Project Description

Having finished the tower to the moon, Shlotz Blox goes interstellar and their spaceship engineers need a specialized CAD solution!

LDraw is an open source standard for LEGO CAD programs. There is a common parts library and a handful of programs that operate on a standard LDraw file format and allow you to create virtual LEGO models and instructions to build them.

Some of these programs are open source, some are freeware, some run natively on Linux, some run in WINE, some only run in Windows. The development is mostly Windows-centric and there are numerous problems when running these programs on Linux.

The goal of this project is to package the programs and fix them where needed to make them easy to use in OpenSUSE and other Linux distributions. If needed, we want to take over maintaining the programs that are no longer actively developed.

Project Results

We have a github project where we collected the opensource tools ldraw, ldglite, lpub4 and leocad.

We have scripts to easilly build our version of the tools with the OBS.

• We have a working leocad package to build models.
• We have a working lpub4 package to produce step-by-step instructions.
• We have ldglite that lpub uses for rendering and ldraw-library that is needed (and correctly found!) by all the tools.

We've given the tools to the Schlotz Blox engineers and they have been able to produce blue prints of their first interstellar aircraft.

However, they are quite unhappy with some of the tools so far. They needed hackish workarounds such as editing the .ldr file with vim and konstruktor (which they needed to get from a dubious source elsewhere in the OBS) to finish their work. Their experience with LeoCad as the primary tool has been painful.

We investigated the LeoCad sources and decided it is a good project to start improving. If time does not permit us to do that sooner, at least we have a Hackweek 12 project already.

Thanks to the HW organizers!