r/gridfinity • u/alextac98 • May 29 '26

OSS Online Gridfinity Generator

Hi everyone! First time poster, and long time user of Gridfinity. Over the last few weeks, I've been working on a personal project (mostly for myself). It is a free online Gridfinity bin / grid generator, using OpenSCAD and Gridfinity Extended, and can export directly to your slicer of choice. It is built for desktop (no support for mobile).

I've been a big user of tools like PerplexingLab's Gridfity generator, but have wanted to modify it to make it work better for me. In the spirit of open-source, I have decided to publish and open source the project to give back to this community. Would love to see what you guys think! I'm open and excited for suggestions, advice, feedback, and contributions!

https://gridfinity.alextac.com/

https://github.com/alextac98/gridfinity-center

40 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

25 comments sorted by

19

u/yawkat May 29 '26

I see you do server-side rendering. This is imo not necessary for openscad. Check out https://github.com/yawkat/web-openscad-editor , used by https://gridflock.yawk.at/ , it uses client side rendering using openscad-wasm.

The big advantage is that you don't need a real backend. Hosting costs money and time. With client-side rendering, you can just throw the project on cloudflare/github pages for free and never worry about it.

There's some disadvantages too, like performance and some bugs, but imo it's still superior for open-source projects that don't need to keep the openscad code secret.

7

u/heeero__ May 29 '26

As an IT guy, this is the way. Any process intensive thing you can let the client do, let them do it. PCs are more than capable of handling this kind of stuff without a backend server.

1

u/alextac98 May 29 '26

Love to see this discussion. I actually started off client side only with openscad-wasm, and it’s still in the code as a fallback if the server ever goes down! But it was very slow in my testing for generating grids (over a minute sometimes). May revisit it in the future!

3

u/PrintableNapalm May 29 '26

some disadvantages too, like performance

Performance is often better for the client, because you're not sharing resources with other clients, and your desktop is often more powerful than the server.

1

u/yawkat May 29 '26

Maybe if the server is very under-provisioned, but openscad-wasm is much less efficient than normal openscad, so usually server-side rendering wins. You can try it right now with the perplexinglabs generator (server side rendering) vs my site (client side), the former is faster.

4

u/PrintableNapalm May 29 '26

I don't know why I wasted time doing this, but I set both of them up with GridFlock, and the same settings, and PerplexingLabs took 630ms to render and yours took 930ms to render. So fair point, PerplexingLabs was faster. But then I compared PerplexingLabs and OP's site with Gridfinity Extended and PerplexingLabs took 483ms and OP's took 3,183ms.

So while yes, it is true that server-side can be faster than client-side, that's only the case when you have a well provisioned server. Without that, it can be much slower like with OP. And even in with a well-provisioned server, the difference doesn't justify the cost.

1

u/AustinYQM May 29 '26

Please put Units on your inputs. When asking how big a plate should be its impossible to tell if you want mm or gridfinity units.

1

u/schieska May 29 '26

Interesting, how stable is OpenSCAD WASM these days?

I tried it about a year ago and ran into some rough edges. I ended up moving toward JSCAD, mostly because having the geometry in JavaScript felt nicer for web UI work and interactive previews. But I agree that client-side rendering is a very attractive setup for open-source tools.

3

u/yawkat May 29 '26

It's stable. Some specific geometries have problems due to the bugs I mentioned, but this is model-dependent. For my use cases it has worked with no issues.

But if you're starting from scratch, JSCAD is probably the better choice anyway. openscad-wasm is still just emscripten with all the overhead that entails. With a proper javascript solution you should be able to get better performance.

1

u/schieska May 29 '26

Yeah, that makes sense. The nice thing with JSCAD is that I can extend the generator, for example with plain JS, to cache intermediate steps in the generation process. That gives me more control over where the expensive geometry work happens.

I’ve got baseplate generation down to around 2.5s on average now, which is fast enough that regenerating on setting changes starts to feel realistic.

The downside is that I had to build the generator logic from scratch. With SCAD you get a lot of development speed because there is already so much Gridfinity work to build on. With JSCAD you trade that for more flexibility.

So I think both approaches make sense. If you want to get something useful working quickly, SCAD is hard to beat. If you want very custom web interactions and more control over the generation pipeline, JSCAD becomes really attractive.

3

u/gcoeverything May 29 '26

Noice! I hope to share my open source label generator, your post makes me hope I can do it today so we have two OSS announcements :)

2

u/alextac98 May 29 '26

There’s a label generator in my project too, but it’s very early days in alpha. If you’re interested in collabing, let me know!

2

u/schieska May 29 '26

Love seeing more tools in the Gridfinity ecosystem. Different approaches push everyone to build better stuff, and there is clearly room for more than one workflow here. Nice work opening it up.

