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Cadette is free, open-source parametric CAD for makers — Tinkercad's simplicity,
Shapr3D's spunk, FreeCAD's kernel, nobody's subscription. Model a part, change
any step later, and export a clean STL for your printer.
macOS (Apple silicon):cadette-macos-arm64.dmg
— the app is ad-hoc signed, so the first launch needs right-click → Open.
Windows / Linux: coming soon.
What's inside
Direct modeling — select a face and push/pull it, resize with handles,
snap to a grid, group bodies and move them together.
A real B-rep kernel — OpenCASCADE, the engine behind FreeCAD: exact
solids, fillets, booleans, sweeps and revolves. Real geometry, not meshes.
Everything parametric — every action lives in the Build Graph: re-open,
tweak, re-order or roll back any step and the model rebuilds.
A constraint sketcher — pen and Bézier tools with dimensions and
constraints, driven by a pure-Rust Levenberg–Marquardt solver.
Print-ready output — STL export, plus .cdt project files that keep the
full parametric history.
STEP in and out — import a vendor part (a servo, a bearing) as exact
B-rep and fillet, shell or cut it like anything else; export the model as
STEP for other CAD. The imported file travels inside the .
.cdt
STL in — drop a mesh (a download, a scan, an old print) in as a
faceted solid and cut, join, pattern or move it like any other body.
Scripting and AI agents
Everything the window can do to a model is available headlessly through the
cdt command line (JSON in, JSON out), built on the same crates the app uses:
cargo run -p cdt-cli -- info part.cdt # every step's status, every body's exact bbox/volume/area
cargo run -p cdt-cli -- info part.cdt --detail all # + faces and edges with types, normals and anchors
cargo run -p cdt-cli -- check part.cdt # exit 2 if a step failed to build
echo '[{"op":"add","kind":{"Box":{"size":[40,13,26]}}}]' | cargo run -p cdt-cli -- apply part.cdt
cargo run -p cdt-cli -- render part.cdt -o iso.png --view top --highlight 12
cargo run -p cdt-cli -- export-stl part.cdt -o part.stl
cargo run -p cdt-cli -- import part.cdt servo.step # a STEP (or STL) file as a new body
cargo run -p cdt-cli -- export-step part.cdt -o part.step
Edits are DocEdit batches — the verbs (add, replace, suppress,
remove, insert_transform, ungroup, …) around the same FeatureKind
data a .cdt file stores — applied all-or-nothing as one undo step.
MCP.cdt mcp serves the same operations to an AI agent over the Model
Context Protocol (stdio): tools cadette_info, cadette_apply,
cadette_render (returns the image), cadette_check, cadette_export_stl,
cadette_import and cadette_export_step (STEP in and out),
cadette_new, and — for a running window — cadette_state, cadette_undo,
cadette_redo, cadette_save, cadette_windows; plus a cadette://guide
resource (also the cadette_help tool) that teaches the edit and feature JSON.
The repo's .mcp.json registers it for Claude Code; elsewhere use
{"command": "cdt", "args": ["mcp"]} with a built cdt on your PATH.
If a Cadette window has the file open, info, check and apply go through
that window instead: the edit lands as an undoable step and the viewport
updates live (--offline forces the file). cdt live ... talks to a window
directly, saved file or not — cdt live state says what the user has
selected, cdt live render -o shot.png shows what they see, cdt live apply
edits it. Windows register in <config dir>/Cadette/instances/; the link is a
Unix socket (Windows named pipes are not wired yet).
Build from source
You need Rust (1.85+) and OpenCASCADE 7.7 or newer.
# macOS
brew install opencascade
cargo run -p cdt-app
On other platforms (or a non-Homebrew OCCT), point the build at your install:
export CDT_OCCT_PREFIX=/path/to/occt-prefix # contains include/opencascade and lib/
cargo run -p cdt-app
On Windows, vcpkg install opencascade --triplet x64-windows and use
%VCPKG_ROOT%\installed\x64-windows as the prefix.
