Built by my former colleague, Stewart Allen (Co-Founder/CTO of WebMethods, CTO of AddThis, Co-Founder/CPO of IonQ, et al.).
What caught my attention:
- 100% free, no subscriptions, no accounts, no cloud
- Local-first: all slicing and toolpath generation runs on your machine
- Works in any browser, even offline once loaded
- Supports FDM/SLA, CNC milling, laser cutting, wire EDM
- Fully open source: github.com/GridSpace/grid-apps
Refreshing to see a tool that isn't trying to lock you into a subscription or harvest your data.
I wrote up a bit on Carbide Create at:
- https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing (note that there is a link to a free (as in beer) download for Windows or Mac OS at that link)
- https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/toolpaths
Other commercial programs which one licenses and installs and which don't intrude beyond that include:
- MeshCAM https://www.grzsoftware.com/
- Alibre https://www.alibre.com/ (note that there is a CAM option which is a re-badged MeshCAM)
- Moment of Inspiration 3D https://moi3d.com/ (this is probably the next commercial package I try)
and of course FreeCAD has a CAM Workbench which has seen great strides and Solvespace has a basic facility for G-code generation and some folks just program G-code/CAM directly --- I've been working on a tool for that myself: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
Edit: looks like yes! https://github.com/GridSpace/grid-apps I will try it then.
In fact I had that only a month or 2 ago with fusion 360. Something in their cloud was down so I couldn't export to STL and i really needed that urgently.
It’s probably one of the few area of YouTube that is actually still useful. Probably a high enough barrier to entry to stop most slop.
DesignSpark PCB is also decent - only minor UX mistakes like warping the mouse when you zoom.
It's not perfect but it's pretty damn good these days. By EE standards it's positively awesome. Single platform vendor toolchain hell is why people leave commercial software and move to KiCad, which runs everywhere, is open source, and has a plugin architecture plus mostly every feature you could ever need except high end simulation (which just needs time).
- Local-first: all slicing and toolpath generation runs on your machine
- Works in any browser, even offline once loaded
YES!
I think a new type of open source is emerging centering around what is now possible in browsers. Browsers have a great track record when running legacy projects. Relying on a backend could be a liability for longevity.
I built opal editor myself, a local first open source free markdown editor with these same principles, https://github.com/rbbydotdev/opal
That, my friend, is not how offline works. You will be required to have internet access in one way or another. Offline works 100% locally no matter if you have internet or not.
We call this: download. Usually better than RCE.
A "browser cache" is just an opaque bit of storage. What if you need to update/reinstall your browser or want to switch? I wouldn't trust important data to it.
I generally feel uncomfortable how so many applications are browser-only these days. The thought of having important data in a tab that you might close by mistake at any moment is uncomfortable. Browsers should really only be used for fleeting content, not productive work.
This probably won't scroll to the correct place on the page but there's some images of my project at https://hcc.haus/propmania/#2024-palm-torches and https://static.cloudygo.com/static/Prop%20Making/2024%20Palm...
I used it instead of the terrible closed source Easel App for a CARVEY hobby CNC. For metal milling I find Fusion 360 is necessary.
But another part of me realizes that everyone is using Fusion360, despite the fact they have a history of taking away features to force people to migrate to paid tiers. So it probably doesn't matter.
But browsers (and browser technologies) have documented track of being fully backward compatible up to the beginnings of WWW, and it's not going to change.
Which actually is much much better than any other environment you can imagine - unless of course you use (and want to use) that one frozen in time 25 year old PC. And pray nothing breaks (y2k bugs and whatnot).
If the software is open source (and works offline) you can have it functional in 10 or 20 more years. And it will be "locally-installed software you own" you want.
People (generally) use web-based apps that are good enough in spite of the web stack -- not because of it.
It’s a good thing that’s exactly what this is, then.
CNC machines are somewhat basic machines really.
I too wish that software would be efficient, robust and long-lasting. But it seems that most people don't care about this enough (compared to other factors) to force change. (Alternatively, they are locked in to platforms they don't like to use.)
