Preview: Juypter CadQuery now has a Viewer component for debugging in IDEs

This is a beta version (beta1) of the CadQuery viewer for IDEs I talked about earlier.

If you want to give it a try, happy to get feedback.

Installation

It can be installed in an existing conda environment

pip install git+https://github.com/bernhard-42/jupyter-cadquery.git@viewer2

However, since it is quite young, I’d recommend to try it in a fresh conda environment with CadQuery 2.1 being installed:

conda create -n jcv python=3.8
conda activate jcv

conda install pywin32  # Windows users only
conda install -c conda-forge -c cadquery cadquery=2.1

pip install git+https://github.com/bernhard-42/jupyter-cadquery.git@viewer2

pip install git+https://github.com/bernhard-42/cadquery-massembly  # for the animated examples

Test from the terminal

Starting (on Mac, Linux and Windows)

jcv -w 800 -h 600

As a simple test add the following code to test.py:

import cadquery as cq
from jupyter_cadquery.viewer.client import show

box = cq.Workplane().box(1, 1, 1).faces(">Z").hole(0.6).edges().fillet(0.05)
cyl = cq.Workplane().circle(0.1).extrude(1)

show(box, cyl, axes=True, transparent=True)

Debugging session with dark theme

jcv -d -w 650 -h 400

[bernhard-42]

@Jojain correct. @jmwright The show function imported will tessellate the objects provided and then send the numpy arrays via zmq to the viewer. So you can call python test.py from the command line or run it in VSCode or any other editor from anywhere. You only need to use the python interpreter of the conda env you’ve installed the viewer into. The viewer is stateless, so you can even send (show) objects from different editor instances. If you set reset_camera=False, different calls to show will use the same angle to look at the object.

So basically, when the voila thing works (see below) you don’t even see jupyter. And restarting the viewer simply is a browser page refresh.

This also means that there is no dependency for the viewer part on Cadquery. The viewer only deals with numpy arrays and pythreejs. Only the show function uses Cadquery code. And if jupyter cadquery is deployed to the same env as your cadquery, the versions will fit automatically.

Additionally, I found the issue around voila: I need to create a kernelspec called jcv first and tell voila to use it. Will update the git repo today or tomorrow. Up to then jupyter lab will do the trick

[bernhard-42]

Release RC1 of Jupyter-CadQuery, so closing this issue