AoI Alternatives

Forrest Higgs Wrote:
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> Lord! Linux and "building from source"! I'd
> rather get tangled in poison oak.


Forrest, if you look at the website under "downloads" they have nice friendly .exe files for Windows as well. A mature project like this almost never requires Windows users to build it for themselves - they know they'll get that kind of reaction .

Of course, the executables are similarly out of date, but my suspicion is the program hasn't changed drastically in the last two years. And if you look at the fine print for the 7.12.4 announcement, it *does* say that this is a source-only release intended primarily for developers.

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One thing that strikes me as unique and promising about this software is that rather than a monolithic application it is "a collection of more than 400 tools, utilities, and applications". While this means it is probably not as well integrated as some more commercial products, it also means that a hobbyist could theoretically learn about one particular module and begin improving it without having to become well acquainted with the entirety of the source code. This generally leads to more rapid development of open source software. "Bazaar model" and "UNIX philosophy" and all that jazz. Of course, that is predicated on a sizable and knowledgeable userbase, which I don't think it has right now, contrary to Ralith's assertions. But the potential is there.

Kyle Corbitt Wrote:
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>
> One thing that strikes me as unique and promising
> about this software is that rather than a
> monolithic application it is "a collection of more
> than 400 tools, utilities, and applications".
>

That's promising? Sounds more like a nightmare, to me anyway.

Forrest Higgs Wrote:
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> Kyle Corbitt Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> >
> > One thing that strikes me as unique and
> promising
> > about this software is that rather than a
> > monolithic application it is "a collection of
> more
> > than 400 tools, utilities, and applications".
> >
>
> That's promising? Sounds more like a nightmare,
> to me anyway.


Right, we know. Kinda like Linux.

I'm no idealogue - I'll use whatever software gets the job done. I run Linux at work, but my primary OS at home is Vista. I also have a Kubuntu VM I run from Vista, and I dual boot (although I can't remember the last time I booted my Linux partition). I have a home server running Ubuntu as well. However, I spend 95% of my time at home in Vista, because you're absolutely right, it's easier for many things. I'm not advocating BRL-CAD because I think open source apps are inherently better, but because it's the best thing I've seen out there for the price. And yeah, the ability to run on Linux is a huge bonus over other CAD packages because I would like to spend more time in that environment - it's becoming nicer and more user-friendly every month, but I still have all the raw power of a fully integrated CLI whenever I need it.

Kyle Corbitt Wrote:
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>
> I'm no idealogue - I'll use whatever software gets
> the job done.

In a very real way, I'm not either. I've used upwards of a dozen operating systems over the years. IBM's with their Job Control Language (JCL) with no defaults was a living nightmare. I also used Sun Unix for several years on Sparc workstations with good results. Mind, the manuals for Sun Unix took up nearly two metres of shelf space, but you could do quite useful work with only a few pages in their thin summary manual.

I find myself caught. I've avoided going over to Vista because it's a resource pig without competition. I'd planned to shift over to Linux about now, but the damned thing is still as geeky as it was when I first started watching it's progress five years ago. Doing an informal look at my own website statistics Linux is getting about 17%, Mac OS about 8.5% and the remaining 75% Windows.

Those numbers are a little canted because of the technical nature of my website.
For another, non-technical website that I look after the numbers for Linux, Mac and Windows are 4%, 10% and 86%, respectively.

Clearly, Linux has a long way to go in reducing it's user hostility.

Forest,

Your opinion of modern Linux seems strange to me; this is the day in which it is available preinstalled at brick-and-mortar stores, and even (so I hear) pitched heavily by the salespeople to new computer users. Barring serious hardware support issues, an up-to-date Ubuntu install can give most users an easier time than the competition. Also, you're doing that popularity == quality thing again. I shouldn't have to explain why that's inaccurate.

You seem to presume that the reprap community should not be expected to complete technically advanced tasks such as compiling BRL-CAD. This seems silly; assembling a reprap is far more complicated a task than building a well-maintained software package. You don't really need any skills to run 3 commands a web page instructs you to, but I suspect assembling even just the electronics of a reprap is no small feat for someone without relevant experience. In the end, though, this is largely moot; in a community such as this, there will always be at least a few highly capable software techs, and preparing packages and executables from sources is not terribly challenging when a project places the emphasis that this one does on an easy and reliable build process.

You speak fearfully of the massive-scale modularity of BRL-CAD. This division of the package into many independent tools, libraries, and utilities is in keeping with the most valuable of Unix traditions, and one of its greatest strengths. Thanks to this, tasks such as working with its native file format are largely straightforward, as instead of writing a complex parser one can simply use that which is already available, encapsulated in a library with a simple interface. As Kyle says, this also makes the internal code itself much easier to jump into. I realize that these development tasks are not directly relevant to its practicality as a end-user CAD tool (which is getting the work it admittedly needs), but their enabling is what gives it real strength, providing a great deal of reassurance that it will not stagnate, which is a major issue with a project in as obscure a niche as this.

