Motivation

OpenSCAD is a very cool tool that lets you express 3D models using its own language. Unfortunately the language itself comes with a lot of intentional limitations.

• No mutation of variables (immutability, "single assignment of any variable")
• Limited number of iterations
• No file I/O

These exist for the reason that they don't want the language to be able to do bad things to people's computers, which allows the "script sharing culture" to be safe.

Additionally the choice to use their own language brings with it a whole new mental model that must be learned and mastered. This is a problem for wide adoption.

This fork lets you use Python inside of OpenSCAD as its native language

No extra external script to create OpenSCAD code. And as its based on openscad we aim to keep all the features which already exist in openscad. Only added features, no skipped ones ...

Before I continue I'd like to say I fully appreciate all the efforts the team and the Open Source community has contributed towards it over the years. The project is truly a work of love and has brought for many the joy of programming back into their lives. I believe the choice to have a safe script language is a good one.

These limitations cause OpenSCAD programs to be written in the most convoluted ways, making them difficult to understand. While my goal to be able to use Python with OpenSCAD is actually completed, the problem that remains is getting it merged into mainline OpenSCAD.

The argument is Python will introduce a massive security hole into the sharing culture. So the proposed solution is to put the Python capability behind an option, which I have done. Additionally OpenSCAD asks you, if you trust to a new Python Script and it will saves this decsion for you in an SHA256 hash. Now I hope it's just a matter of time until things are merged.

This is where you come in. Use this fork, have your say, and let's get it in!

A nice tutorial walking you through some exercises can be found here

Get started

If you're new to "code CAD", please first read this short introduction and browse the plethora of already existing solutions to this problem space.

Before downloading it, please understand that "Python | OpenSCAD" is a fork currently maintained by myself, gsohler. I heavily wish for this fork/branch to be merged into mainline OpenSCAD and have been working towards making it happen. You can follow the progress here.

There are several benefits to using Python over OpenSCAD's DSL (domain specific language):

1. Faster general computation due to faster interpreter
2. Utilize any pip packages
3. More familiar syntax
4. More familiar computation model

Hopefully these benefits will help draw more people to the wonderful world of code CAD!

Ok, now it's probably a good idea to download it. Dont forget to enable python experimental feature in the preference. You might also want start openscad with '--trust-python' to disable annoying warnings as python is considered unsafe by the openscad developers. In case you like my work i would love to see my branch forked

If you rather want to compile it yourself, these are the steps to get it done.

git clone https://github.com/gsohler/openscad.git
cd openscad
git checkout python
git submodule update --init --recursive
sudo ./scripts/uni-get-dependencies.sh
# make sure to get cryptopp and python dev packages installed, additionally
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DEXPERIMENTAL=1 -DENABLE_PYTHON=1 -DENABLE_LIBFIVE=1 ..
make
sudo make install

Usage samples

Not quite like "Hello world!" but hey, we need to start somewhere. Here's an example of a table:

def foot(x,y):
	c=cube([1,1,10])
	return translate(c,[x,y,0])

def plate():
	return cube([11,11,1])

parts=[]
parts.append(translate(plate(),[0,0,10]))

for y in [0,10]:
	for x in [0,10]:
		parts.append(foot(x,y))

output(parts)
      		

Many applications are possible like

a QR code generator

or Using Figlet 3D Ascii art

or A Gyroid

or even GDS File Parser used for creating Microchips