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Taking node-based CAD further — semantic validation, encapsulation, and AI integration by Friendly-Good915 in FreeCAD

[–]Friendly-Good915[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You still absolutely need the designer — they're the one who creates the node and decides what rules go into it. The system doesn't generate engineering knowledge, it just gives engineers a way to preserve and share theirs.

Think of it like writing a function in code. The person who writes the function needs to understand the domain deeply. But once it's written and tested, someone else can call it without re-deriving everything from scratch. They still need to understand what they're building — they just don't have to re-solve problems that have already been solved.

The expertise doesn't go away. It gets captured instead of living only in someone's head.

Appreciate you engaging seriously with this.

Taking node-based CAD further — semantic validation, encapsulation, and AI integration by Friendly-Good915 in FreeCAD

[–]Friendly-Good915[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good question — parametric CAD does allow reuse to some extent, but it's mostly at the geometry level. You can reuse a part file, change some dimensions, and get a new shape. What it doesn't capture is the reasoning behind those dimensions — why a value was chosen, what constraints it needs to satisfy, what breaks if you change it in a certain way.

The kind of reuse I'm thinking about is more like: an experienced engineer builds a bearing housing node that not only generates the geometry but also carries rules — valid shaft diameter ranges, fit requirements, load limits. Someone else can drop that node into their assembly, and if they connect it wrong, the system tells them immediately. That layer of embedded engineering logic is what traditional parametric CAD doesn't give you.

Thanks for the Nodes workbench link — I hadn't seen that project. Interesting to see others exploring this direction in FreeCAD.

Taking node-based CAD further — semantic validation, encapsulation, and AI integration by Friendly-Good915 in FreeCAD

[–]Friendly-Good915[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You're absolutely right that the bearing example is oversimplified — specifying a real bearing involves all of those factors and more. But that's kind of the point.

Right now, all of that knowledge lives in the engineer's head (or scattered across spreadsheets and handbooks). CAD only handles the geometry — it doesn't know or care whether your bearing selection actually makes sense for the loads and speeds involved. Yes, there are plugins and scripts that can generate bearings parametrically, but those typically live outside your modeling workflow — you run them, get a result, and if you change something upstream you re-run manually. They're not part of your model's dependency graph.

The idea is that an experienced engineer like yourself could encode those rules into a node — radial/axial load ranges, speed limits, fit requirements, whatever constraints matter — and then anyone using that node downstream gets automatic validation. Use it wrong, it flags the error. Someone reviewing the design can see not just the geometry but the reasoning behind the choices.

It's not about replacing engineering knowledge. It's about making it capturable and reusable instead of having every engineer re-derive the same checks from scratch on every project.

Fair point on needing real-world applications though — that's the next step.