New Open Hardware company

Laszlo KREKACS laszlo.krekacs.list at gmail.com
Tue Jul 21 17:44:06 CEST 2009


On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Wolfgang
Spraul<wolfgang at qi-hardware.com> wrote:
> For mechanical design, it's even harder. Werner thinks HeeksCAD is the best
> candidate, so Qi is looking into that now. Our mechanical engineer Tully
> (ex-OM as well) has found some serious problems with HeeksCAD already, that
> he says prohibit him from doing effective work to prepare for plastic
> injection. Oh well...
> So on the mechanical tool, same thing, we want something free, and we will
> follow Werner's leadership or ask him for advice if we are ahead of gta02-core
> in some area.

I tried out HeeksCAD too. For me the showstopper is the complete lack of
true boolean operation. It simply "group" the objects together, but dont really
union them (in mathematical correct way).

The best candidate (the most serious open source software) would be
wildcat: http://wildcat-cad.blogspot.com/
http://code.google.com/p/wildcat-cad/source/list

However its author stopped working on it (unknown reason) from this
january.
If I were Qi Hardware I would seriously consider to donate to this project
or even hire the developer (wildcat cad). Opensource 3D cad tool needs
a kick to get starting.

HeeksCAD is a "simple" frontend to opencascade.org. (I dont want to
be negative here.)

I definietly propose you to get touch with the wildcat developer.
What is his plan (he is a phd student?), how you could help him to
continue the development, and finish the basic showstopper features.
Please consider to get contact with him.

I do hope the best for you. The longer you stay in business the more
improvements gets the free software engineering tools (cad, kicad, etc),
what is a wonderful thing.

Best regards,
 Laszlo



More information about the community mailing list