PartCAD is the first package manager for CAD models and a framework for managing assemblies. It aims to complement Git with everything necessary for hardware development to substitute commercial Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools. It is a free versioning and change management system for your CAD, but built around your CAD artifacts instead of being built in into your CAD tool.

PartCAD maintains information about mechanical parts and how they come together to form larger assemblies. The same parts can be reused in multiple assemblies and multiple projects. And all of that is supercharged by the ultimate versioning and collaboration features of Git.

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Here is a brief description of PartCAD features:

• 3D part models using CadQuery, build123d and OpenSCAD scripting languages
• 3D part models using legacy STEP, STL and 3MF files
• Generate 3D models using LLM/GenAI: Google AI (Gemini), OpenAI (ChatGPT) or any model published to Ollama (Llama 3.1, DeepSeek-Coder-V2, CodeGemma, Code Llama etc)
• 2D blueprints using build123d, or legacy DXF and SVG files
• Object-Oriented Programming approach to maintaining part interfaces and mating information
• Live preview of 3D models while coding in VS Code
• Render models to SVG, PNG and export to STEP, STL, 3MF, ThreeJS and OBJ
• Render Markdown documentation files

Browse our documentation and visit our website.

Note: It's not required but highly recommended to have conda installed. If you experience any difficulty installing or using any PartCAD tool then make sure to install conda.

This extension can be installed by searching for PartCAD in the VS Code extension search form, or by browsing its VS Code marketplace page.

Make sure to have Python configured and a conda environment set up in VS Code before using PartCAD.

The recommended method to install PartCAD CLI tools for most users is:

pip install -U partcad-cli

• On Windows, PartCAD must be executed inside a conda environment.
• On Ubuntu, try apt install libcairo2-dev python3-dev if pip install fails to install cairo.
• On MacOS, make sure XCode and command lines tools are installed. Also, use mamba should you experience difficulties on MacOS with the arm64 architecture.

The recommended first steps for PartCAD developers are:

git clone https://github.com/openvmp/partcad.git
cd partcad
python3 -m pip install -U -e ./partcad
python3 -m pip install -U -e ./partcad-cli