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
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.
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.
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?