Parapart

3D part library for printing or incorporating into other projects.

Project Goals

Free
Fast
Open source
No account needed to download parts
Ad free
100% static - Hosted by GitHub and runs in the browser
No code editing needed to customize parts

Take a look:

What is this thing?

I found myself constantly running into situations where I needed to 3D print some small part, but I couldn't find an STL, or if I did, it was not quite right and needed to be modified. I had not to date seen a 3D model site that did this quickly and efficiently, so I decided to write one.

This site is intended to be a fast, free repository of customizable OpenSCAD models with STL export. No logins or signups to download models, no ads. Everything is statically hosted on GitHub. Customization is done using the OpenSCAD customizer functionality.

What is it not?

Parapart is not intended to be a replacement for thingiverse, thangs, or any of the other excellent model repositories out there. Parapart is intended to be a repository of components for makers to use while building their fabulous projects, or for anyone with a 3D printer to quickly download and print that one type of hook that nobody makes.

How does it work?

Parapart uses a WebAssembly version of OpenSCAD,and OpenSCAD's built-in customization handling as described in the wiki:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual/Customizer

This allows the openSCAD file to remain portable and does not require any external parameter files to be maintained. The functionality here is meant to mimic OpenSCAD's built-in customizer.

For the part database, Parapart loads a static database file and uses the WASM version of Sqlite.

I have SCAD files - how do I get them in here?

Instructions are here: https://github.com/nbr0wn/parapart/wiki

Shout outs to those upon whose shoulders I stood

Many thanks to Olivier Chafik, whose opencad-wasm editor project served as the foundation for Parapart. I did a lot of modification to the presentation layer and file management, but the true work of loading, spawning, and managing OpenSCAD WASM is largely still Olivier's work.

https://github.com/ochafik/openscad-wasm/tree/editor-ochafik.com

Olivier's openscad-wasm build is a fork of Dominick Schroer's openscad-wasm project:

https://github.com/DSchroer/openscad-wasm

Olivier's project also made use of the most excellent viewstl, which Parapart also still uses:

https://www.viewstl.com https://github.com/omrips/viewstl

...and the monaco editor as well: https://github.com/microsoft/monaco-editor

Because I wanted this site to be served from GitHub and hosted statically, I needed a way to manage the part library without a server. I landed on including a sqlite database in the distribution and using sqlite WASM to query it:

https://sqlite.org/wasm/doc/trunk/index.md

...and of course where would any of this be without the OpenSCAD project itself https://openscad.org

Olivier kindly included the following OpenSCAD libraries in his distribution, which I have aldo carried forward:

BOSL2
BOSL
closepoints
fonts
FunctionalOpenSCAD
funcutils
MCAD
NopSCADlib
openscad-tray
plot-function
smooth-prim
Stemfie_OpenSCAD
UB.scad
YAPP_Box

See https://openscad.org/libraries.html for license details

I also included the following libraries myself:

dotscad (https://github.com/JustinSDK/dotSCAD/tree/master)

Known Issues

General code messiness
Layout (especially mobile) needs serious help
OpenSCAD wasm performance for complicated models can be painful

Wish List

External help files per part
Local include files for a part
Having the ability to link related parts and possibly use the same customizations
Expose $fn to tune model smoothness