aerkiaga's blog

This week, I reimagined my fluidics tools. Rather than a complete solution, they were redone to work with other programs, so now you can simply draw a circuit in KiCAD and make it into an OpenSCAD script.

Of course, that leads us to OpenSCAD. No matter how much I love this tool, I feel it needs improvements. In particular, it needs speed, lots of it! And the CGAL backend just can't be enough for this, or for solid modeling in general.

I heard of CadQuery, a pretty neat piece of software, if it weren't for its fragile installation procedure, which requires an immense number of compile-time dependencies.

I tried to persuade the code into compiling, which kinda worked... Through a lengthy script that patched many files to push the installation forward, I got much progress, but ultimately quit.

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And here's what I did: reimplement OpenSCAD with an OCCT backend. Nah, just kidding. Well, kinda. I've written a full lexer and parser, a half-baked compiler and a minimal bytecode interpreter, all in plain old C, linked everything against OCCT and... got a Standard_DomainError a few minutes ago. That's what's kept me busy these days.

Oh, yes, I do intend to replicate the entire thing. I'll just need to work on it for more than a week, no matter how productive it's been ;)

Edit: error fixed. Now we're making some serious cylinders!