Joshua M. Pearce is the John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation at the Thompson Centre for Engineering Leadership & Innovation. He holds appointments at Ivey Business School, the top ranked business school in Canada and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Western University in Canada, a top 1% global university. At Western he runs the Free Appropriate Sustainability Technology (FAST) research group. His research concentrates on the use of open source appropriate technology (OSAT) to find collaborative solutions to problems in sustainability and to reduce poverty. His research spans areas of engineering of solar photovoltaic technology, open hardware, and distributed recycling and additive manufacturing (DRAM) using RepRap 3-D printing. He wrote the Open-Source Lab and Create, Share, and Save Money Using Open-Source Projects.
Authored Comments
I would hazard a guess that most readers of opensource.com come from the programming world and thus would be far more at home with OpenSCAD. You simply code objects -- after a little bit of a learning curve to remember the basic commands it becomes an incredibly powerful parametric design tool. In general, I have found that students who are not already familiar with some form of visual CAD program pick it up more quickly. That said, you can have your cake and eat it too - as FreeCAD has an OpenSCAD module.
What we really need to work on is getting open source CAD programs into schools - so students become familiar with them first rather than getting locked into expensive proprietary packages.
Great article -- very nice welcoming approach to pulling people into OS.