Hacker News: brlcad

New comment by brlcad in "Picard 3.0"

brlcad — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:18:43 +0000

Kudos to the team being able to get a new major release out. Robert would be proud.

New comment by brlcad in "Golden Testing a CAD Library"

brlcad — Thu, 14 May 2026 08:17:33 +0000

Nice to see other open source CAD development being explored. BRL-CAD has had the pixdiff, bwdiff, and pixcmp tools for a very long time, for very similar purposes:

pixdiff: https://manpage.me/index.cgi?q=pixdiff&sektion=1&apropos=0&m...

bwdiff: https://manpage.me/index.cgi?q=bwdiff&sektion=1&apropos=0&ma...

pixcmp: https://manpage.me/index.cgi?apropos=0&q=pixcmp&sektion=1&ma...

New comment by brlcad in "Show HN: A Website for Comparing Protein Powder Prices"

brlcad — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 16:50:03 +0000

Now this is awesome. Hope iHerb appreciates this as it should will lead to more sales through them. Scraping is always tricky.

Love that you’ve included other nutritional facts. Would be cool to also incorporate review scores and/or taste somehow, however subjective.

Really nice work.

New comment by brlcad in "DEC PDP-1 emulator running "Spacewar", the earliest known digital video game"

brlcad — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 04:07:03 +0000

Very cool that it emulates the phosphor "burn" fading away like the original vector graphics hardware. You can see and play the real thing at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

New comment by brlcad in "I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs"

brlcad — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 03:54:30 +0000

Boggles my mind when coders don't save everything they've ever written. It's easy to be a digital pack-rat without much consequence.

That said, my first Java 1.02 programs from the 90's still compile and the old jars run surprisingly well too. Color me impressed!

New comment by brlcad in "The Berkeley Software Distribution"

brlcad — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 06:08:39 +0000

I have the sources to "JHU UNIX" which were a direct fork of one of the earliest BSD's, though I don't recall hearing which. They were recovered off data tapes (and are still in an arcane raw binary format) from the late 70's / very early 80's.

New comment by brlcad in "2024 Google Summer of Code Orgs Announced"

brlcad — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 01:54:33 +0000

That's fair, but I figured the main page has it big and prominent right now, and does better to explain what GSoC is for anyone out of the loop.

New comment by brlcad in "2024 Google Summer of Code Orgs Announced"

brlcad — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 17:14:42 +0000

This past week, orgs were announced for the 20th anniversary of the Google Summer of Code. Anyone new to open source (not just students anymore) can submit a proposal to remotely work on an open source project for a few months and get paid. Best advice: communicate early, communicate often.

Cheers!

Disclaimer: GSoC admin and mentor since '07. BRL-CAD, BZFlag, Haiku OS, RTEMS, ... good times.

2024 Google Summer of Code Orgs Announced

brlcad — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 17:14:42 +0000

Article URL: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39582221

Points: 29

# Comments: 3

New comment by brlcad in "Panama Canal drought forces Maersk to start using land bridge for Oceania cargo"

brlcad — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 09:33:31 +0000

Plague Inc.

New comment by brlcad in "Tell HN: Bash.org is no more"

brlcad — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 18:57:31 +0000

I'd be happy to host the site in perpetuity on one of our dedicated hosts (for free). Have hosted the sites for a number of notable open source communities for decades.

New comment by brlcad in "What will enter the public domain in 2024?"

brlcad — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 22:07:43 +0000

Not quite in the same vein, but the patent for T-splines expires in 2024. Big news for 3D modeling systems.

New comment by brlcad in "GPU vendor-agnostic fluid dynamics solver in Julia"

brlcad — Mon, 08 May 2023 14:27:56 +0000

Really? Fluid solver with no pics?

New comment by brlcad in "BRL-CAD"

brlcad — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 04:55:08 +0000

Tcl's integrated for the long haul, but clock is ticking on Tk. Migration will take a while, but Qt GUI is in the works.

New comment by brlcad in "BRL-CAD"

brlcad — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 04:51:15 +0000

Not entirely true. As an explicit edit method, sure, but several of the big-name non-parametric (i.e., solid modeling) commercial CAD systems are fundamentally still CSG representation under the hood. They just hide it well, typically under the guise of feature edit nomenclatures or editing constraints.

Can find indications it's CSG under the hood if it won't let you directly modify a surface without selecting some "convert to editable representation" option. TinkerCAD is an extreme example that's basically a pure CSG modeler (and probably the most popular CAD system to date, but I digress), but you won't find the term union, intersection, or CSG anywhere in its GUI. Solidworks and NX do a really good job hiding it.

New comment by brlcad in "BRL-CAD"

brlcad — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 03:59:04 +0000

Well said!

Like many open source communities, pandemic had a pretty significant impact, but development and releases are quite active.

New release coming out in a few weeks introduces conversion support for 150 new geometry and terrain file formats. This summer, Physically-based Rendering support is coming to open source CAD for the first time ever. All the while, devs are working on GUI infrastructure, mentoring GSoC, doing academic research, interacting with academia, and doing what they can to help foster an open source CAx community.

New comment by brlcad in "BRL-CAD"

brlcad — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 03:42:58 +0000

BRL-CAD has a very rich and ongoing development history that is not immediately obvious. [1,2] Heavily actively used by gov'ts as it has unique features like validated full shotline solid ray tracing -- granted, not a feature most know, understand, or care about but absolutely critical to others. Development is actively funded annually (just not your priorities).

In total, BRL-CAD today has more than 500 full-time staff-years of effort invested, more than pretty much all other open source CAD combined.

There's simply no PR team, and limited bandwidth to provide support to those that don't contribute in kind. CAD modelers coming out of school are only accustomed to multibillion dollar company products that dedicated highly experienced devs to specific user-facing features under dedicated funding lines.

With open source, skillsets vary wildly and coordination, collaboration, and maintenance are a challenge until a project achieves critical mass. It's something the BRL-CAD community is working hard on, but it's not something that will be quick. Contributors are welcome!

[1] https://www.army.mil/article/92288/brl_cad_the_worlds_oldest... [2] https://brlcad.org/BRL-CAD_Bibliography.pdf

New comment by brlcad in "BRL-CAD"

brlcad — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 03:11:44 +0000

The topic has come up and been a point of discussion, especially developing something akin to the ACIS or Parasolid kernels, but open source. In many areas, BRL-CAD's capabilities far exceed what OpenCascade provides, particularly w.r.t. CAE features, and in others it is noticeably lacking (e.g. export to polygonal). Couple years of effort have been invested in developing a new C++ API for exactly this purpose (codename "MOOSE").

Current dev focus is on conversion, rendering, and GUI modernization.

New comment by brlcad in "BRL-CAD"

brlcad — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 03:03:32 +0000

The two main graphical applications, MGED and Archer, are both Tcl/Tk so what you're seeing is Tk. Newer GUI work in development is Qt-based.

New comment by brlcad in "BRL-CAD"

brlcad — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 03:01:43 +0000

If someone were to come to the project with an interest in integrating CAM features, they would not be turned away. Closest has been having someone implement a BRL-CAD-to-gcode converter, which was actually incredibly well-suited to solid modeling. Used ray tracing to perfectly sample and slice the layers.