Photonics and copper both travel at about the speed of light. Photonics requires special circuitry to do the conversion to/from light. And don't get me started on how PCIe just isn't designed for optics, or really any kind of amplifier. Over a long distance, or due to signaling rate, it makes sense, but onboard it makes little sense unless we have optic switches which are faster than silicon.
> Photonics and copper both travel at about the speed of light.
Just going to put this out there since it's totally non-obvious to a lot of armchair engineers, but this is not at all true. Velocity factor in most transmission lines (optical or electrical) is typically about 0.66c but varies depending on the material and the physical dimensions of the medium.
In very highspeed circuit design, (10s of ghz) both path length and velocity factor matching are considered when evaluating timing constraints for chipscale features.
If I recall correctly, they started with doing a screen overlay, and migrated to using the hardware gamma tables (I think I might have pointed them to it?). Android apps that do screen dimming use overlays, which ends up causing flickering.
I found OpenSCAD to be very friendly for parametric designs, but after a while I switched to the SolidPython wrapper as it was more flexible.
However, I'm hunting for a better way to create 3d models via code (Blender Python?) because 'extrude_along_path'->SolidPython->OpenSCAD->stl export simply could not handle my model.
I wouldn't consider OpenSCAD real CAD. It doesn't aid you in design really, it's just a language to represent the design you already have in your head.
Without constraints, you're still doing a lot of stuff directly rather than declaratively, and without a GUI you're mostly limited to geometry you can imagine, because doing anything by trial and error in OpenSCAD takes forever.
The whole thing feels very open loop, like it's meant to be "imagine it>reason about it> code it" rather than "vauge idea > iteration > verify"
I could see it being useful in some cases for high level professional designers though.
OpenSCAD is great in some ways, but the fact that everything gets boils straight to triangles drives me nuts. If there were an OpenSCAD equivalent to work with boundary representation models I’d have found my CAD nirvana.
I honestly think CadQuery has more promise as a way to get open source 3D components and modules to the mainstream, because it's fundamentally code, and can be reasoned about as such (diffed, merged, blamed, parameterised, modularised, reused and tested). Putting SolidWorks or FreeCad file into source control is a very different thing.
Also, as it's natively Python, you have all sorts of library support, up to and including things like numpy.
On the other hand, sketching with constraints is very intuitive. Making interesting shapes that aren't trivial CSG demos by fiddling with code just doesn't sound that great.
The future dream mCAD for me is something where extrusions and fillets and other 3d stuff is code, but sketches are GUI edited.
