Hey, folks. I’ve watched KittyCAD.io come together over the past few months and they just opened it to the public so I thought I’d share. I have no business relationship with them, no sponsorship, etc.
The idea is that it’s a network service that you call from your code (I’m using Python but there are other language libs) to perform some of the trickier or computationally complex work needed during a CAD/CAM workflow.
The example I think makes it most clear is that I can write python code that sends KittyCAD a big OBJ file and ask it to convert it to STL. Because the conversation happens on their machines I can potentially call it from a low power microcontroller board or a SBC with limited RAM. So, if I’m designing a really low cost CNC machine that works without a PC I could theoretically offload some heavy lifting to KittyCAD.
There are other API endpoints for things like center of mass calculation and volume estimation and they’re adding more based on user suggestions.
I’ve only poked at it a little bit so I can’t say anything about the quality of service, costs, etc.
addendum: I just noticed that they also have a video streaming service made for showing CAD/CAM stuff in your browser. So, I guess you could make something like OnShape with it.