open source tractor

Marcin asks "I was considering Blender. Can HeeksCAD do better?"

I haven't tried Blender for a while.
I like to think that HeeksCAD is easier to use, but that might just be because I wrote it.
Here is a video of me playing with HeeksCAD a few minutes ago.
HeeksCAD has plenty of bugs, but it is OK for making some solid models.
It doesn't do anything nice like fitting solids together.
Save the file every time you do something, preferably with a different file name each time, in case HeeksCAD crashes.

Splines for pocketing

Sketches with splines work for pocketing operation too, now.

Spline Machining

You can now profile sketches with splines in HeeksCAD ( mostly from SVG file ), without needing to split them into little lines. They are converted into arcs for the python script, but they remain as splines in HeeksCAD. This is in the source code now; http://code.google.com/p/heekscad/source/browse/trunk/src/HSpline.cpp#417 This was inspired by Jeff Epler's biarc code, available here http://bitbucket.org/jst/inkscape-gcode/

BRepAlgo_Fuse

I added an option "Use old solid fuse" and made it the default. When using the old method, it fixes the problem with unwanted edges.

I found this here http://www.opencascade.org/org/forum/thread_13599/
see 'Use Old Boolean Operations “BRepAlgo_Fuse” can avoid coplanar faces.'

However, apparently the new method is better in other ways, so I have made an option.

OCC offset

After "geo" from #cam mentioned using Open CASCADE's Test Harness and gave me an example, I produced these offsets, which look promising for pocketing with a permissive license. It seemed to produce the offsets very fast.

flyout toolbars again

I changed the flyout toolbars to use a popup window with a toolbar in it, instead of the popup menu I was using before. The tooltips don't seem to be working on the Windows version, though.

Graduated Background

I added a graduated background.
Feel free to suggest some better default colors.
The default is for the color to change from top to bottom, but I have added modes for single color, left to right shaded and four corner color setting.