I recently visited my high school to check in with my robotics teacher. Aside from catching up he gave me a tour of all the amazing things being done at as early as the 6th grade level. Among such cool things I was introduced to Onshape, an in-browser 3D CAD tool. I've actually been needing to CAD up my next side project and so I gave Onshape a try.

Surprisingly, without having gone through any tutorials and just clicking through the options I was able to make a silly cube within 30 minutes.

yolo cube

I really liked that Onshape saved the steps taken to build my YOLO cube in the order they were performed, almost as if they were code commits. After the initial sketch was finished I decided that I wanted the extruded letters to be centered in their quadrants. I simply clicked into the step in which I laid the letters, figured out how to realign them, and saved the changes to the step. If I'm not mistaken the latter step of extruding the letters was reapplied to the aligned letters.

Despite my initial skepticism about this browser based CAD program, considering how much time it takes to download and install the alternatives I found this pretty amazing. I also really like that it's sufficiently simple that you don't need a 1000 page manual to start using it. Perhaps the software engineering like nature of the product makes it easier for me to understand.