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| Original author(s) | Eric Sherouse, Dan Meisner, Patrick Gallogly |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 0.5 (beta)
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| Type | CAD, 3D Printing, Crowdsourced Engineering and Design, 3D Modeling |
| Website | 3dorchard |
3D Orchard is a free online platform for crowdsourced design. Built mostly for makers with 3D printers, it contains most the tools needed to turn an idea into reality; including browser-based Computer-aided design (CAD) tools (which includes both primitive objects and Parametric_design tools), a public database of open source 3D CAD files that can be edited directly on the platform, and the ability to download and 3D Print any of those 3D CAD files.
As each public model is edited and saved by people around the world--similar to Wikipedia--that progress is visualized with a tree to show 3D CAD scenes progression over time. At any time, any version of any 3D CAD object can be downloaded and 3D printed by anyone. For those that don't want to build publicly, saving models privately is also available and free for anyone.
Being browser-based, the platform currently runs in Chrome, Firefox, Opera and MS Edge, meaning that no installation of computer software is required. The 3D Orchard platform uses the same open-source CAD modeling engine as OpenSCAD and FreeCAD. 3D Orchard attempts to simplify the CAD interface by only displaying tools that are applicable to the selected operation. In other words, what you click determines what tools pop up (i.e. if you click an edge, the options to chamfer of fillet that edge become available). This is termed Model-Driven Design. The built-in sketching functions allow the drawing of constrained 2D sketches that can be pulled into complex 3D shapes. The ability to sketch and use primitive shapes in combination to produce full CAD models gives this platform some potent mechanical design capabilities.