<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>subway</author><text>This is really cool, but I always feel kind of dirty putting my STL (or any other binary) files into a git repository.&lt;p&gt;I hope GitHub adds support for scad files soon. In theory it should be pretty easy since they already support STL -- have openscad generate an STL from the scad files on the fly.</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>STL File Viewing</title><url>https://github.com/blog/1465-stl-file-viewing</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>kanzure</author><text>Yo github... while you&apos;re bothering, here are some other things that would be handy:&lt;p&gt;* Visual STL diffs, maybe by coloring deleted/added triangles. Possibly with a viewer on gh-pages or on the /:username/:reponame/commits/:branchname endpoint?&lt;p&gt;* DXF sucks, but yeah DXF rendering.&lt;p&gt;* Maybe consider thingiview.js (which does not use WebGL) or possibly a WebGL equivalent viewer. Controlled rotation, zooming, camera repositioning, etc. It seems that most of these features are implemented:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/blob/master/mini/z-bottom-left.stl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/blob/master/mini/z-bott...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/blob/master/mini/y-motor.stl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/blob/master/mini/y-moto...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;* openscad rendering- I know this is a pain in the butt, especially since openscad still requires xserver. But at least it feels more like source code. There are some other options other than openscad that could be easier to render without an xserver, which would be fine in my book, I am not particularly attached to openscad.&lt;p&gt;* Other scripting/rendering options... maybe implicitcad, pythonocc (opencascade/python bindings), HeeksCAD/python, FreeCAD/python, OpenJSCAD, something like that. The problem with STL is that it&apos;s like transmitting compiled binaries to other developers, but what developers really want to work with is the source code. Having to commit STL is like having to commit compiled binaries.&lt;p&gt;* UI widgets for committing from SolidWorks, Pro/Engineer, CATIA, AutoCAD, HeeksCAD, FreeCAD, and other front-ends would be really useful. I would be happy to use github.com while working on my next fighter jet project.&lt;p&gt;* Upverter claims to support git, but really it&apos;s just a link to a remote git repository and you can&apos;t push your schematics to Upverter. Please feel free to eat their lying lunches. Maybe also circuitlab&apos;s (although they have never claimed to have git integration). So yeah, schematics.&lt;p&gt;* Some projects require thousands of parts that need to be included when rendering, especially in assemblies. It would be nice to be able to see a fully rendered image of a version of the repository contents. This quickly devolves into a mess of file format hell, which I imagine is not something you want to tackle. But maybe this could be done through continuous integration hooks or something?&lt;p&gt;For whatever it&apos;s worth, here&apos;s a terrible post-receive bash script I wrote in 2010 for scad rendering on a git server:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/gitduino-post-receive.sh.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/gitduino-post-receive.sh.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;* It would be exceedingly awesome if you could get the RepRap project to jump ship from svn to git. RepRap is the largest, most well organized open source hardware project, and I think it would be a great community to work with to show how strong git is for distributed hardware development.&lt;p&gt;There are already some really excellent RepRap projects in git repositories on github:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/josefprusa/PrusaMendel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/josefprusa/PrusaMendel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/tree/master/mini&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/tree/master/mini&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>STL File Viewing</title><url>https://github.com/blog/1465-stl-file-viewing</url></story>