Using tools properly takes skill, and this goes for software tools as well as hardware. You don’t just buy a paintbrush and on day one paint the Mona Lisa. Similarly, you can’t just open up a CAD program and whip out whatever 3D objects your heart desires, or fire up Vim and start typing. Software tools take a bit of learning before you can wield them efficiently, if even at all. And because you can’t be skilled at everything, no matter how hard we are all trying, it’s good to have at least some of the software tools you know do double duty.
Tom and I were watching [Clough42] design an electronics cabinet for a CNC machine. He does a lot of CNC machining and design work, so he’s no stranger to CAD software. So he downloaded all of the parts that he needed inside cabinet, slid them onto virtual DIN rails, modeled the hinges, and made sure that everything fit before buying anything.
Now I know that some of you out there do CAD modeling like this all the time, but for Tom and I, who are 3D printerers and PCB layouterers, doing the CAD without then following through and finishing up with the CAM seemed a bit novel. I never open CAD unless I’m going to have a machine make the thing – otherwise I’d just draw it out on paper, right? But [Clough42]’s point is that getting models of all of the subparts is so easy these days, you might as well model it.
If, and this is the big “if”, you know your way around the CAD tool of your choice. If you don’t yet, it’s going to be a couple of days’ worth of effort to get there. But once you reach CAD nirvana, you’ll find it’s useful for sketching up anything that has a third dimension to it, not just stuff you need to print out.
What other software tools are like CAD in that once you know them well enough, a wealth of applications opens up before you? Of was this just an instance of having a hammer and everything looking like a nail?
Given how hard it can be to find the important to you in this usecase dimension listed anywhere, while a 3d model of many of these things is available… I can see going straight to a CAD package making sense when the models for the off the shelf parts actually exist.
I tend to prefer pencil/whiteboard doodling and only bother with CAD at all once the complexity gets too high for me to be confident everything will fit as I think it should in my head taking those 2d/iso doodles really into the 3rd dimension. And/or when the basic concepts of which feature is on which part, which off the shelf elements are being selected etc is nailed down and I want really decent drawing to work from that won’t be lost to greasy finger smudges or just to leverage the printer to template etc.
“What other software tools are like CAD in that once you know them well enough, a wealth of applications opens up before you?”
Emacs
vi
viemacs
At the risk of sounding like a normy / industry shill
Excel is great for processing text files
Power Point is about the easiest way to do minor touch ups to images – crop, size, brightness, contrast, color temp and annotate in seconds
The only time I voluntarily used Excel was for a Gov contracting job. They were processing thousands of transactions, by hand, with copy/paste and manually doing operations on them. It was insane. I wrote some VBA to do it for them with a little button, and a filepicker that did it all for them. What took them 16 hours to do manually, was automated and took less than a minute to run from start to finish.
These were GS13’s by the way. Your Gov at work…
Excel VBA is pretty powerful, it’s usually my goto tool for data manipulation if I don’t have what I need. Not only do you have control over things like the cell functions and formatting but also automated printing, email etc. VBA also works in Word, Outlook, etc. There’s even provision to do things like text to speech and inline asm if I remember correctly.
Although, sometimes it’s best not to automate yourself out of a job.
Been there done that, learnt the hard way.
They refused to use the automation because they didn’t understand how it produced the correct answer, now it’s a six person job, spread over four departments. So ultimately, the last laugh was still mine.
Or JavaScript if your a Google sheets user
And a sledge hammer is the tool to use to cut toe nails.
i am all thumbs at excel, but give me a csv and some flavor of sql and i can do just about anything
I think inkscape for EEs doing ECAD is a lot more powerful than it might appear. Of course I make the occasional graphic or logo, which can then be imported into KiCAD as PCB art. But it can also be super useful for making timing diagrams, doing circuit sizing estimates, creating flow charts, pin out diagrams for modules and connectors, etc
I think the real key is to realizing that if you have a 2D othrographic drawing, and you know the dimensions of a single component of the board. You can copy and paste a screen grab and scale it to size using the component as a datum
Inkscape is a wonderful tool for everything vector based. The gcode tool is nice, and I use it for stitching and to create files for my laser cutter. In my dayjob I use it to create graphics the framework we’re using to build a hmi can’t handle.
There is a major roadblock to taking on learning something new-to-you like CAD. That would be the current non-working state of the world’s web search engines.
Google is no longer viable for finding anything – paid listings; instead of real URLs they give you everything converted into a mile-long tracking hash redirect bullshit thing; all the ‘AI’.
DDG, being based on Bing, just finds you ecommerce sites selling the thing you searched for and if you try forcing it to refine the results it flat-out gives up and hands you a ‘No results found for…’. DDG is somewhat better if you restrict it to a specific domain but if you are starting from zero on a particular subject, that’s just a big ol’ fail. Maybe try Wikipedia, bro. LOL.
As far as I know, any other alternatives either also just don’t find what you searched for, or are a paid service that you aren’t allowed to try out before signing up.
Good thing you can still go to a library and grab a book for any major cad software like autodesk, maya, rhino, 3dsmax, etc.
Sounds like Assembly vs Modeling.
There does seem to be more Assembly in videos. Scanning and Assembly, checking clearances, door motions. Wiring seems to screw things up after…
Doing a layout before the parts arrive or before they’re even ordered.
I’m jealous, I have too much of a SCAD mind and SCAD is a dead end when it comes to assembly and fillets, just too slow.
There is a new way to do lay-outs virtually with InstructMesh
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-software-tool-users-ai-generated.html
3D printers may even get a brain of their own:
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-ai-powered-3d-printers-brain.html
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-ai-ability-autonomously-labs-scenario.html
For me it’s Microsoft Word, I’ve figured out how to bend it to my will and get past the frustrating bits such as numbered paragraphs and section breaks. A lot of that is VBA and knowing the data model, some of which I owe to Woody Leonard’s Microsoft Word Annoyances written (I think) in the late 90s, and most of those annoyances still exist in the currant versions.
I’ve been involved in projects to automate creation of long and long-lived (the trickier part) documents for the pharma industry including a couple commercial products as well as custom work for clients.
Indispensable is the art of letting enough free space for cable ferrules and cable bending between din rail device and cable rail:) Boxes in Freecad based on device dimensions, maybe some python script to import Excel csv table export. Btw Excel (and VBA) are great powerful tools.
Perhaps the best use of a programmers time would be to set up no-code solutions for others:
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-code-platform-customize.html
In the same way Wiles solved Fermat, perhaps there is some genius who…with or without AI help) that can code in an operating system a 0 and a 1 at a type…below assembler….coding so tight there is simply no room for hacking… something that can be hard-wired that has its own fiber networks such that a later superintelligence couldn’t do a Colossus.
Like how antiquated ICBM equipment or the first atomic reactors run by hand are immune from Stuxnet.
Air-gapping isn’t enough anymore.
For now, A.I. just needs to know what actually is possible
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-hardflow-algorithm-generative-ai-high.html
You can get a lot done in Blender, and it should be supported to the max to break the Autodesk and Adobe monopolies.
I’d say data processing tools. Command line pipes with cut, rev, awk, jq and so on. Or higher level with Jupyter Notebooks, imagemagick, spreadsheet software, and similar tools. Anything that can take a bunch of data and filter and convert it into what is useful to you.