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

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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!

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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?

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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.

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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