[bd_at_rivenhill]

"You're never going to see a power tool or a tractor or whatever designed in OpenSCAD."

I beg to differ on this, I've been using OpenSCAD for a couple of years now, and the two most complicated designs I have done were for a dual drive robot base and a simple 3-axis CNC machine. Many of the parts were COTS (which I built modules for) and the rest were designed for these projects, including some parts which were sent directly to my 3D printer. In doing this, I've been developing various functions and modules that simplify common operations such as attaching two separate parts and using difference to form a free fit hole for a specific type of screw. I find this to be much easier than clicking on dimensions in a sketch, but this is because I have all of the mental habits developed by learning to build complex software.

[jlarocco]

My last job, at a CAD company, we had a competition to see who could create the coolest models programmatically using the new Javascript based scripting language we were creating. My entry was a library that could generate Lego pieces, which I used to build a Lego truck. I can't find a pic of the full truck, but here are some samples:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fu7xc4cjda2kyx4/lego7.png?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/33dws1ug5vzyfe6/lego6.png?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7z85257nidmpkdz/lego5.png?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ks8ctcfcbxan3dq/lego1.png?dl=0

Anyway, as much as I enjoyed creating the truck, the reality is that a decent mechanical engineer, experienced in SolidWorks, CATIA, or other parametric CAD, could have built the truck in a fraction of the time that it took me. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that even I would have been faster in a parametric modeler, and I'm a software engineer.

EDIT: I should also mention that the Javascript binding was primarily for developers to test out the modelling kernel's API, rather than creating actual parts.

[gcb0]

i also use open scad, but mostly because solid works is too expensive (and i like to have my data on a free format, human readable if possible, always)

i bet if you look at your design code, most of the parametrization and solid are there just to work around the fact that you can't tie one side of a cube to another.

to me at least, that's the killer feature that open scad lacks.