Agree with OP that the raw models aren't that useful for schematic/pcb design.
It's why we build flux from the ground up to provide the models with the right context. The models are great moderators but poor sources of great knowledge.
I’m realizing I didn’t give flux the credit I should have. I actually interviewed to work on it because as far as I can tell, this stuff is the future. So that aside, it doesn’t fit my workflow well today but I don’t doubt that it will, and for many people it already does.
I’m glad to hear good things are coming! I’ll definitely keep checking in. Apologies for being dismissive of the hard work your team does, especially after seeing the kinds of technical challenges you take on and working with similar technologies myself these days.
High performance, user-friendly collaborative tools in the browser are not a free lunch, and what flux does today is already impressive.
Thanks for the kind words…it’s a true labor of love
Also no hard feelings…I agree that we are early and that there is still a lot of work ahead of us.
Schematic UX hasn’t gotten as much love as it needs because there was so much other stuff to figure out first…we just needed something that worked in the very early days
And now we get to come back to it and make things like wiring truly great
For anyone wondering what the difference is between R3F and Use.GPU:
R3F is a react reconciler for three.js. You manipulate a three.js scene, which the classic non-reactive renderer then draws.
Use.GPU does not have a non-reactive model nor does it have a notion of a scene. Components just compose and expand to produce lambdas which make calls to the GPU.
It's basically React without a DOM, where components can _only_ render other React components.
The docs go into detail of how this is accomplished and what it means.
My experience is the opposite. I found react-fiber to be a leaky and more importantly unnecessary abstraction. It is very easy to embed https://threejs.org/ in any frontend framework and use it directly without any wrapper.
Yeah, performance is on our radar now that the core product is mature enough to manufacture boards. Our goal is to get 200 component projects to work well on a regular 2017 generation machine and get to 1000 by end of year.
About vendor lock-in: we def don't want to lock anyone in...so data portability is big focus and we have import/export support for kicad and other formats like STL or Collada already. Planning to add support for Netlists, Altium, Eagle, etc too as well as a REST API.
You can also export your project as a json file today
Ultimately the power of flux is connectedness the collaboration that enables but we do plan to ship a standalone app that's unbundled from your web browser in parallel to the web version.
We also have plans to offer some amount of offline capabilities so solve for use cases such as being on a airplane.
Agree with OP that the raw models aren't that useful for schematic/pcb design.
It's why we build flux from the ground up to provide the models with the right context. The models are great moderators but poor sources of great knowledge.
Here are some great use cases:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdH075ClrYk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0CHG_fPxzw&t=276s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGJOzVf0o7o&t=2s
and here a great example of levering AI to go from idea to full design https://x.com/BuildWithFlux/status/1804219703264706578