Experimenting with OpenSCAD

For those of you who have read my posts about my experiences with 3D printing, you would know that I usually work on Fusion 360 in order to generate my 3D models for printing. Fusion 360 helps me to visualise while I'm working on the project, so I know precisely what I'm doing, especially when it comes to custom-made designs.

Here is a post that I made regarding how I use Fusion 360:
https://steemit.com/story/@tanyehwen/design-processes-i

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Recently, however, I have taken a module in my final term at Singapore University of Technology and Design which required me to use OpenSCAD as one of my assignments. Thankfully, the visualisation skills I learned from using Fusion 360 helps a lot in trying to visualise what I want to do. On the other hand, there was a lot of code that I had to learn.

It was pretty frustrating, to be honest, especially when you start to get errors like this:

The error, in this case, happens to be that I did not add ";" at the end of the code. Unfortunately, OpenSCAD does not reflect what is wrong with your code, so you end up hunting up and down for the erratic code.

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Well, there are advantages of working with OpenSCAD. For parametric designs (such as this ball bearing), it is easy to set the parameters that we want. So, effectively I could change the number of balls from 5:

To 7 (as an example):

This makes designing for mechanical parts very easy.

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Honestly, I would still prefer to work with Fusion 360, but I do see the beauty in OpenSCAD. Well, if you are a good programmer, and you have no issues trying to visualise the object you have in mind, why not try OpenSCAD?