Hey, this is super interesting! Thanks for sharing.
I have been playing with using the Python console/scripts/macros in FreeCAD to create 3D models. I found this to be very friendly for my programmer mindset. I have learned a bit of onshape, tinkercad, blender and freecad, but I find it extremely tedious and full of unknowns that I struggle to make sense of and resolve (e.g. contraints in freecad, sometimes I just don't know how to add the missing constraints, or just adding text to a curved face in literally all programs, it's never as easy as click the face add text, there are always gotcha's).
I wonder how does openscad compare to FreeCADs python, if you know. I just found https://pythonscad.org/ which looks interesting, but then, the BOSL2 library looks super interesting and important for a good user experience, so I do not know if the PythonSCAD could somehow just import it and use it.
I guess there's homework for me to do here, but if anyone has the experience to get a hint of "what is the best/easiest python-based programming way of doing 3D modeling", I'd be forever thankful for sharing their thoughts.
LLMs are really good at writing Python, so iterating over a model in code I found is really quick, and I really enjoy the process. Meanwhile clicking so many times in so many menus makes me desist on designing anything more-or-less complex.
The venv created for this is ephemereal (it can not be if you want), so you don't need to keep in mind cleaning up stuff and so. Also uv is really fast in creating the venv and installing whatever is needed. Coming from using plain pip and venvs (and having pain setting up different python version interpreters for projects), and poetry just after that, I am pretty happy with the improvements.
I've only learned a tiny bit of Rust, and I feel the same. Going from the bottom up, makes it all make so much sense. (Albeit I still like the Rattlesnake syntax haha)
I was not familiar with the acronym ETL and it is not explained anywhere in the website! My feedback would be to at least write it once, on the first instance so others like me will know what they are reading :)
Looking at the examples, for quick UIs, REMI seems simpler. And PySimpleGUI (https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI) offers REMI as a backend to deploy on web too (PySimpleGUI is pretty simple to learn).
I took a look and didn't see any element to show video (real time video streaming? showing a webcam demo maybe?) which I find like an interesting application.
Making GUIs is always a fair amount of work/overhead on whatever you are working on, and I like to stay in Python when possible (I've used REMI (https://github.com/rawpython/remi) to create web apps before in Python). Thanks for creating this. I look forward to updates!
I'd like to point to the excellent REMI [1] library that provides similar capabilities to Lona. You can create web apps by only writing Python. They can also be executed as GUI programs. You can even choose REMI to be the output backend of PySimpleGUI [2].
Not sure what the differences are, but good to know there are similar approaches :) Maybe every project can learn from each other. Thanks for sharing!
I wonder how does openscad compare to FreeCADs python, if you know. I just found https://pythonscad.org/ which looks interesting, but then, the BOSL2 library looks super interesting and important for a good user experience, so I do not know if the PythonSCAD could somehow just import it and use it.
I guess there's homework for me to do here, but if anyone has the experience to get a hint of "what is the best/easiest python-based programming way of doing 3D modeling", I'd be forever thankful for sharing their thoughts.
LLMs are really good at writing Python, so iterating over a model in code I found is really quick, and I really enjoy the process. Meanwhile clicking so many times in so many menus makes me desist on designing anything more-or-less complex.