And oh yeah, here's a video of CloudSCAD on an iPad.  Sometimes I even impress myself!

Filed under  //   cloudscad   makerbot   rails   reprap   ruby   rubyonrails  

This is a little premature, but I wanted to share some progress I've made today on an idea I've been thinking about for a while now.  When I'm not hacking on 3D printers, my day job is web development so it's about time I start using my real skills for this stuff.  I call it CloudSCAD - it's OpenSCAD for the web.  It lets you write, share, mashup, and customize parametric 3D models using the OpenSCAD scripting language all within the browser and doesn't require anything to be installed locally.

As you can see in this screenshot, one of the cool things it does is parse the OpenSCAD script looking for parameters.  Then presents those variables in a friendly HTML form so that people can modify an object for their needs and click a button to download the customized STL file suitable for printing on a 3D printer.  They don't have to know anything about OpenSCAD, install anything, or touch a line of code.  Also, the author of the script doesn't have to do anything special - just put some well placed comments in their code.

What you can't see is the edit page.  I'm using Bespin to provide a syntax color coded editor for writing scripts.  I hope it will eventually include code completion and a few other things.  In some ways this is (or could be) even better than the editor in OpenSCAD itself.

Like I said, this is pretty premature.  I've registered CloudSCAD.com but there's nothing there for you to see yet.  Everything you see in that screenshot and what I've described is finished, though.  Not too bad for one days work.  ;)

Filed under  //   makerbot   openscad   rails   reprap   ruby   rubyonrails