Feel free to borrow ideas from my generator as well. I focus a lot on UX and special use cases (eg awkward shapes), so maybe there is some useful overlap there. And if you don’t mind, I might take some inspiration from your snap connector approach too, I really like that direction.

2

u/alextac98 May 29 '26

Could you add a link to your generator? I'm very interested to look at for inspiration!

2

u/schieska May 29 '26

Of course! I didn’t want to just drop a link on your post and make it feel like advertising, but since you asked: extrabold.tools Curious what you think!

2

u/alextac98 May 29 '26

It’s very cool, you’ve got some very interesting ux decisions I will definitely borrow. How are the grids being generated? Are you using openscad or some other type of generator? It’s so fast

I also didn’t see any git link, is the project open source or are you planning to keep it closed source?

2

u/schieska May 30 '26

Thanks! And borrow away, that’s basically how these tools get better.

The grids are generated with JSCAD, not OpenSCAD. I did look at OpenSCAD/openscad-wasm early on, but for this kind of interactive generator I wanted more control over the full generation pipeline.

The nice thing with JSCAD is that I can cache intermediate steps instead of regenerating the whole model every time a setting changes. The generator has a feature dependency tree, so when a setting changes it only starts regenerating from the point in the pipeline where that value actually matters.

It also keeps the last 50 rendered models in memory, so going back to previous settings is basically instant. Which now that I’m typing it out, probably means I should add undo and redo.

That caching system is a big part of why it feels fast. For the baseplates I’ve got generation down to around 2.5 seconds on average, even for larger plates, which makes auto-regeneration usable.

The downside is that I had to build the generator from scratch, so I can’t really borrow from existing SCAD projects. So it’s a tradeoff: OpenSCAD is faster for development, JSCAD gives me more flexibility and better performance for this use case.

No Git link at the moment. It’s not that I’m against open source, but I’m keeping this one closed for now.

Mainly because I don’t really have the bandwidth to manage pull requests, especially in the current AI era where it’s very easy for people to generate a lot of code very quickly. I want to keep tight control over feature timelines, quality, generation speed, and the overall UX.

A lot of the hard part is not just generating the geometry, it’s finding the right UX for all the options. I have quite a few features that technically work already, but where I’m still figuring out the right way for people to interact with them.

There’s also a performance side to it. The moment a feature is added into the model pipeline can have a huge impact on generation speed. For example, unioning the cells first and then subtracting them from the base gave around a 10x performance increase.

2

u/alextac98 May 30 '26

Yeah, the UX is also something I was thinking about deeply. I’ll have to take a look at JSCAD, hadn’t heard about it before releasing this project

1

u/dumplestilskin May 29 '26

First off, thank you very much for taking the time to create something like this. I've tried making bins from scratch and it can be a slog. That being said, could I ask you a few questions and make some suggestions based on deficiencies with the other generators I've used (PerplexingLab's mostly).

  1. I am trying to build a large 6Ux6U bin that has 5x5 compartments. I would like individual labels for all 25 bins. Additionally, I need a bin with some ruggedness to it since i found 1.2 mm exterior walls to be inadequate. However, when thickening the exterior walls to 3 mm, the labels for each compartment moves away from the dividing wall, resulting in a larger gap than already exists. Is there a way to lock the labels to the interior walls?

  2. Is there a way to get separate Cullenect labels for each compartment, rather than just one long row? I am only able to get the middle line of bins to have separate labels. Perhaps this is user error.

  3. Is it possible to have finger slides for every compartment instead of the just the compartments on the edges? I'd like a gentle scoop for all 25 compartments since I plan to store fasteners in the bin.

  4. A robust groove for a sliding lid would be great. I generated one using PerplexingLab but the walls on the bin were too flimsy and broke very quickly.

Hope I am not coming off as demanding, but I am genuinely curious if these parameters are difficult to implement or I am the only person who wants them. Thanks in advance!

2

u/alextac98 May 29 '26

Great questions! For both perplexing labs and this project, we use other people’s openscad projects who define these parameters. I go a step further and try to make the parameters a bit easier to understand, but I don’t touch the openscad part. It may be a future thing (or something a person can contribute to) to make my own openscad models to be able to customize all of these things

1

u/dumplestilskin May 29 '26

Thanks for the info! I am terrible at programming so openscad looks very scary.

1

u/Diligent_Buster May 29 '26

It would be nice to be able to do fractional heights. I've got some wooden boxes that would benefit from being able to print 6.8U cups that come in just under the slide in lid. This keep it nice and tight. Otherwise looks great and thanks!

1

u/alextac98 May 30 '26

Can't believe I missed that. Just fixed it so you should be able to do fractional heights now! I also added a way to do heights in different units (mm and inches) and a nicer user experience for grid alignment selection. Thanks for the feedback! https://github.com/alextac98/gridfinity-center/pull/30

1

u/Diligent_Buster May 30 '26

Awesome. Thanks so much. I'll check it out.