Ralith Wrote:
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>
> You seem to presume that the reprap community
> should not be expected to complete technically
> advanced tasks such as compiling BRL-CAD.
>
Nope, they shouldn't. If you want Reprap technology to become something more than a geek fad it's going to have to be a LOT easier than that.
>
> This
> seems silly; assembling a reprap is far more
> complicated a task than building a well-maintained
> software package.
>
Did you hear me suggest that building a Darwin is simple enough to get it a large following? Darwin is a good start, but Repraps have a bunch of design iterations to go though before they get a large following.

I would be extremely surprised if producing a new reprap and connecting it to power and a computer did not involve more work than running a single command to automatically configure a package to your environment, one to build the new software, and one to plug it in - er, install it.

This also leads to the peculiar concerns of being expected to work for free rather than for help. Developing something that a technically capable person can put together and work on tends to result in improvements coming in from that person fiddling with it to make it work better, and so is exchanging work for work. Expending work to develop that thing into something that someone who is not capable or willing to become capable of such work is doing work for very little benefit - doing work for free. Distributions find other causes to do that work - sometimes simple charity, sometimes simple profit. I see no reason to say that other people should develop things for free.

I agree with Forrest that RepRap should be completely novice friendly - the current status quo is unacceptable in the long run, if this project is to have a future. Along those lines, I DON'T think that BRL-CAD in its current incarnation is an acceptable solution - as I understand it, although it is much more powerful than AoI it is almost certainly more arcane. While that may be an acceptable tradeoff for you and me, I have no particular desire to force others to learn such an inhibitive interface. The way to make a project grow is not to put up artificial barriers so that only the very motivated folks can get in - if you lower barriers, open the project to a wide variety of users, and maybe change the world while you're at it, the motivated folks will come.

In my view, any candidate to replace AoI must be BOTH more powerful and easier to use. While BRL-CAD goes above and beyond in the first category, we all know it is very lacking in the second. However, I completely disagree with Forrest's assessment that because it's not polished, it's not worth the time of day. I see this software as having enormous latent potential, and the task of putting a new and intuitive frontend on it is relatively trivial compared to trying to write a new CAD package with similar functionality. It is also an active project with many developers and upgrades going on right now, including one that *might* (emphasis on the might - they don't seem to even have any alpha code up yet) solve the GUI issue, which is the only objection to the software that I've heard yet. And if it doesn't get finished by the end of the summer, well, maybe next year. What's not to like?

Well said. BRL-CAD is in some senses in much the same position as Darwin right now; the fundamentals are great, but there's still quite a ways to go in terms of accessibility -- a distance that both are likely to traverse. I'll even go so far as to suggest that implementing a new interface for BRL-CAD is much easier than designing a widely accessible rapid prototyper. Should the current effort fail completely, there's significant enthusiasm for a new GUI within the dev team, and even from scratch, as Kyle says, such a task is minor compared to beginning from scratch as the only real competition appears to be doing.

Although, there may be a simpler approach. Might one be able to take an existing open source modeling package and adapt it to support BRL-CAD, needing relatively little effort compared to writing from scratch? That could give us a more friendly GUI very quickly, which could then be further optimized for CAD use.

Edit: Talked to a dev on IRC, turns out the new GUI code is in fact out there: svn co "https://brlcad.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/brlcad/rt^3/trunk" "rt^3"

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/15/2008 09:19PM by Ralith.

just thought I would post it looks like no body has mentioned this software I found the link on the www.mechmate.com site


[www.caligari.com] the free software is called truespace.

from looking at the web site it kind of looks like blender which I have been trying
out.

Bruce W.

Found another link to some cool stuff in my search for all things "cad powered".
they have some cool things listed in the software section. plus some free .stl files.


[cnc4free.org]

Bruce

Hi Bruce,

brucew Wrote:
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> ... it looks like no body has mentioned this software ...

Look here: [forums.reprap.org]

Viktor

my bad


Thanks Viktor there was a lot mentioned what do you think of the software?

Bruce

Hi Bruce,

Truespace is great! - it's a powerfull 3D-programm with tons of features, possibilities and STL-export, so would fit perfect for our needs.

The tutorials are very good too, and you need them - you have much to learn until you're in. But it's much easier to adopt then blender.

I'm in some german based CNC-forums with a big base of hints, informations, download-stuff and such ...

It's a different comunity with similar problems and solutions, so sometimes i can exchange some hints - the biggest problem is the shear amount of informations!

Viktor

Thanks for the input I think I will give it a try.

Does it have good measurement tools?

That is what is lacking in AOI and so far I have not seen any in Blender.

Bruce

I've looked over the website for truespace. It's a very mature program. With lots of features. But of the highlighted features, only 1/16th had anything to do with CAD as opposed to animation and art. And that was only snap-to-grid.

So it, like blender, is primarily an animation package.

And it's free as in beer, but not free as in freedom, and it's windows only.

I don't see it's advantage over blender? Prettier UI maybe? Easier to learn? Can't be much easier. Based on the comments here, you'll still need to spend hours in tutorials. And most of them will be concerned with shading, rendering, animation, and getting things to look right. Though to be fair even the BRL-CAD tutorials do spend some time on those topics.

There is no way to avoid the learning curve for any powerful 3d package. Better to face the music now and enjoy the benefits later that to sit in a chair on the side of the hall and feel the pain forever.

---

--
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