A few ideas for the customizer

[OutwardBuckle]

Just sharing a few ideas for consideration, mainly in regards to the customizer. Apologies if any of these have already been discussed. The first two are the mains points I'd personally like to see implemented the most.

Obviously this is just my wish list so feel free to ignore any/all of these if they don't align with the project goals. Also, thanks for the work that's already been done, this project is looking really promising!

• OpenSCAD allows for importing files using either import(filename) or surface(filename), it would be useful to be able to upload files or import from cloud storage. For the customizer, the creator would ideally able to select a default file to be used

• The Thingiverse customizer supported exporting multiple STLs. Not sure if this could be included in the customizer or even in the editor? They used part as the variable name. In the example the give here, it is also used to control which item is displayed in the preview:

    // Which one would you like to see?
     part = "first"; // [first:Cube Only,second:Cylinder Only,both:Cube and Cylinder]
  

• OpenSCAD also allows for parameter sets to be saved. Would be great to see this implemented in the editor/customizer.

• Colour picker to hex code - Seen this mentioned already, just a +1 from me.

• Font select tool for the text command

• User-friendly echo output. E.g for a design that you can specify the height OR width and the other value is auto-calculated - being able to output the calculated values and clearly present them to the end-user. Maybe just change the colour of the echo command in the console so it's more apparent?

• I imagine it's beyond the project scope, but ultimately, I'd love to be able to create a wizard style UI for customizing items. For example, groups/values would be hidden until the corresponding type is selected and that value is actually used:

    // Shape Type
    type = "square"; //[square,poly]
  
    /* [Square Settings] */
    x = 10;
    y = 15;
  
    /* [Poly Settings] */
    measure_type = "radius"; [radius,inradius,side-length]
    size_value = 10;
    number_of_sides = 6;
  

[Irev-Dev]

Thanks @OutwardBuckle,

I'll respond to this properly soon, just wanted to quickly let you know now that we meet weekly at (your local time https://tinyurl.com/cadhub-meet-time) on the discord https://discord.gg/SD7zFRNjGH so next one is in about 8 hours. No obligation but if you wanted to discuss some of your ideas in real time you'd be more than welcome.

Last weeks notes are here: #456

[OutwardBuckle]

Apologies, got a call from work shortly after posting this and haven't had the chance to check back until now. Thanks for the invite, I'll jump into the discord and have a look around when I get some spare time.

[hrgdavor]

Hi, ideas like this are welcome, some of them my have been already considered, but to justify implementing it needs to seen that there are actuall users interested in a feature-X ...

groups/values would be hidden until the corresponding type is selected and that value is actually used:

This is already under consideration to be supported in the parameters interchange format #437

• dependsOn - name of parameter that this one depends on
• dependsValue - value of dependsOn that makes this parameter visible

But to have it working, issues will have have to be raised on both ends: CadHub - integration side (CadQuery,OpenSCAD,jscad).
CadHub is going in direction to support the feature, but each integration has to produce the setting JSON to activate it.

Parameter sets get +1 from me :)

Font select is bit tricky, because CadHub knows nothing about fonts supported. My thinking is that the script should just define a parameter for select box, so font would be nothing different than your exapmple // Shape Type | type = "square"; //[square,poly]

// Font
font = "Arial"; // [Arial,Verdana,Comic]

[Irev-Dev]

We've thought about something similar to your Wizard idea @OutwardBuckle, as per @hrgdavor's depends on comment. For us to make that work in OpenSCAD probably want to do it without the comment syntax as I mentioned here #464 (reply in thread)

[OutwardBuckle]

Yeah, moving away from comment style parameters sounds like a solid plan. It definitely limits what can be added. The Depends On value would work well for all my uses.

[hrgdavor]

Just chiming in here, as a fan of comment style ;) ... but in jscad

In jscad there is convention that you export getParameterDefinitions function that gives json configuration for customizer, so, if I have a parameter somewhere at the top of the script

wall=1,

then somewhere relatively far away I need to add this

function getParameterDefinitions(){
  return [{"caption":"Wall thickness","type":"int","name":"wall","initial":1,"min":0.5,"step":0.5}]
}

instead of writing it all in one place with less repetition

wall=1, // Wall thickness {min:0.5, step:0.5}

I personally perfer this shorter convention that uses comments, and the more parameters there are in my script the more I prefer it.
Both styles are supported, and ofcourse not everyone shares my enthusiasm, so others can use the one they prefer :)

[t-paul]

Font select is bit tricky, because CadHub knows nothing about fonts supported.

