Josh VonFricken

Aerospace and software engineer building the future of CAE @FiniteSystems. Previously @planet, @penn_state

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

This shows a cool latency hiding technique that extrapolates the position of dragged sketches between server responses using their motion derivatives

[Andres @AndresMilioto]

4 legs, 1 crank, 41 hinges. a real assembly, not an animation: solved every frame, zero interferences over a full turn, every part a 4 mm plate, a dowel pin, or the one crankshaft

theo jansen's numbers, built by astra in finite

[Jake Dahn @jakedahn]

he's right, the future is Finite

[Andres @AndresMilioto]

IRIS, just not the goo goo dolls one

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

@BrierRat @KunalJain1017 I'm curious how you determined it was an exact copy? Was it a combo of a volumetric measurements to a tolerance + booleans?

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

Hmm, I imagine each CAD package is doing their own latency hiding technique. I don't know for sure if they're using this exact strategy or not.

But you have to do something, otherwise there will be painful jank when dragging.

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

This shows a cool latency hiding technique that extrapolates the position of dragged sketches between server responses using their motion derivatives

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

Section cuts in Finite are starting to really feel good

[Jake Dahn @jakedahn]

holy moly

I let GPT 6 Astra jam on designing the camera for a few days and forgot about it, I just returned to find this over-engineered monstrosity!

it's beautiful, but wayyyyy too complicated

[Matt Ferraro @mferraro89]

working cams and tappets! the cam profiles are arbitrary splines, we aren't pre-baking an analytical profile so we can change lift, duration, velocity, etc

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

Doing some more work getting text sketching working well in Finite.

[Andres @AndresMilioto]

grok-4.6-made fidget in finite

"make me a cool print in place fidget"

it authored the parts, made the assembly, ran the motion studies, checked for interferences, realized multiple times that the assemblies were not up to spec to print in place nicely, and iterated on it until it was good to go

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

@jldelpueyo We're in a closed alpha right now. The plan is to open to a larger beta once we're committed to backwards compatibility on documents created within Finite.

Months not years.

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

We just added the ability to export parts out of Finite as STEP!

Curious of there are any other import/export formats that are super important to your workflow?

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

@UltraCrepidairy We’re creating a great CAD app, and using it as a foundation to explore how AI advancements can be leveraged to empower engineers.

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

There's a ton of tedious tasks you have to do when building CAD models that aren't related to designing at all. One of my favorite things in Finite is have an LLM keep my feature tree clean so I don't have to think about it while I work.

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

@jldelpueyo A flattering comparison!

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

I've been implementing text within Finite's sketching tool. It's been super interesting to learn how text works from first principles (first principles being Harfbuzz in this case lol)

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

@OxidisedENGR No. We use the same commercial kernels that Onshape and Solidworks use, and are therefore unable to open source this code.

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

@mferraro89 More soon

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

You can see the part here: https://t.co/pHaiL5Kj9g

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

You can see how I made the part (and some of the bugs I found lol) here: https://t.co/hHIQIwSfuc

[Josh VonFricken @jvonfricken]

This is the most complicated part I've made by hand so far in Finite. While we're heavily focused on what AI brings to the table, we're also making sure that we get the fundamentals right too