Cascadia Demo Data

The datasets behind the Cascadia PLM demo:

• robot-arm/ — a 6-axis robot arm, ~88 parts and ~101 BOM relationships, pre-converted to web-ready GLB with per-face colors. Geometry and structure — and since the GLBs carry a glTF node per leaf part, structure you can click: 11 of the 13 assemblies are selectable, 500 parts between them, 225 in the main assembly. (The other two are single-solid pulleys, with nothing to take apart.)
• freecad-demo/ — two products taken through the whole PLM record: a powered utility cart (PUC) and a survey catamaran (USV), with BOM and AML, requirements and V&V, ECO history, KiCad boards and firmware source, MES travelers and serialized genealogy, harnesses and drawings. Built with an open toolchain (FreeCAD 1.1, KiCad 10) and baked from a real seeded database.

They live here rather than in Cascadia-App because they are large (~420 MB together) and change rarely, while the application repo is ~5 MiB and changes constantly. Keeping them together meant every clone of the app paid for the datasets, and every image build shipped them as build context.

Contents

Path	What	Size
robot-arm/glb/	79 GLB models, colors baked per face, assemblies split into per-part nodes	198 MB
robot-arm/nodes/	The selectable parts inside each model, one JSON per cadFileBase	244 KB
robot-arm/thumbnails/	79 PNG thumbnails, one per model	2.1 MB
robot-arm/manifest.json	Part numbers, BOM structure, Make/Buy classification	44 KB
robot-arm/step/	STEP sources — gitignored, regenerated on demand	393 MB
freecad-demo/tables/	One JSON per database table, ids already deterministic	5.9 MB
freecad-demo/files/	616 vault blobs, each named by its own SHA-256	213 MB
freecad-demo/manifest.json	Insert order, deferred columns, blob inventory	130 KB

See freecad-demo/README.md for what that dataset contains and why it is baked rather than scripted.

How it is consumed

Published as ghcr.io/cascadia-plm/cascadia-demo-data, an alpine image whose only content is /demo-data/robot-arm and /demo-data/freecad-demo. Cascadia-App's docker-compose.demo.yml runs it as a one-shot init container that copies the datasets into a named volume, which the app then reads via DEMO_DATA_DIR.

The image ships GLB + thumbnails only. Cascadia-App's seed treats STEP files as optional and builds its 3D viewer from the GLB, so parts show no "STEP file" pill in the demo. That is expected, not a bug.

For local development against Cascadia-App, npm run demo:fetch in that repo shallow-clones this one at a pinned tag, then npm run db:seed:demo seeds the robot arm and npm run seed:freecaddemo seeds the FreeCAD/KiCad datasets.

Regenerating the datasets

freecad-demo/ is produced by npm run demo:bake:freecad in Cascadia-App, against a database its Python authoring pipeline has seeded. That pipeline lives in the private Cascadia-PLM/FreeCADDemo repo and needs FreeCAD 1.1, KiCad 10 and the CAD-converter workers; baking freezes its result so seeding needs none of them.

The robot arm is maintainer-only, and it needs the private Cascadia-App-archive repo, which holds the SolidWorks source, assembly-structure.json, and step-output/. Clone it as a sibling of this repo, or set ARCHIVE_DIR.

npm install

# 1. SolidWorks -> self-contained AP214 STEP (needs SOLIDWORKS installed).
#    Only required if the CAD itself changed.
pwsh ./scripts/export-demo-steps.ps1

# 2. Rebuild manifest.json and stage canonical STEPs into robot-arm/step/.
npm run build:manifest

# 3. STEP -> GLB + thumbnails + nodes, via the published cad-converter image.
npm run build:cad

#    ...or, when only the geometry needs rebuilding, keep the thumbnails:
#    re-rendering one from unchanged geometry yields a different PNG of the
#    same picture, which is churn in a 198 MB dataset for nothing.
FORCE=1 SKIP_THUMBS=1 npm run build:cad

build:cad writes nodes/<cadFileBase>.json beside each GLB: the parts inside that model, which Cascadia-App's seed folds into the file's cad_metadata so the 3D viewer can select one. A model with nothing to select gets an empty list rather than no file, so a missing one means "not converted yet" and not "single part".

prepare-demo-cad.ts pulls ghcr.io/cascadia-plm/cascadia-cad-converter:latest. Set CAD_IMAGE to a locally-built tag to test a converter change before it lands.

Provenance and licensing

The assembly is derived from an FRC-style robot arm and includes vendor components (West Coast Products, REV Robotics, McMaster-Carr, CTR Electronics) alongside custom TDJ-25-* parts. Vendor geometry is redistributed here in neutral GLB form for demonstration purposes only. Native SolidWorks files are not published.

Tooling in scripts/ is AGPL-3.0-only, matching Cascadia-App.