Hi everyone,

I've been using OpenSCAD for a month or two.  I think it is a fantastic tool
and I have great things in mind for it!

While I was playing around it occurred to me that I could use OpenSCAD to
wrap the large number of Actobotics parts available from Servo City to make
quite a nice library.  Along the way I (re)invented the connections concept,
seriously stubbed my mental toe on quaternion math, and ended up making
quite a few components, covering maybe 80% of the Actobotics range, a
handful of parts from other places and a couple of examples.

I've published this and some documentation at:

https://github.com/davidthings/mocad

and would really appreciate questions, comments, and advice.

What I've done seems useful to me, but being a bit of a noob to OpenSCAD, my
biggest worry is that what I have done is completely stupid or redundant in
some serious way!

Specific questions I thought of:

• Does this project as a whole make sense?

• Does the formalism of Part and PartPosition make sense?

• Is the naming OK?

• Are there critical gaps in the documentation?

• Could some of the internal math be more efficient?

My plan is to leave this for comment for a little while, then if all is
well, possibly expose it a bit to the Actobotics / Maker crowd to see what
they think.

I'm looking forward to hearing any reactions!

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Hi David,

Nice work! I'm working on the MCAD library (at the moment getting myself up
to speed, exploring some concepts). One thing that would be very helpful for
openSCAD users is a standard library of existing parts, such as this. Many
websites like mcmaster.com have iges/stl/solidworks files available - not so
much scad. It's unfortunate because scad files are perfect for
generative/enumerative catalog parts. Having scad files on vendor websites
would also be a great way to promote the platform.

I look forward to checking out mocad and am interested in discussing
organization and extension of libraries like this with you.

Mitch

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Hi David,

At first glance this looks really awesome!
One of the things we hope to facilitate with OpenSCAD in the future is support for user-contributed libraries, through some sort of online repository, as well as officially supporting or endorsing a style for describing connectors.

We’re also (or rather, hyperair is) working on modernizing the MCAD library. I’m not sure how such libraries would be shipped in the future, but either merging or breaking up such libraries, using said online repository, would make sense.

Cheers,

-Marius