3D output yet, so most of...»

After completing implementation of the RapCAD parser I decided to give it a thorough test against as many files as possible. I created a script that scoured thingiverse and created a list of thingiverse scad asset urls. I then ran the RapCAD parser against all of the downloaded scad scripts to see how it fared....»

For the purpose of understanding tools like Bison and Flex, I have been building a parser for RapCAD despite the fact that it will probably one day use a library version of OpenSCAD as the back end. My reasons for doing this are two fold, firstly I have never writtern a parser in Bison or...»

All this talk of RapCAD hasn’t gone un-noticed by the OpenSCAD maintainer(s). Recently on the OpenSCAD mailing list Marius Kintel has stepped forward and stated that he is now the core maintainer of OpenSCAD. He has also outlined his goals which are similar in essence to my own. Opening up development and try to build...»

Another motivation for writing RapCAD is to provide a complimentary back end tool for CloudsCAD. As I understand, a number of features have been requested by Tony Buser and the CloudsCAD community and which the OpenSCAD community has been unable to address. I am hoping to build a stronger community by setting up rapcad.org and...»

RapCAD is a new script based CAD IDE especially for RepRap printers. It will be a written from scratch based mostly on OpenSCAD and hopefully scad scripts will just work inside RapCAD. Ultimately however I would like to add new features to the script language, so that RapCAD files will be a superset of scad...»