While we use a lot of CAD tools, many of us are fans of Tinkercad — especially for working with kids or just doing something quick. But many people dislike having to work across the Internet with their work stored on someone’s servers. We get it. So does [CommonWealthRobotics], which offers CaDoodle. It is nearly a total clone of Tinkercad but runs on Windows, Linux, Mac, or even Chrome OS.
Is it exactly Tinkercad? No, but that’s not always a bad thing. For example, CaDoodle can work with Blender, FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, and more. However, on the business end, it sure looks like the core functions of Tinkercad.
The program appears fairly new, so you have to make some allowances. For example, the Linux AppImage seems to have difficulty loading plugins (which it needs to import many of its file formats). In addition, on at least some systems, you have to resize the window after it starts, or it won’t respond. But, overall, it is pretty impressive. The Settings, by the way, has a checkbox for advanced features, and there are some other goodies there, too.
One reason we found this interesting is that we sometimes go into schools, and they don’t want us to have kids on the Internet. Of course, they don’t like us installing random software either, so you can pick your battles.
Tinkercad, of course, continues to add features. Not all of which you’d expect in a drawing package.
Hey there folks! I am the creator of CaDoodle and I am so happy people are hearing about it and using it! After the Tinkercad outage due to the AWS outage, I started noticing CaDoodle getting lots of attention.
I am always looking to improve this tool, and am especially looking for other Java devs to help out with the slowly growing back-log of issues. If you are interested in helping, or just using, CaDoodle, please consider joining our discord through the link on the main page.
Feel free to AMA :)
Hero. Keep up the good work.
Is it portable? Like the post says, sometimes schools or whatever don’t want you installing software, so a self-contained portable version that could run from a USB drive would be good.
I was introduced to tinkercad while trying to introduce 3d modeling to kids. OpenSCAD is clearly a little advanced for trying to teach the fundamentals of 3d space, and Fusion 360 (or any Autodesk software) was prohibitively expensive. Tinkercad was a great idea, and after learning and teaching it, I’ve found myself using it more often than I anticipated. For us the primary downside is the browser-only online environment. There are always trade-offs with anything though.
I hadn’t heard of CaDoodle before this, and this sounds great–I’m surprised that after being so well-received for what it is that Tinkercad never released any standalone offline versions. We run Debian, so I’ll give CaDoodle a try tomorrow! We have a pc that has windows, but it’s not ideal for us to resort to that, so hopefully we can get the Linux package running reliably. A project like this would really great news for us!
Thanks for posting, can’t wait to give it a go!