Which one exactly ? IE ? Dillo ? Lynx ? Pale Moon ? Firefox version 126 ?
Alphabet make money from ads, so they want web pages, apps on Android and Chrome everywhere.
Mozilla make money from Google.
Microsoft make money from software licenses and subscriptions and from cloud services. They might be interested in cross platform installation.
At the moment what we have is PWA and WASM and icons on the desktop.
At least for stuff that doesn't use device API's much, it seems like websites are the way to go. They're a whole lot easier to build than mobile apps.
I think we already have plenty of avenue in ‘solutions’ like Electron to let people build bad apps.
The boring answer from Capt. Obvious. Incentive alignment.
That said, WebAssembly might be the trojan horse. While it started as a browser compile target, WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) is extending it beyond browsers into filesystem, networking, etc. etc. etc.
Fingers crossed, we may get cross-platform standards by accident.
That said, aren't Prusa/Orca/etc. all already open-source (and part of the same lineage)?
I wouldn't want online tools to be come the default (like google docs) but having them as an options is great. (I find onshape and photopea useful in this way as well).
When the bugs don't creep up it's absolutely incredible, though.
For the A1 and P1S you're better off backporting the profile to PrusaSlicer or Orca.
And don't get me started on the network plug-in (the lack of transparency there makes me fairly suspicious that something is up) and the lack of directory structure support on the SD cards. Really, how could you mess it up.
It’s a fork of PrusaSlicer, which was a fork of Slic3r. There’s a fork of BambuStudio called OrcaSlicer now.
They didn’t “rip off” an open source project, they forked it just as the parent project forked another project. This is how open source is supposed to work, isn’t it? Why are we shaming them for doing the thing we always encourage and then giving features back to the community which have gone into OrcaSlicer now?
I’m not lecturing anyone. I was trying to leave a helpful comment for the thread to clarify that it’s a fork, just like the fork that it came from, and the other slicer that was forked from it.
And then there is crap like this:
https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...
Bambu is fantastic hardware but they're doing the exact same thing that DJI did in the drones field. A few more years and Prusa will have gone under, because it is impossible to compete with Chinese state subsidized companies whose sole purpose it is to dominate a market where they take something that has been community built and then embrace and extend it in every way possible to kick the door shut behind them. All of course in your best interests.
Also what's weird is that this project seems to be primarily written in javascript. I can't imagine that's a pleasant user experience for generating tool paths...
You can import models to orcaslicer (open source), do your slicing, and export the g code file to SD card.
If you want to skip the SD card, block the printer's mac/ip address at the firewall and set up WiFi. Then send the print directly from orcaslicer.
That being said, my gut says bambu is going to slowly require a persistent connection to the cloud at some point. Maybe they think they are an EV car company.
AFAIK, the hidden internal USB port is intended to charge a phone/other device used as a "touch controller".
I don't like their closed-source control and the way they've managed local integrations, but I also want to accelerate making things with a printer that just "prints" (akin to how some will buy into the Apple ecosystem for something that "just works"). I've now sold my previous open-source Klipper/Mainsail printer which I heavily modified.
If/when Bambu makes their ecosystem unbearable for me, I will switch away (probably to a Prusa). For now, the ease of use of the machine has led to much more things being made as I can trust it to work accurately and reliably.
They make solid enough devices sure, but they dont exactly have a moat that would keep users buying their stuff if it were to start getting locked down. They have far more to lose than they have to gain doing so.
I work with the Smoothieware project. The V1 Smoothieboard was one of the first with ethernet onboard (although kinda borked). First thing that was advised to everyone was "never connect this to anything outside your local network"
Nowadays...it seems that warning has been lost. Even in the face of firmware updates that caused physical damage.
Something to be said for building your own printer.
They’re trying to introduce legislation that would require 3D printers to be online so that if you try to print a firearm, it won’t let you…
Granted, today, you can print offline.
