I want to learn OpenScad! Anyone have any tips?

[Kingoddball]

I want to learn openscad - Looks scary!
I found a few tutorials, one on makerbot I'm reading now: http://www.makerbot.com/blog/tag/openscad-tutorial/

But does any one have any info or tips to help someone who has ZERO knowledge?
All of my designs are done in TinkerCAD (which I fully recommend to anyone!!).
The makerbot blog is poorly formatted. My eyes wander too often and I get side tracked.
The scad online manual is UUUUUUUGLY!

I need to use OpenScad to fix some files I'm working with and build some add-on's.

.... Secret project which I will release on here soon!

[Kingoddball]

Aha!
I found one thing which is not in the tutorials! Case sensitivity! All text has to be written in lower case. If I use an upper case character or all uppercase it just fails!

[ldabkey]

Lots of videos out there on YouTube helped me. Another thing is download other scad files and study what people are doing....like "how did they do that?" Change the code and see what it does. Lastly, sometimes, you have to just jump in the water to learn how to swim. Start a small project....like building a snowman.

[old man emu]

One would hope that a really nice lady from Texas might offer some help to we poor suffering ignoranti.

Old Man Emu

[truly_bent]

OME;

Read through your entire OpenSCAD Help Center thread last night. I ran across OpenSCAD not long ago, and being a C programmer since before the Great Flood, i was intrigued, but knew that if i got sucked into it, it could end up eating up SCADs of time (Ha! SCADs of time. Get it? Maybe not - you're from "down unda"). Anyway, i decided to scan the manual and started loading up a few .scad programs to have a look. Haven't studied that threaded screw program you posted, but saved it for later.

Got to the 'concat' function and found out it didn't work. What the...? You gotta have a concat() function, in any language. Upon further investigation it turns out that it doesn't work in the current "stable" release of 2104.03, but does work in the "development snapshot" release 2015.01.08 (scroll to bottom). This new release has a few more fixes and is prettier to boot. Recommended.

I agree with one of the guys, in the other thread, that OpenJSCAD is a better product. It can, by the way, be run locally (on your computer) as opposed to running it in the cloud. The upside is that OpenSCAD and OpenJSCAD are 90% compatible, and so most of what you learn in OpenSCAD can be transferable in the future.

Of what i know so far, i tend to agree with other critics that the language itself is a bit of a "dog's breakfast". This business of calling a translate function before the creation (instantiation) of an object seems counterintuitive. Once these foibles are accepted though, things can move ahead.

[Roxy]

I want to learn openscad - Looks scary!
...
The scad online manual is UUUUUUUGLY!

I need to use OpenScad to fix some files I'm working with and build some add-on's.

One would hope that a really nice lady from Texas might offer some help to we poor suffering ignoranti.

Old Man Emu

Well... The best advice is to jump in with both feet. It is a little over whelming at first. And I still can't do a lot of things the language offers like Polygons, but its amazing how simply some things can be constructed with it. With that said, I think the trick is learning what things the language naturally handles and what things are better done with other tools. That Cartoon Car is a good example. For sure, the 3D Graphics tools are better suited for that task than OpenScad.

KingOddBall: If you post the files and the changes you need, it may be simple to make the change and everybody can follow along?

[Roxy]

I agree with one of the guys, in the other thread, that OpenJSCAD is a better product. It can, by the way, be run locally (on your computer) as opposed to running it in the cloud. The upside is that OpenSCAD and OpenJSCAD are 90% compatible, and so most of what you learn in OpenSCAD can be transferable in the future.

I haven't had time to mess with it yet, but OpenJScad does look much 'cleaner'. It fixes some of the syntax issues with OpenScad and it also eliminates some of the deficiencies (like singular variable assignments). I suspect we will see OpenJScad start to replace OpenScad soon.

[old man emu]

But don't you have to learn Java to use Openjscad?

Sounds like you'd need lashings* of extra time to master it.

OME

Lashings: English equivalent of scads

[Roxy]

But don't you have to learn Java to use Openjscad?

I certainly don't know for sure. But... No... I don't think so. Looking at the instruction manual I think the J is there because the compiler is written in Java and they needed to change the name because even though it is very OpenScad 'like', it isn't OpenScad. It would be good to have somebody that is actually using it jump in and comment if what I'm saying is not true.

[truly_bent]

I've just started having a look into this:
- The OpenJsCad documentation discusses all the OpenScad functions right along with the object oriented ones. This is good for comparison and learning purposes, if you happen to already know OpenSCad. As a Solidworks user, i'm quite impressed with what OpenJsCad can do.
- Just to check, i dumped the ridged_beams.scad program (found on this page) into the OpenJsCad home page. It took longer than expected to render, but then it has to be run through a translator first. This screen grab was the result. Obviously no problem reading that file.



- I've started looking into running OpenJsCad locally (offline). I've installed Node.js on my system, which is the Java interpreter that OpenJsCad uses on their site and downloaded the OpenJsCad source code. Node.js comes with a openscad-openjscad-translator built in, so if i ever do get it operational it should have the same capabilities as the online version. By the way, the preferred browser for this is Chrome. That or Firefox (my fave) are the only two capable of running the site for now. More browsers are anticipated.