Yeah, OnShape rocks. And now, you can even modify the program in some ways.
Now, I haven’t played with it yet… And they mostly talk about new features being new parts and styles in the models you make.
But they also say this is the same way they made OnShape itself. So possibly… this means we can have someone add a “send to Glowforge” button directly in OnShape. That would make it 100% realistic to cut a complex part with absolutely nothing but your smart phone.
Sweet. This might get me over the hump of actually using Onshape. I’ve played with it a little, but I much prefer programs I can type at. (Also, I’m old, so I need to zoom like hell to read anything)
That looks fantastic!
I have played around with OpenSCAD, but it is not exactly “user friendly”.
OnShape is already so powerful that adding a scripting language is like candy.
Over the last couple of weeks I have spent a ton of time learning OnShape. I came from a 3d art/animation background, so going from freeform to parametric, measurement and constraint drive modeling was a tough transition at first. Now I’m absolutely loving it. I can use a single dimension with constraints to drive a model from the ground up. Making an alteration is as simple as changing a dimension.
As far as export to Glowforge, you can already export sketch profiles to DWG so importing into Illustrator (I don’t know if GF currently supports DWG?) is a snap. There are also already integrations with third party apps that can add additional functionality, and featurescript allows you to program new features right into the app.
Yeesh, I sound like their sales staff must! I promise I’m not. If you haven’t checked it out, it’s free up to 100mb of private documents (and 5gb of public documents) and their tutorials and documentation are fantastic. I went from spending hours honing a 3d design in lightwave to a few minutes of modeling and dimensioning to build the same part (on my iPad by the way) in OnShape. It’s a bit of a steep learning curve at first, especially if the concepts are foreign, but once you get over the hump it’s well worth the time you’ll invest.
I see a difference between exporting to DWG and importing to Illustrator, and just clicking “Print to Glowforge” straight from the iPad while in OnShape 
The latter is what I am excited to see (and may be enough to finally make me devote some time to using OnShape for a complex system model)
The direct export to GF is probably completely doable. It wouldn’t be a featurescript, it would have to be a direct integration with the GlowForge cloud app, but OnShape almost certainly has the tools available. All it would take would be the work on GlowForge’s end. Maybe @dan can throw it in the backlog?
Ah, had not yet looked at precisely what Featurescript could accomplish. It is mostly just programming in new ways to make and modify models and connections then, not full re-write of the program?
I’m not sure familiar with all the features of featurescript, but my current understanding is that it’s meant for creating new features and functionality within the app itself. The app integration route seems more likely for a “send to GlowForge” button because it would require API access in at least one direction.
Since OnShape already allows you to click the face of a model and export that as a DXF, then perhaps FeatureScript could be used to allow the export of “tagged” faces as an SVG. Not quite perfect integration, but a whole lot less steps!