Tomorrow? A firmware update might just brick it the next time it goes online or won’t be able to read the grbl
The whole notion is about as anti-American and authoritarian as laws get, I don't see it as anything more than political grandstanding, and even if Washington passes it with statewide, unanimous endorsement, it won't last a year before 9th circuit court strikes it down on purely 2A grounds.
Virginia Democrats are advancing multiple gun ban bills in the 2026 session, including assault weapon sales bans and magazine capacity limits, primarily through Democrat-controlled committees. Virginia's General Assembly has a slim Democratic majority sponsoring and pushing these measures without Republican support.
Bills like house SB 217 (assault weapon ban) and HB 271 (semi-auto ban) were approved in the Democrat-led Senate Courts of Justice Committee strictly along party lines. Sponsors such as Sen. Saddam Azlan Salim (D) lead these efforts, facing opposition from Republicans like Del. Terry Kilgore (R). They await full Assembly votes and signature from Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger.
In NY State, Democrats, holding supermajorities in the Assembly (103-47) and Senate (42-20), champion Governor Hochul's 2026 State of the State proposals. These include criminalizing unlicensed possession/sale of CAD files for 3D-printed guns (via Penal Law amendments), mandating 3D printer safety standards to block firearm production, and requiring recovery reports to state police. Key bills like S.227A (Sen. Hoylman-Sigal, active in 2025 session) target 3D-printed ghost guns/silencers as felonies; related A2228 pushes printer background checks.
Republicans offer no sponsorship or support, labeling Hochul's agenda and bills like S.227A "anti-gun, anti-speech" infringements on Second Amendment rights and innovation for non-gun printing. NRA-ILA criticizes them as futile against criminals while burdening hobbyists
In my opinion the ICE unrest is a smoke screen. There is a separate fully frontal assault on personal liberties impacting normal American citizens happening right now and it is happening while all the attention is on Minneapolis!
https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=2320&Year=202...
https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=2321&Year=202...
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20260127/virginia-gun-contro...
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S227/amendme...
At the same time it's neat to live in a separated reality from the people thinking that "In my opinion the ICE unrest is a smoke screen."
The federal gov disarmed a protestor and executed them on the street.
That doesn't seem like a "distraction"... that seems like -the literal thing that you're worrying about- happening in a highly obvious and direct way.
As a left-wing gun owner, a pretty common conversation is about how limited the right wing gun owners understandings are, because this is, like, literally the thing they have been fantasizing about all along.
Wild times for sure.
I hope the world many of us live in never actually enters yours and you can keep enjoying your fantasy of government oppression while some of us are out here being physically assaulted by the state.
Anything outside your bubble is framed as a conspiracy theory or the ramblings of deluded, even evil people on "the other side".
The media streams you watch end up being a rorschach test - carefully crafted and deployed to different bubbles, A/B tested, cynically manipulative and deliberately framed and intended to evoke specific reactions. The language is carefully used so two people can watch the exact same clip or newscast or soundbite and hear what sounds like a reasonable reinforcement of what they already believe. Sometimes things will even technically be 100% factual, but it'll be just as manipulative and as much of a "lie" as if they'd made it up entirely.
I don't think bubbles is the right paradigm, anymore - these are deep, deep pits, and every piece of media that reinforces your model, where that model is the one intended for you to have by some of the big influences, brings you another shovelful deeper, and you've got to put that much more effort in to dig your way out.
Trying to talk to anyone who hasn't worked their own way out of digging out of a media pit ends up being a team sport or a tribalistic conflict - the facts and the stories don't mesh, and if you're 100% certain of your facts, and your "opposition" concedes to the facts, then you're going to think your story is the right one. The cognitive dissonance and the effort required to update your model to match reality - to recognize the manipulative, malignant influences deploying these conflicting storylines, and to figure out how to identify what actual reality is - is too much for most people, and way too much for any casual online interactions.
Not sure how you fix that without forbidding some actors from doing what they do at a legislative level, and that gets into hairy freedom of speech territory.
And it’s not a bubble or a pit anymore, it’s an island, a nation of their own mind.
Consumerists till the end.
