You should remove any reference to LEGO from the website and the examples. LEGO is extremely protective of its brand (similar to / worse than
Nintendo) and does not want third parties using its name, because it is concerned that LEGO could become a generic term which could put its trademark at risk.
I'm willing to die on the hill that lego already is a commonplace word, but I can't argue that they've held on to the LEGO trademark for pretty long. Though, I'd say Nintendo is a lot worse than LEGO, and I've never heard LEGO do the frankly insane crap that Nintendo has.
They actually sued a lego youtuber (or threatened to sue - unsure) for using a lego brick in his logo.
this lead to him creating a new word for lego bricks "Klemmbausteine" which means "clamping building bricks".
I've been using zoo and its KCL language with some success for boundary-representation CAD writing. If I understood correctly, µcad serves the same purpose. Comparing code samples between both of them, I personally enjoy KCL's pipelined approach more.
My main beef with zoo is the fact that they are promoting vendor lock-in by forcing users to use their cloud-hosted geometry kernel with absolutely no local alternative. It's not clear to me how µcad solves this problem.
Hm, at least build123d (which I had never heard of, thanks!) can export STEP, which I believe is becoming a necessity if one wants to assemble real-world models with FreeCAD (and nicely also slicers are picking up support to it). I'm on the edge though if I'd really like a proper DSL instead of building it on top of Python, although I can see that too has its benefits (e.g. library access).
Does anyone have idea about the STEP export support status for KCL/µcad? To me it looks like KCL cannot, and I cannot find information on it about µcad. The one tool I'm familiar within this space is OpenSCAD and it cannot. While FreeCAD is able to (sometimes?) convert from STL to STEP, it seems actually working with such models in FreeCAD is quite compute-inefficient.
One of the best things about openscad is the ability to immediately see the results of a code change in the 3D view (all I do is save the file with :w in neovim and openscad re-renders it). Being able to interact like this makes it much quicker and easier to iterate on a design.
I read through the ucad website and book for 10 minutes and haven't been able to figure out if there is an analogue to this for ucad?
There are several things that look neat about ucad's language, but I would need to recreate something like openscad's workflow to consider switching.
That immediacy is mostly thanks to OpenCSG which is essentially a magic trick to quickly fake 3d rendering of booleans between 3d objects using stencil buffer of gpu. http://opencsg.org/
In other words it renders the cylinders cubes spheres etc and their unions differences etc, to a 2d screen without actually calculating the intersection of those meshes / solids in 3d space.
This is the special thing about OpenSCAD design is they figured out how to build an abstract syntax tree that could either be sent to OpenCSG, CGAL (old engine), Manifold (new engine), or even the bare bones 'ThrownTogether' renderer (ancient engine on machines with no gpu that just draws 'negatives' as green blobs iirc).
It should be theoretically possible for any CAD program to do this. its just a lot of work.
> This is the special thing about OpenSCAD design is they figured out how to build an abstract syntax tree that could either be sent to OpenCSG, CGAL (old engine), Manifold (new engine), or even the bare bones 'ThrownTogether' renderer (ancient engine on machines with no gpu that just draws 'negatives' as green blobs iirc).
Mostly.
I've still had several instances when drawing curved solids that the OpenCSG renderer worked well with (visually) but when it came to render-time, there was something wrong. It is very hard to debug things, or at least I found it so, when it goes wrong like that.
There is zero reason for you to have a cookie banner taking up a third of the page.
At this point, everyone making websites should be well aware that there is no requirement for cookie banners and that implementing such is active disrespect towards your users. Your cookie banner does not tell me you care about my privacy, it tells me you're trying to collect some type of data about me and want to annoy me into letting you sell that data.
A cookie banner is exactly as much a red flag as an obviously AI generated hero image at the top of your page. Disrespectful.
Tried openscad and then cadquery for some geometry iteration projects and found them clunky. It wasn't just that I was missing a UI; the functions, constraints and geometry kernel weren't as powerful as onshape, which I've used a bit, and presumably light years behind fusion 360, which I haven't used.
Even freecad, a UI-based oss cad, is not quite ergonomic for a beginner-to-intermediate user, though it has come a long way in the past few years.
I'm excited for there to eventually be a good open source cad option, whether language-only or language-plus-GUI, but am also increasingly on team 'tools matter for your productivity'.
The great thing about OpenSCAD is that it makes it easy to programmatically model objects using cubes, cylinders, cones, and spheres by placing, stretching, and rotating them.
The awful thing about OpenSCAD is that one's ability to model in it is strongly bounded by one's fluency with mathematics and ability to use math to programmatically model objects using cubes, cylinders, cones, and spheres by placing, stretching, and rotating them.
The one tool I'm aware of which is looking at a new geometry kernel which I can recall is:
I find OpenSCAD to be decent, if somewhat tedious, when making mechanical parts but extremely limiting if you want to work with organic shapes. Even mechanical shapes that just avoid sharp edges require a fair bit of effort. One thing I do like about it is how it encourages users to parameterize their models just by the nature of the language. Pretty much everything I make in OpenSCAD has a list of named parameters at the top I can later tweak if I need to shrink or enlarge some aspect of it.
