EDIT: We have launched a company to solve these problems. Read more about it on kittycad.io!
Hello 🤓 !
We are looking for people who think similarly to us about the state of CAD software today and wish to help change it for the future!
Like you, we are engineers who dabble in both the software and hardware worlds. We hate doing the same thing twice manually. Some may call that trait lazy but we like to think of ourselves as efficiency-seekers. As seekers of efficiency, we love to automate everything we can! When we use a product or service that has no API or something we cannot script, we find this immensely painful and it drives us crazy!
The state of CAD software today is largely based on a person clicking in a GUI and manually creating components. For large projects with a lot of small parts, similar parts, or anything that requires changes in the future, clicking in a GUI really does not scale. It also sends all of our automation senses tingling! We yearn for something better! Some of us even tried to get the vendors to give us access to the underlying kernel behind the program, only to hear “no one ever wants that.” WE DO.
We think CAD software needs to be rethought from the ground up so that it is more accessible and similar to software development tooling where you can program against it. We think it should be easy to integrate any PLM through plugins written in your favorite programming language of choice. And we believe all this should be open. Anyone should be able to program with it and anyone can add new plugins. Plugins include modifying parts to do transformations or simulations, the world is your oyster! We want to free mechanical development from the shackles of proprietary software and lack of anything to program against. We yearn to do mechanical design via scripting, much like you would script calling an API! We want a shell!!
Lastly, you should be able to use git as your version control system! Today, this is way too difficult in git -- you cannot handle merge conflicts effectively and you cannot view diffs. It seems obvious that this would just work in the future we envision.
If you see this same future, WE WANT TO TALK TO YOU! We are forming a group of folks who share this same perspective to build the CAD of the future! We are looking for anyone with a motivation to build, but also expertise in computer graphics, rendering, even animation would be great to have! We want to make a highly performant CAD tool which requires thinking about the problem set in new and different ways!
The goals of the group will be to help hardware development catch up to the world of software development in terms of automation and programmability! If this resonates with you, please fill out this short form and we will be in touch!
To learn more about Embedded Ventures, head on over to embedded.ventures!
You can read a bit more about our thinking here!