This repo has some tools that I've pulled together to help do some design and planning for working with dimensional lumber. Currently, it consists of a library for OpenSCAD and a small tool to read the output from OpenSCAD rendering to generate board cut lists and what boards to buy.
You can download the binary from the releases or build it with go build. The run dimensional-lumber <openscad file>. You can also just run it with go run board-calculations.go <openscad file>. If your openscad binary is not in the path (as is the case on MacOS) you can specify the binary to use with the -openscad-bin flag.
Some examples are provided.
The prices per board are just the prices from my local home depot the day I did a project.
There are some minimal prerequisites for working with this:
- BOSL2 - I find the tooling here super handy. Follow their installation instructions
- If you want to build the code: go. I like go, I always have it available, so it works for me. If you don't have this you can just download from the releases.
It's a good question. I like OpenSCAD and I found myself wanting to design various projects that used dimensional lumber. Once I had a simple design, the logical extension was to figure out what I needed to buy and what cuts I needed to make.
Maybe something else was already out there and I didn't find it, but this is my take on solving my need. The implementation is a simple brute-force approach and is probably not terribly elegant, but it works for my needs.
Warning This is solidly in the 'works for me' category. It probably doesn't work on very large projects, but let me know!
- Updating board prices with config file
- Updating board prices with API calls
- Comparing board prices at different stores would be neat
- Autogenerate some of the helper methods in the openscad library
- Maybe find a better way to work with these