You certainly don't know - none of us have all the facts, and the investigation into it will reveal it. It's that both sides present the same facts, the same video, and tell two starkly different narratives, either of which are reasonable conclusions based on the facts that can be proven from the available evidence. What doesn't get talked about is that even with multiple videos, from multiple angles, nobody has sufficient evidence to definitively prove what actually happened.
What I do know is that it's extraordinarily stupid to get into a heated conflict with any sort of law enforcement, especially when armed, because any sort of accident or exceptional circumstance or misinterpretation of events is not going to go your way, legally and sometimes with regards to you losing your life. Pretti was in the wrong - you cannot physically interfere with and antagonize federal law enforcement. We have legal remedies to hold officers to account for overstepping or violations. He was well within his rights to record and then report the mistreatment of the woman he was stepping in to "protect", and the proper place and time to remedy that wrong is in court. If the officer was in the wrong, he'd have been held to account. Getting physical and up in the officers face and space was either stupid and ignorant, or a deliberate act intended to elicit additional violence. There's protest "training" out there that teaches people to do that sort of thing, with the intent of escalating violence deliberately, specifically for agitprop and convenient political narrative purposes.
The government has the sole and absolute monopoly on violence, for better or worse, and if you intrude on that in the slightest, you will lose.
They want the nebulous, uncertain, rorschach test incidents where they can spin an event to tell the story they want to tell, regardless of whether that story is actually true. That doesn't mean the CBP agents were in the right, nor that Pretti was responsible or did it on purpose, or that anyone involved in the whole series of events had ulterior motives. The only thing we know, until an investigation is finalized, and due process is enacted, is that we lack critical information that explains the full context and nuance of the incident. There are a metric shit ton of ways the actual story might have gone, ranging from schizophrenic break (by an agent, or Pretti) to suicide by cop, to tragic accident caused by a notoriously flawed weapon, to some other asshat, currently unknown, throwing a firecracker after the officer announced "gun", and so on. We don't even have enough information to know what's a "likely" outcome and make some reasonable Bayesian projections.
The videos we saw aren't proof of anything. They're evidence of dozens of different possible scenarios, with a wide range of likely possibilities, and dozens more we don't even know to consider without having the information that investigation will bring to bear.
He was shot after disobeying lawful orders and the man who disarmed him possibly negligently discharged the victim's firearm while the other officers were wrestling him and the other officers didn't have the information that he was disarmed. This wasn't intentional, this was an accident. There is also another angle showing him kicking an ICE vehicle and breaking its tail light the week before. This is no bystander. It is delusional to believe that it is possible to deport millions of convicted criminal illegal aliens without an incident while thousands interfere with police operations as they deport criminals. The bills being passed are far more relevant to Americans' civil liberties because they make the average American who is NOT currently a criminal into one for possession and manufacture of plastic and metal parts. This is an untenable position.
> some of us are out here being physically assaulted by the state
Yeah, I'm not belligerently protesting the deportation of illegal aliens.
More nuanced discussion: "Did ICE Just Murder Someone For Carrying A Gun?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCiaqJvbW_A
So yeah, tensions are high. Minnesotans feel violated. ICE sees a battleground, not a state. That’s an issue.
”There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people” - Admiral Adama
Meanwhile, the legal system in WA requires 5 (five) arrests for juveniles to be given _any_ jail time for gun crimes. And the laws regarding the unlawful possession of a weapon are almost completely unenforced.
Sigh. I'm pretty pro-gun-regulation, but I just can't stand our legislators' furious virtue signaling.
I don’t think this will pass as is but it shows you where lawmakers heads are. They would rather brick your capability than do actual policing.
The is really just a US specific issue where 90% what you need for a gun can be purchased easily, but the non functional handle requires registration, etc.
They could just make buying gun parts as strict as buying a whole gun
To be clear I have no desire to print firearms but I do not want my tools online and getting bricked when the company who made it goes out of business.
Right to use.
I don’t think a company should have a say in what you do with their product after you have purchased it. Whether you intend to print firearms or not. The acts of the few should not withhold liberty of the many.
Trivial to firewall them from the internet.
