[Noisebridge-discuss] Open Source CAD? [discuss/demo? @ 83c tonight]

[John Magolske]

* stars <stars at MIT.EDU> [090714 11:37]:
> Has anyone played around with open [mechanical] CAD programs like
> BRL CAD/mged, or any others? 1) I'm pretty psyched about open cad,
> and I wanna know what's popular and in use or worth using

I've been using mechanical CAD in my work for years (mostly AutoCAD,
Pro-E & SolidWorks) and would love to find a decent open CAD solution,
but I don't think there's much in the way of reasonably powerful FOSS
programs in this field. I'd be happy to be proven wrong about this...
or at least find something capable that runs in a *nix environment.

As Joachim mentioned, there's QCAD, which is a fairly basic 2D
program...haven't tried QCAD Professional (cost = €24.00), curious
to know how much additional functionality it provides over the GPL'd
Community Edition:
http://www.qcad.org/qcad_downloads.html
http://www.qcad.org/store/

Also GPL'd is VARKON, a Parametric CAD-tool from Sweden:
http://varkon.sourceforge.net/index.htm

HeeksCAD is under the BSD License & has been built for Windows,
Ubuntu, Debian, and OpenSUSE:
http://code.google.com/p/heekscad/
http://code.google.com/p/heekscnc/

Some non-FOSS (& unfortunately MSFT only) freeware:
Solid Edge 2D Drafting ... drawing layout, Goal Seeking, diagramming,
and dimensioning. It is fully compliant with ISO, ANSI, BSI, DIN, JIS
and UNI, and it's absolutely FREE to download and use.
http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/velocity/solidedge/free2d/index.shtml

Also non-FOSS and probably quite expensive, but multi-platform
(Linux/Unix, OS X in addition to MSFT) & quite capable is Parasolid:
http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/open/parasolid/index.shtml
http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/open/parasolid/portfolio/supported.shtml

There are other expensive & super-capable CAD programs that run on
Linux/UNIX (Pro-E & UG/NX come to mind). I'd be curious to find out
the relative merits of them (price, functionality, user-base) in the
event that purchasing a seat or two for the Noisebridge space at some
point might become a reality. There has been some discussion about how
cool it would be to get a license for SolidWorks -- and I'd be happy
to teach folks how to use it should that come to pass. It is a pretty
practical an widely used program... but I've been looking forward to
finding something that will run on Linux.

If anyone would like to join in on this discussion, maybe download
& try out QCAD, VARKON, HeeksCAD, Solid Edge 2D ... explore the
mystifying BRL etc., I'm heading over to the space tonight, should be
there by around 8pm. I figure it's somewhat shop class related :)


John


-- 
John Magolske
http://B79.net/contact