Category: RapCAD

Another motivation for writing RapCAD is to provide a complimentary back end tool for CloudsCAD. As I understand, a number of features have been requested by Tony Buser and the CloudsCAD community and which the OpenSCAD community has been unable to address. I am hoping to build a stronger community by setting up rapcad.org and hosting state of the art bugtracking and source code management tools.

RapCAD is a new script based CAD IDE especially for RepRap printers. It will be a written from scratch based mostly on OpenSCAD and hopefully scad scripts will just work inside RapCAD. Ultimately however I would like to add new features to the script language, so that RapCAD files will be a superset of scad files. The IDE will contain project management tools, to allow more than one script to be grouped into a project. Another planned feature is a fully syntax hi-lighted script editor, as well as a 3D visualisation window reminiscent of OpenSCAD. The IDE will also contain gcode visualisation and generation tools as can be found in the esteemed Repsnapper. I am hoping to reap the benefits of combining these two applications into one and allow them to share code, for example slice and dice might be performed using CGAL. But more generally my motivation for doing this is because I would like a one stop app that can be both the design tool, and printing tool without having to go through the intermediary step of having to convert to and from STL. Support for importing from existing STL files will still be available facilitated by an import_stl() function in the script or by some other means.

Registered the domain rapcad.org