As someone who has been using FreeCAD starting in 2020, I can't tell any major differences. The problems are the same they have ever been. It's only the renderer that got a little bit more "sexy", but that is just looks.
I'm self-taught with CAD, and have repeatedly tried and discarded FreeCAD for several years. (Tangent: perceived absence of a decent CAD solution in Linux is one of very few things keeping me using Windows.)
I recently happened upon a video which mostly changed my mind [0], in which someone successfully passed a Solidworks professional certification using FreeCAD. And to my eyes, their workflow was only rarely any worse than e.g. Fusion360, Solidworks, etc.
I've since been trialling FreeCAd via the 'bleeding edge' weekly development builds [1]... and it's not perfect, and it's a touch clunky in certain areas, but it's now more than usable. (In some areas, it's actually better than the competition I've tried, IMO - for example making and cutting threads.)
This does not seem to have a constraint solver or any documented plans to integrate one. I love math, but I don’t enjoy maintaining walls of trig to make trivial constraints parametric.
Readit News
See: "Lego sues Dutch firm over anti-terror blocks using name and shape" https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/lego-sues-dutc... ( http://archive.today/q5XrX )
My main beef with zoo is the fact that they are promoting vendor lock-in by forcing users to use their cloud-hosted geometry kernel with absolutely no local alternative. It's not clear to me how µcad solves this problem.
[1] Lego brick in KCL: https://zoo.dev/docs/kcl-samples/lego
[2] Lego brick in µcad: https://microcad.xyz/index.php/2025/11/12/lego-bricks/
[3] Gear in KCL: https://zoo.dev/docs/kcl-samples/spur-gear
[4] Gear in µcad: https://microcad.xyz/index.php/2025/11/12/gears/
Gear in build123d: https://github.com/GarryBGoode/gggears
Does anyone have idea about the STEP export support status for KCL/µcad? To me it looks like KCL cannot, and I cannot find information on it about µcad. The one tool I'm familiar within this space is OpenSCAD and it cannot. While FreeCAD is able to (sometimes?) convert from STL to STEP, it seems actually working with such models in FreeCAD is quite compute-inefficient.
ucad is based on Manifold, so unfortunately, not really comparable, since it's all meshes vs brep, like OpenSCAD.
Note KCL could be completely augmented with another kernel. There are people who've already tried :)
And they were never heard of, ever again? :-)
I read through the ucad website and book for 10 minutes and haven't been able to figure out if there is an analogue to this for ucad?
There are several things that look neat about ucad's language, but I would need to recreate something like openscad's workflow to consider switching.
In other words it renders the cylinders cubes spheres etc and their unions differences etc, to a 2d screen without actually calculating the intersection of those meshes / solids in 3d space.
This is the special thing about OpenSCAD design is they figured out how to build an abstract syntax tree that could either be sent to OpenCSG, CGAL (old engine), Manifold (new engine), or even the bare bones 'ThrownTogether' renderer (ancient engine on machines with no gpu that just draws 'negatives' as green blobs iirc).
It should be theoretically possible for any CAD program to do this. its just a lot of work.
Mostly.
I've still had several instances when drawing curved solids that the OpenCSG renderer worked well with (visually) but when it came to render-time, there was something wrong. It is very hard to debug things, or at least I found it so, when it goes wrong like that.
Also, fillets are made using the Minkowski operation, which is super slow.
they got a grant for that. i couldn't find an english version though, sorry.
https://www.prototypefund.de/projects/microcad-viewer
I'm not sure if it's on par with what you want, though.
At this point, everyone making websites should be well aware that there is no requirement for cookie banners and that implementing such is active disrespect towards your users. Your cookie banner does not tell me you care about my privacy, it tells me you're trying to collect some type of data about me and want to annoy me into letting you sell that data.
A cookie banner is exactly as much a red flag as an obviously AI generated hero image at the top of your page. Disrespectful.
Even freecad, a UI-based oss cad, is not quite ergonomic for a beginner-to-intermediate user, though it has come a long way in the past few years.
I'm excited for there to eventually be a good open source cad option, whether language-only or language-plus-GUI, but am also increasingly on team 'tools matter for your productivity'.
The awful thing about OpenSCAD is that one's ability to model in it is strongly bounded by one's fluency with mathematics and ability to use math to programmatically model objects using cubes, cylinders, cones, and spheres by placing, stretching, and rotating them.
The one tool I'm aware of which is looking at a new geometry kernel which I can recall is:
https://fornjot.app/
openscad in general is quite easy if you can functionally program
OpenSCAD in a FreeCAD context does address many of the limitations of OpenSCAD, but it's not perfectly compatible.
I recently happened upon a video which mostly changed my mind [0], in which someone successfully passed a Solidworks professional certification using FreeCAD. And to my eyes, their workflow was only rarely any worse than e.g. Fusion360, Solidworks, etc.
I've since been trialling FreeCAd via the 'bleeding edge' weekly development builds [1]... and it's not perfect, and it's a touch clunky in certain areas, but it's now more than usable. (In some areas, it's actually better than the competition I've tried, IMO - for example making and cutting threads.)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEfNRST_3x8 [1] https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/releases