ImplicitCAD 0.0.1 Release

I’m pleased to announce the second release of ImplicitCAD: 0.0.1. (The first release was 0.0.0 because 0 is the true first ordinal.)

The point of this release is somewhat arbitrarily chosen. We were over due for one and no clean break was in sight. Then I woke up with a nasty headache and couldn’t seem to code, so I thought I’d do a release instead.

I’m going to try and martial together my thoughts and discuss changes in this release and what’s coming up. The TL;DR is that ImplicitCAD is going exciting places and if you are willing to tolerate bugs and file bug reports, you should become a beta user for it.

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Manipulation of Implicit Functions (With an Eye on CAD)

Most people are familiar with the equation for a circle, :

I prefer to think of it as the curve where is zero — the locations where the Euclidean distance from is one.

NYC Maker Faire Talk: Programmatic CAD

In addition to running a booth at Maker Faire this weekend, I gave a talk on programmatic CAD and its future.

My only public speaking experience prior to this was doing was doing workshops at hacklab and presentations to my classmates in high school and while this was a non-trivial amount of practice (in grade 10, I ended up teaching two semesters of the physics course I was taking in the form of seminars every class because the teacher didn’t know anything) it was all small scale (at max 15 people), highly interactive and mostly improvised on the spot. In other words, nothing at all like speaking at NYC Maker Faire.

Surface-Oriented CAD, Math, & Telescopes

surfcad is a python proof-of-concept CAD library I’ve been writing for what I call “surface-oriented CAD”.

The idea came to me when I realized that some of things I’d been trying to make in openscad, a CSG based CAD program, would have been much easier to do in the software I’d written for making models of mathematical objects (eg. this model of a solution the diffusion equation). In this software, surface were constructed based on mathematical functions. One had to think to make sure that their object was closed, but it was possible to describe things that would have been prohibitively difficult in a CAD program like openscad.