CallToAction

From http://opencascade.blogspot.com/2009/01/call-for-action-building-cadcamcae.html

2009-01-10

Call for action. Building CAD/CAM/CAE development resource index
After I have started this blog there were a few inquiries from people asking to share resources that would help novices to better understand the CAD/CAM/CAE (CAx) world. I shared what I had (well, some links got broken over time), and thought this could be of a broader interest, virtually for anyone in the development community.

Can we all together try this out and build some useful list ? Let's think how to make and to maintain it manageable. For instance, is there any ready-to-use rating mechanism that visitors could use to rate the usefulness of every resource ? Please advise if you know such.

Anyway, let's start with something simple and see how it goes.

As a first step, I suggest a simple one-level classification. Let's first focus on CAx.
 * Theory (books, papers, articles, courses on mathematical apparatus and models)
 * Software (geometric kernels, libraries, components, etc)
 * Developers communities (forums, blogs, wiki's etc dedicated to CAx development)
 * Informational resources (portals, newsletters, etc)
 * Models (2D or 3D models in neutral or proprietary formats that can be freely used)

Provide your links using comments to this post. Include category, brief description and advantages of the resource (up to 50 words). The goal is not to have it exhausted but to contain most useful links. So, if there are resources that outshine others, we will not hesitate to remove some.

If you have any ideas how to make this most useful, please speak up.

So, let's try... Posted by Roman Lygin at 16:06 Rate this post: 	 11 comments:

Roman Lygin said...
A few links to start Theory - Gerald Farin, Curves and Surfaces for CAGD: A Practical Guide Among frequently referenced books on geometric modeling. Did not read personally. - Jean Gallier, Curves and Surfaces in Geometric Modeling: Theory and Algorithms Among frequently referenced books on geometric modeling. Did not read personally. - Interactive tutorial on geometric modeling in CAD - a collection of links on NURBS theory from opennurbs Software - VTK (Visualization Toolkit). Open Source visualization library with wide adoption (including Salome) - Open NURBS. Open Source library for manipulating B-Splines, from Rhino3D creator. January 10, 2009 4:28 PM

peted said...
I'd started a set of OCC-based links on the qtocc links pages, with some simple comments. http://qtocc.sourceforge.net/links.htmlhttp://qtocc.sourceforge.net/links-related.htmlhttp://qtocc.sourceforge.net/links-useful.html Pete January 13, 2009 1:53 AM

jelle feringa said...
Python bindings for OpenCASCADE January 15, 2009 1:28 AM

Andrey Betenev said...
Hello Roman, IMHO, the Right Place is www.wikipedia.org By the way, recently I recognized existence of www.wikibooks.org - some people use it to host documentation for their software projects Andrey January 16, 2009 6:41 PM

Mark said...
Blogs http://www.anderswallin.net/tag/cam/http://heekscnc.blogspot.com/http://www.freesteel.co.uk/wpblog/category/machining/ A list, mostly CAM papers: http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?List_Of_CAM_References One guy's publications, some of which are CAM related. http://www.isd.mel.nist.gov/personnel/kramer/publications.html CAD and CAM programs http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?Cam swik.net - "a community driven resource for open source software" http://swik.net/cam January 17, 2009 8:22 AM

Pawel said...
Another bunch of links: http://www.freebyte.com/cad/cadcam.htmhttp://www.betatechnical.com/autonc.htmhttp://www.cncsimulator.com/http://gcam.js.cx/index.php/Fileshttp://www.polaris.com.gr/gsimple/download.htmlhttp://www.mecsoft.com/Mec/Products/FreeMill.shtmlhttp://www.technisoft.ch/html/home__english_.htmlhttp://www.dakeng.com/turbo.html January 17, 2009 5:10 PM

PLT said...
All my OCC bookmarks. *Fixes for OCC http://sf.net/projects/opencascade *CAD-CAE products http://sf.net/projects/free-cad/http://sf.net/projects/narocad/http://sf.net/projects/occsketcherhttp://code.google.com/p/heekscad/http://code.google.com/p/heekscnc/http://code.google.com/p/voxelcut/http://jcae.sf.net/http://autoq3d.ecuadra.com/ *OCC/SALOME modules http://sf.net/projects/salomegeometryhttp://sf.net/projects/salomesmesh *Blog http://heekscnc.blogspot.com/ Thanks January 19, 2009 4:56 PM

Roman Lygin said...
Hey folks ! Thanks for putting this stuff together. For future posters: for common convenience it would be helpful if you provided brief annotations to your links (or groups of). 2 Andrey: Yes, good point. Though entry points for CAD, CAM and CAE you can find other theory references. As an example, an article on NURBS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NURBS) seems quite educating. I recently came across cadopedia.org which seemingly lacks contents (yet). January 19, 2009 9:20 PM

PLT said...
General blogs: http://www.novedge.com/pulse.asp Matt Writes: http://dezignstuff.com/blog/?cat=122 2D CAD: Not Onpen Source "Must Have": http://www.ribbonsoft.com/qcad.html Pure python: http://www..net/projects/thancad Win32 only: http://cq.cx/sketchflat.pl FRONTIER geometric constraint solver http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~sitharam/GNU/ An other (?) Heeks product (see previous post for CAD-CAE): http://code.google.com/p/wildcat-cad/ January 20, 2009 12:44 PM

Julian Todd said...
The obvious place is to set up a wikiproject machining under one of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Technology_WikiProjects I've discussed what I can do here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Goatchurch#Machining Using Wikipedia is a very clear choice (if I can persuade anyone here) for the following reasons: (a) It's an extremely powerful set of on-line collaborative tools for organizing links, summaries and topics. (b) The current information on CAM is a mess and we can hold open chats on the discussion pages to work out the structure we think is right. (c) More people are going to find information there than on any blog, so it will get more views and more recruits willing to contribute (d) Anything put there will persist and be available for revival, unlike so many crufty old catalogues on the net that get out of date when the people running them get bored. If you want to starting with some familiarity, drop me a note on my user/discussion page if you need help with improving: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_CASCADE Here's the article I made for my former employer. Admire all the *very* obscure citations used to build up the final paragraph! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NC_Graphics January 24, 2009 1:41 PM

Mark said...
Well, it's not wikipedia, but I requested a wiki at wikia. It was approved, and is at http://cadcamcae.wikia.com The reason I chose wikia is that wikipedia has been known to delete content that they didn't like. I prefer subpar data over no data, myself. Julian, I know you suggested "machining", but to me anything related to machining software can go under CAM. And if data about machining hardware needs organized, well, it is related to machining software. :-)   January 31, 2009 3:39 AM