openscad-playground

OpenSCAD Playground

Open the Demo

This is a limited port of OpenSCAD to WebAssembly, using at its core a headless WASM build of OpenSCAD (done by @DSchroer), wrapped in a UI made of pretty PrimeReact components, a React Monaco editor (VS Codesque power!), and an interactive model-viewer renderer.

It defaults to the Manifold backend so it’s super fast.

Enjoy!

Licenses: see LICENSES.

Features

• Automatic preview on edit (F5), and full rendering on Ctrl+Enter (or F6). Using a trick to force $preview=true.
• Customizer support
• Syntax highlighting
• Ships with many standard SCAD libraries (can browse through them in the UI)
• Autocomplete of imports
• Autocomplete of symbols / function calls (pseudo-parses file and its transitive imports)
• Responsive layout. On small screens editor and viewer are stacked onto each other, while on larger screens they can be side-by-side
• Installable as a PWA (then persists edits in localStorage instead of the hash fragment). On iOS just open the sharing panel and tap “Add to Home Screen”. Should not require any internet connectivity once cached.

Roadmap

• Add tests!
• Persist camera state
• Support 2D somehow? (e.g. add option in OpenSCAD to output 2D geometry as non-closed polysets, or to auto-extrude by some height)
• Proper Preview rendering: have OpenSCAD export the preview scene to a rich format (e.g. glTF, with some parts being translucent when prefixed w/ % modifier) and display it using https://modelviewer.dev/ maybe)
• Rebuild w/ (and sync) ochafik@’s filtered kernel (https://github.com/openscad/openscad/pull/4160) to fix(ish) 2D operations
• Bundle more examples (ask users to contribute)
• Animation rendering (And other formats than STL)
• Compress URL fragment
• Mobile (iOS) editing support: switch to https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-codemirror ?
• Replace Makefile w/ something that reads the libs metadata
• Merge modifiers rendering code to openscad
• Model /home fs in shared state. have two clear paths: /libraries for builtins, and /home for user data. State pointing to /libraries paths needs not store the data except if there’s overrides (flagged as modifications in the file picker)
• Drag and drop of files (SCAD, STL, etc) and Zip archives. For assets, auto insert the corresponding import.
• Fuller PWA support w/ link Sharing, File opening / association to *.scad files…
• Look into accessibility
• Setup OPENSCADPATH env var w/ Emscripten to ensure examples that include assets / import local files will run fine.
• Detect which bundled libraries are included / used in the sources and only download these rather than wait for all of the zips. Means the file explorer would need to be more lazy or have some prebuilt hierarchy.
• Preparse builtin libraries definitions at compile time, ship the JSON.

Building

Prerequisites:

• wget
• GNU make
• npm
• Docker able to run amd64 containers. If running on a different platform (including Silicon Mac), you can add support for amd64 images through QEMU with:

  docker run --privileged --rm tonistiigi/binfmt --install all

Local dev:

make public
npm install
npm start
# http://localhost:4000/

Local prod (test both the different inlining and serving under a prefix):

make public
npm install
npm run start:prod
# http://localhost:3000/dist/

Deployment (edit homepage in package.json to match your deployment root!) is handled automatically via GitHub Actions. Pushing to the main branch triggers the deploy.yml workflow that builds the project and publishes the contents of the dist directory to GitHub Pages.

If you prefer deploying manually you can still run:

make public
npm install
NODE_ENV=production npm run build
cp -R dist /path/to/your/pages/repo

Build your own WASM binary

Makefile fetches a prebuilt OpenSCAD web WASM binary, but you can build your own in a couple of minutes:

• Optional: use your own openscad fork / branch:

  rm -fR libs/openscad
  ln -s $PWD/../absolute/path/to/your/openscad libs/openscad
    
  # If you had a native build directory, delete it.
  rm -fR libs/openscad/build
  

• Build WASM binary (add WASM_BUILD=Debug argument if you’d like to debug any cryptic crashes):

  make wasm
  

• Then continue the build:

  make public
  npm start
  

Adding OpenSCAD libraries

You’ll need to update 3 files (search for BOSL2 for an example):

• Makefile: to pull the library’s code (optionally alias some files for easier imports) and package it as a .zip archive

• src/fs/zip-archives.ts: to use the .zip archive in the UI (both for file explorer and automatic imports mounting)

• LICENSE.md: most libraries require proper disclosure of their usage and of their license. If a license is unique, paste it in full, otherwise, link to one of the standard ones already there.

Send us a PR, then once it’s merged request an update to the hosted https://ochafik.com/openscad2 demo.

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