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Scripting, Customization and Automation Using Tcl in Creo (tcl-lang.org)
33 points by blacksqr on Dec 1, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments



This is pretty neat. For those interested in automating CAD, Solidworks has a COM interface (great C# support) and Fusion 360 has Python, C++, and JavaScript interfaces.

https://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/api-support.htm

https://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=GUID-C154...


And fully programmatic CAD also, such as http://www.openscad.org/


I guess for some or generative structures it makes sense, but programming a CAD object sounds like something from the 1970's. Being able to click on a corner and say, "fillet, radius whatever" makes way more sense to me. I must not be "getting it" - could you explain how it is better? I get that it's FOSS, so besides that?


The difference is programmatic cad can have composable, repeatable, and automatable operations.

What if you have a thousand corners to fillet, in some kind of gradient, so each is a little different than the last? You won't be clicking and menu-ing your way out of that.

What if you want to do transforms on models as part of a process, like read a pile of models and do something to each? Programmatic. And then you can pass that process to another transform doing something else.

etc.

In a programmatic cad system, it's just a few lines of code.


Has an effort to add a full GUI to OpenSCAD ever been considered? Would be absolutely amazing to be able to design the way you're describing, and then throw it into a git repo.


CadQuery allows scripting of FreeCAD, and comes close to "OpenSCAD with a GUI".

https://github.com/dcowden/cadquery


CATIA has VBS, if you're in that particular circle of hell.




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