Kevin Harrington
As an elementary school technology teacher, TinkerCAD provided easy to use on-ramps for students as young as 2nd grade. I spent the 23/24 school year teaching with TinkerCAD and found myself increasingly upset by the limitations and constraints of TinkerCAD. First and foremost, the fact of the CAD models sources being entirely unavailable. The "Tinkercad source" is actually entries in the Autodesk servers database. With no option to access those actual sources, students are tied entirely to the tinkercad website.
The first real problem came when a student made a model in 5th grade that was so complex that the Tinkercad site crashed. The model was not recoverable, and the student that had done all of that extra work to add detail to his model lost everything. This experience started me thinking about how this could be made better for the students.
The next major problem came when another student wanted to do CAD work on her ride home (which due to bus schedules took over an hour each day). She wanted to keep designing things, but without an internet connection she was unable to do any work.
Finally i began to contemplate the pedagogical damage being done by teaching students a skill that is only accessible to them as mediated by a company. I began to feel a deep sense of unease that the skills of my students were increasingly being trapped behind a paywall.
My solution was to make a locally installed application, that used an open file format that is stored locally on the disk, and that had access to the full resources of the computer the application was running on.
In July 2024 i began work in earnest on CaDoodle. In April 2025 I hit a level of feature completeness to open it up for Beta testing.
Source Code
This repository is the installer and auto-updater. The installable releases are found here.
The below link is for the source code of the main application itself.
https://github.com/CommonWealthRobotics/CaDoodle-Application
Inspiration
The workflow of Tinkercad is an excellent experience for novice users of CAD.
1. Drag and drop shape with surface snapping
2. Group and ungroup
3. Solid and Hole status
4. Undo of operations
5. Stretch and move handles
6. Library of examples
The Tinkercad workflow suffers from a few fundamental problems
1. Web based UI means it is enclosed by whomever runs the server
2. Subscription model is precarious (Autodesk is not known as a reliable partner for free tools over time)
3. Proprietary source files
Solution
This application is Java based and uses BowerStudio as the CAD kernel.
All scripts will be compatible BowlerStudio scripts.
UI will be laid out in SceneBuilder / JavaFX.
OpenJDK 17
Hardware Requirements
The following platforms will be targeted:
* Windows
* Mac OS (Intel and Aarch64)
* Linux Ubuntu .deb and flatpack)
* ChromeOS
* 8 gb of ram is required.
The following platforms will not be targeted:
* Androind (depends on JavaFX, Aparapi, MuJoCo, none of which work in Android due to JNI deps)
* iOS (I am not interested in even trying TBH)
Chrome OS Instructions
First, set up Linux using the instructions : https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en
Next download the Linux .DEB installer from : https://github.com/CommonWealthRobotics/CaDoodle/releases
Finally double-click on the .DEB to install CaDoodle.
You can now launch CaDoodle from the applications launcher window.
Peter Walsh
Yann Guidon / YGDES
Duncan
yOyOeK1
Wanted to say - this is perfect. Everything I wanted in a 'I need to quickly sketch up a design' program, and keeps all the TinkerCAD feel to make it even easier.
Absolutely love it. Only thing I'd say is missing is thread generation but that's not a deal killer at all.
Thank you for all your work.