About
Our Vision
CAD-Viewer.org aims to become a high-quality website for sharing CAD files. We believe that the future of engineering and most of the software is on the web, and that’s why we created rapid & secure cloud infrastructure.
While our software is still in its early stages, we strive to provide a seamless experience. If you encounter any issues, please try refreshing the page (Ctrl+Shift+R) or reach out to our support team for assistance.
Our Business Approach
At this time, this project is not designed to generate revenue. As long as server costs remain manageable, we will continue offering the service for free. Should server costs increase, and we need to expand our infrastructure, we plan to offer the following options:
- For un-registered users: Free usage of the software with limitations due to spam & boots.
- For registered users: Full usage of the software & 2Gb of free storage for private content.
- For premium users: The possibility of buying extra storage and the priority on conversion queues.
- For enterprises: Private cloud instances and on-demand customization.
If the registered features do not satisfy your needs, or if you are interested in a private cloud, you can contact us, and we will be very happy to provide a solution.
Our Growth and Milestones
Our software is currently composed of about 30k lines of code* and we continuously improve it by adding new features, fixing bugs, and optimizing existing code.
Some of our major features & improvements are:
- 2024: Significantly improved the CAD backend by using OpenCascade directly.
- 2023: Added the tree navigation & instance properties feature.
- 2022: Added the multi-app interface & the CAD library.
- 2021: Added a custom CAD backend for OBJ and STL files, a Chat application and a new user interface.
- 2020: Moved to a custom domain and a private server.
- 2019: General improvements.
- 2018: Usage of the Websocket protocol.
- 2015: First version in a personal website.
*Last updated on December 2024.
The story behind the project
This project was conceived and developed by me, Rafael Senties Martinelli, a software subcontractor in the aeronautics industry. Alongside my professional work, I dedicate time to exploring and maintaining personal software projects.
The idea of a CAD viewer began in November 2015 during my studies, when a colleague from the University, Paul Renard, shared with me a Python snippet based on pythonocc-core. The library’s potential immediately caught my attention, and I saw an opportunity to combine it with the Django framework to create a web-based CAD viewer.
By December 2015, I had developed the first version of the viewer and launched it on my personal website. However, after a year, I decided to pause my software projects and temporarily take the viewer offline.
The project stayed on hold until the summer of 2018, when a conversation with a CAD expert, Romain Chelmas reignited my interest. His curiosity and enthusiasm motivated me to create a demo for him and relaunch the project online.
While I’ve always believed this project holds great potential for the industry, the key question for me was whether it was worth dedicating my free time to a project entering an increasingly competitive market. After some consideration, I decided to continue developing it—not with the goal of turning it into a business, but driven by my curiosity and passion for technology and software development.
Finally, after some years as a "demo software", in 2020, I decided to give it more attention to this project and develop a professional version. I transitioned it to a custom domain and private server, and despite limited resources, I do my best to provide a high-quality service.