Hi,

I'm curious - there seem to be a lot of coders on here, as well as mechanical designers and tinkerers.

Pardon my ignorance, but does anybody know if there is a web-browser-based wiki-style portal for collaborative CAD designs?

I'm talking about something like Wikipedia, but instead of having a text-editor interface, it would be a CAD-style editing interface inside your browser screen. Imagine having a gallery of CAD designs where people could click on an existing design and immediately start modifying it, or where people could contribute their own new designs. Then with all that collaborative designing, it could build up a massive online collection of CAD designs of different things.

Then the RepRap community could immediately download any of those CAD designs to instantly make some useful part, or gadget, or whatever.

Does anything like that exist? Is it browser-based, and have a wiki level of friendliness?

Google Sketchup? I don't use it but it seems to be popular and somewhat open source.

Yeah, sure I know about Sketchup - but it's not quite as seamless as Wikipedia, in the sense that you need to download a plugin. It's still not at the point where anybody can just navigate to a page and hit edit and immediately start editing. I was thinking of something more AJAX-based, where it would be more naturally integrated with normal browser function, without even having to download a custom plugin.

The other main thing is that Google Sketchup doesn't allow wiki levels of collaboration. Everybody mostly makes their own model separately, and can upload it to the Google site. While you can allow others to edit it, I don't think you can leave your model open for just anybody to casually edit it, like how anybody can contribute to any given Wikipedia article.

Btw, is there RepRap firmware or software that will directly work with Google Sketchup files?

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/12/2013 04:32PM by sanman.

It seems like the logical first step towards this would be to get a decent revision control system working with CAD files.

Or alternatively, have an AJAX-based editor that can quickly read/write CAD data to backend database, which can store all past states necessary for revision control? The particular format the data is stored in on the database end would be optimized for loading/reading from the frontend editor, and could be independent of any particular CAD file format, with the site allowing you to export to the CAD format of your choice. File storage and database storage are each optimized for different needs.

A Wikipedia of 3D modeled eh?...

I don't think a web-based CAD application is required. Github can't compile source files either, after all.

What's needed is probably a CAD application available on the three major platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac) plus a simple viewer with some sort of source code management. And this CAD should allow to actually edit a file, like moving a hole, adding a corner, etc. Current CADs pretty much enforce to work as if everything were made from scratch.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

... FreeCAD maybe? - [free-cad.sourceforge.net]

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Viktor
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Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]