{"id":488,"date":"2011-03-25T18:20:02","date_gmt":"2011-03-26T01:20:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/?p=488"},"modified":"2011-03-25T18:20:02","modified_gmt":"2011-03-26T01:20:02","slug":"why-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/25\/why-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I <3 OpenSCAD"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/x-axis.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-495\" title=\"x-axis\" src=\"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/x-axis-300x172.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"172\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/x-axis-300x172.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/x-axis-1024x590.jpg 1024w, http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/x-axis.jpg 1280w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>So my CNC design is coming along nicely now, and I'm really liking developing it in OpenSCAD.\u00a0 I'm trying to organize everything well to make the design easy to modify and come up with a good work flow for going from designing individual components, to fitting them together into assemblies, to actually generating the toolpaths to cut out the parts on a CNC router.<\/p>\n<p>One of the cool things you can do if you build full assemblies from your individual parts in OpenSCAD (or any CAD program, really) is do a quick first pass of your design and make sure everything fits together nicely.\u00a0 Here's an example issue I caught when looking at my X-axis assembly:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/we-have-a-problem.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-494\" title=\"we-have-a-problem\" src=\"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/we-have-a-problem-300x172.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"172\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/we-have-a-problem-300x172.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/we-have-a-problem-1024x589.jpg 1024w, http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/we-have-a-problem.jpg 1280w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>One of the pipes that span the X-axis frame intersects the spans of the gantry.\u00a0 To fix this I can open the include file for the X-axis and change a single line that defines how wide the\u00a0 spans are or the\u00a0 spacing of the guide rods, recompile, and end up with this:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/fixed.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-493\" title=\"fixed\" src=\"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/fixed-300x172.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"172\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/fixed-300x172.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/fixed-1024x589.jpg 1024w, http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/fixed.jpg 1280w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Problem fixed!\u00a0 If I extend this approach and make an assembly for each full functional unit, each axis, each tool head, etc., I can throw them all together and see how my whole final machine will look and identify problems with the design before I start cutting parts.\u00a0 Moreover, others can also easily see how the hole thing fits together, make changes, and check their mods easily as well.\u00a0 That's the plan at least.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So my CNC design is coming along nicely now, and I'm really liking developing it in OpenSCAD.\u00a0 I'm trying to organize everything well to make the design easy to modify and come up with a good work flow for going from designing individual components, to fitting them together into assemblies, to actually generating the toolpaths [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[24,23,40],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":498,"href":"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488\/revisions\/498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.built-to-spec.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}