Being as how I have need of sundry forms of CAD software from time to time, and what with Linux being my preferred environment, I've long taken an interest in What's Out There.
Back in the 90s, I took a look at this nifty thing called Open CASCADE, which on closer examination turned out to be the core of a high-powered 3-D mechanical CAD system... minus any sort of user interface.
And there was BRL-CAD, which had some interesting capabilities but was kind of specialized.
And so, these past several years, I've been using VariCAD, which, while right around the top of my price range, has proven useful... but it has limitations of its own: it lacks scriptability, and the only 3-D format it will import is STEP, which is hideously complicated (and getting access to the spec costs money).
Meanwhile, I've occasionally vaguely noted the existence of something or other that puts a GUI wrapper around Open CASCADE.
Well... just recently, I took another look at FreeCAD, which someone was using to build 3-D models of EAGLE PCB designs. Hoo-hah! Looks decently usable, imports and exports quite a variety of file formats, and is scriptable.
Naturally, I promptly try things VariCAD isn't good at, and run into limitations. Like, it will happily import an airfoil data file, and extrude the resulting curve into a wing... but I don't find any way to do a tapered extrusion, let alone an extrusion tapering from one shape at the root to another at the tip.
But! Looks like someone's got a Blender plugin that'll (if I can figure out how Blender plugins work) import X-Plane files, after which Blender can export wings (or entire planes) to one of the formats it shares with FreeCAD.
Not that migrating plane models into CAD is really a priority at the moment, but it's nice to have the path available.
Having the EAGLE-to-mechanical-CAD path is of more immediate interest, especially once I build up a library of 3-D models of, e.g., connectors.
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