That's not the case for OpenSCAD, I don't know how other systems access fonts. Using system installed fonts, it's trivial to query the list of available fonts using the fontconfig tools, e.g. using fc-list. Thingiverse installed a huge list of fonts from google-fonts and made those available.

[hrgdavor]

that is neat :) ... jscad could also benefit if CadHub would facilitate a nice selection of free fonts to use by integrations. jscad would ofc also need to be able to access them when run in browser too.
jscad needs access to actual ttf file of a font

[Irev-Dev]

A list of fonts sounds good.

@OutwardBuckle one thing we decided on previously was not to couple the underlying data type and the UI element for controlling it. For example a number could be controlled by a simple number input or a slider, we were planning on using input as a way for the author to hint what UI element they want but its optional. So a text select would be a type: 'sting', input: 'text select' or similar.
Curious @t-paul if were to try and do something like this, Im assuming for OpenSCAD it would be best to wait for the export style customizer params, rather than trying to do it through comments? (@OutwardBuckle Torsten would like move away from comment style parameters, this was a Thingiverse innovation as a way for them to bolt something onto the language, that OpenSCAD then added retrospectively to support users, however its a bit magical and it would be better to have better integrated. We still plan on supporting the comment syntax, but I think its likely that for extending new feature in the customizer we might want to do that in new customizer export)

[Irev-Dev]

The Thingiverse customizer supported exporting multiple STLs

OpenSCAD allows for importing files using either import(filename)

In general we'll be able to add a lot of extra flexibility when we add multi file support. We've talked a lot about a cadhub.json file or similar where settings specific to Cadhub can go, so I think mutiple exports would probably go there, that way we can make it cover multiple CAD packages rather than only OpenSCAD through the comment syntax.

Mulitple files should also allow uploading non-text files to be imported, but we'll probably start with text only to begin with.

[Irev-Dev]

User-friendly echo output. E.g for a design that you can specify the height OR width and the other value is auto-calculated - being able to output the calculated values and clearly present them to the end-user. Maybe just change the colour of the echo command in the console so it's more apparent?

@OutwardBuckle Do you mean highlight specific echos, or just highlight echos in general? something like this?

Its something I would want to think about a lot more, so not committing to it but ti would be possible for us to intercept special messages lets say you write Echo("cadhub show this special message"), cadhub could than parse that out display "show this special message" in a toast notification or something, but I don't think the value that would provide would be super warranted for the fact that we now extending OpenSCAD with specially formatted echo messages.

[Irev-Dev]

That's a good point, I'm currently emphasizing lines with ECHO: in them but should extend that to WARNING: for non manifold etc,

Console messages come back and effect the customiser, my biggest problem with something like that I don't feel like I have a good grasp on what will be most useful to users, just because there are not many users on CadHub atm, as we get more of a pulse on how it's used and what will be more useful that something along the lines of a tighter and more interactive experience between code and the customiser could be really cool. Could you give me a solid example of how you see ing being used? i.e. parametric part of a X where the Y param is used to change this part of the model and when the user changes it we highlight Z in the customizer with message ". . ."

[OutwardBuckle]

Agreed, it's worth waiting to see how much others would use this, the use cases I have are limited. The best way to show what I had in mind is probably to use a standard image resize tool:

So as you edit one value, the other is updated (but in this example, the height box wouldn't be editable)

[hrgdavor]

lock aspect ratio and calculation is out of scope of what I had in mind with dependsOn and is tricky to implement for multiple reasons.

It is one other common use case with forms: showing content only in some cases that dependsOn is meant for.

If we have a script for a box with a lid, and in first part we have 2 checkboxes that decide whether to show lid and/or box. dependsOn would allow hiding group of parameters related to box for example when box is not shown.

[OutwardBuckle]

Sorry, shouldn't of included that tick box. It was just to show that it may be useful to have fields in the customizer that just display data and are updated based on echoed values. For example if you're designing a case for an item, it would make sense to input the size of the item and then size of the container walls, you could then have a Total Size field that shows the full height/width of the container.

x = 10;
y = 20;
border = 2;

/*[Hidden]*/
total_x = x+(border*2);
total_y = y+(border*2);

difference(){
    square([total_x,total_y], center=true);
    square([x,y], center=true);
}

echo(val1=total_x);
echo(val2=total_y);

[Irev-Dev]

I don't have anything more to add, these are definitely interesting ideas though.