heekscad

Hi,

I want to invite reprap core dev team and comunity to check to heekscad [1]
as an alternative to AOI, also could be developed plugins to connect to reprap machine and more stuff

check this intro:

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HeeksCAD is not finished, yet.

HeeksCAD is a free, open source, CAD application written by me, Dan Heeks, danheeks@gmail.com Anyone can download it from [code.google.com]

Functionality: Import solid models from STEP and IGES files. Draw construction geometry and lines and arcs. Create new primitive solids, or make solids by extruding a sketch or by making a lofted solid between sketches. Modify solids using blending, or boolean operations. Save IGES, STEP and STL. Printer plot the 2D geometry or to HPGL. Import and export dxf files; lines, arcs, ellipses, splines and polylines are supported. Use the geometric constraints solver to create accurate drawings from rough sketches.

See here for instruction how to use HeeksCAD [code.google.com]

The solid modeling is provided by Open CASCADE. [www.opencascade.org] The graphical user interface is made using wxWidgets. [www.wxwidgets.org]

HeeksCAD can be translated into any language. There are currently English, German, and Itallian translations.

HeeksCAD has been built for Windows, Ubuntu, Debian, and OpenSUSE.

see the Wiki tab for details

It is possible to make Add-In modules, see HeeksCNC, HeeksArt, and HeeksPython projects.
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[1] [code.google.com]

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Paul

I just downloaded heekscad, and have played around with it for a few minutes.

I does look very very promising, and I'm definitely going to watch this tool, but for now, I think I'll hold back because....

1) When doing solid operations, the hierarchy of operations are lost, e.g. if I create a sphere and a cube and then perform a cut, immediately the two objects are deleted and replaced with an object called "Result of Cut Operation". This makes a "design as you go" workflow very difficult, because I have no way of going back and modifying the original solids.

I tried to create a post in the forums, but they are locked to members only, so asking if there is some option for changing this functionality could not be done. Given the level of documentation available,

2) It seems to be a tad unstable, it crashed 5-10 times during my 1/2 hour trial.

but... I'll definately keep monitoring HeeksCAD, and would love to try and make the CNC portion work with additive processes.