CAD coding

OPENSCAD Credit: http://openscad.org

Hungarian boy genius Tam Hanna helps you improve your 3D models with OpenSCAD, a 3D printer and a dose of home-renovation advice…

OUR EXPERT

Tam Hanna’s creativity can be compared to the amount of humour found in a stone or the communication capability of popped balloon. In short, he is the ideal candidate to explain how to design cool things using OpenSCAD.

This tutorial and the one that will follow next month use a series of natural 3D objects to T introduce how OpenSCAD works. While a complete discussion of the software’s programming language is impossible due to the system’s power, we will attempt to give an overview of the capabilities provided by this open source app to get you up and exploring this incredibly useful design tool.

OpenSCAD, which started life in a (since run-down) Austrian government research facility, has established itself well – at the time of writing, almost all distros provide a ready-to-run version. Sadly, these are usually heavily out of date.

Instead, open the URL https://openscad.org/ downloads.html in a browser of your choice and scroll down until you find the Other Linux section. Click the button corresponding to your operating system’s architecture; currently, OpenSCAD is available for x86 and ARM. The reward is the downloading of the file OpenSCAD-2021.01-x86_64.AppImage, which can be executed from the command line: $ chmod +x OpenSCAD-2021.01-x86_64.AppImage $ ./OpenSCAD-2021.01-x86_64.AppImage

After running these commands, OpenSCAD presents the getting-started wizard. Click the New button to open the OpenSCAD editing environment (see screenshot, above-right).

The white window on the screen’s left side is the input area. The yellow-backgrounded space shows the current contents of the rendering cache, while the console window below provides status information from the rendering engine. As the proof is in the pudding, place the following line in the code editor and click the preview icon: sphere(r=20);