Interactive Elixir based CAD Modeling with OpenSCAD

OpenSCAD provides a programatic interface for generating CAD models which can ultimately be 3D printed. While it's syntax makes sense for rendering, it leaves something to be desired when it comes to automating large sets of objects. The language also reads, in my opinion, backwards. I found Elixir's pipe operator to be an elegant way to express these models.

## Draw a 3mm cube, with it's bottom left corner at 0,0,0
cube(size: 3) 
## rotate it 90 degrees around the x axis
|> rotate(v: {90, 0, 0}) 
## move it 10 mm along the y axis (depth)
|> translate(v: {0, 10, 0}) 

# a 1x2x3mm cube, with its center at 0,0,0
cube(size: {1, 2, 3}, center: true) 

• Models defined in Elixir
• Reusable components can be included as mix dependencies
• iex -S mix will watch for changes in a project's ./models directory, and run those scripts.
• an escript can also be built that watches for changes in the directory specified by the command line, but that version won't import modules from a project's ./lib dir.

Documentation

CheatSheet

You'll need OpenSCAD.

brew cask install openscad

Or download it for your platform here

Add to your project by putting the following in mix.exs:

  def application do
    [extra_applications: [:logger, :open_scad]]
  end
  def deps do
    [{:open_scad, "~> 0.5.0"}]
  end

This includes the OpenSCAD language and a watcher for filesystem changes.

In your projects' ./models directory, create exs scripts. They can output any number of .scad files.

Your ./lib directory, you can define modules that represent complex, reusable objects. These are things that you might want to include in other project, which you can do by including your project as a dependency in that projects' mix file.

My Keyboards repo is built with this library, and is a full working example.