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Love it, and about to dive into the world of 3d printing IoT devices myself. Currently in the process of choosing my modeling software, so your comments on free

Love it, and about to dive into the world of 3d printing IoT devices myself. Currently in the process of choosing my modeling software, so your comments on freecad hit home. Would you do it in freecad again? I too want to support open source software and will accept ~2x speed reduction to do so, so I hope 10x is hyperbole, otherwise I need to reconisder. Unfortunately the community definitely seems more geared towards fusion360. My gut reaction is that in general they don't value the open source aspect of freecad, but maybe it is just subpar for now. Did you buy a 3d printer for this project? Don't have any source code available?

fpgaminer 8y ago
I haven't tried Fusion 360 yet, so I can't compare. For lack of any other options I would definitely use FreeCAD again. It wasn't a horrible experience. I love supporting open source. For example, the 3D printer I have is the Lulzbot Mini 2. The company behind it is ... aggressively open source, to put it mildly (_everything_ is open source. Even their manuals for factory assembly are online.). Which is why I went with FreeCAD initially. But I lost a lot of time to A) the awkward UI; and B) bugs. Having just now, the day before Christmas, finished wrapping the gift ... I wonder how much time I would have saved using a "professional" CAD solution. shrug Words of advice if you do go down the FreeCAD route; learn about dataplanes and shapebinder (check YouTube for tutorial videos). They are somewhat recent features. If you just look up FreeCAD tutorials you'll find a lot that tell you to bind sketches to faces. That's the old way of doing it and it can lead to a lot of problems. Dataplanes are the new way of doing it. And be careful in the sketcher. A number of times I've had it tell me a sketch is fully constrained, but I was scratching my head because I didn't think it was fully constrained. A day later I'll go back into that sketch and it'll have realized its mistake and moved the sketch around (had one failed print because of that bug). > Don't have any source code available? I'm thinking of writing a blog post about the whole project at some point, with all the documentation and such. Bit exhausted right now... Best of luck with your 3D printing!

fpgaminer 8y ago

I haven't tried Fusion 360 yet, so I can't compare. For lack of any other options I would definitely use FreeCAD again. It wasn't a horrible experience. I love supporting open source. For example, the 3D printer I have is the Lulzbot Mini 2. The company behind it is ... aggressively open source, to put it mildly (_everything_ is open source. Even their manuals for factory assembly are online.). Which is why I went with FreeCAD initially. But I lost a lot of time to A) the awkward UI; and B) bugs. Having just now, the day before Christmas, finished wrapping the gift ... I wonder how much time I would have saved using a "professional" CAD solution. shrug Words of advice if you do go down the FreeCAD route; learn about dataplanes and shapebinder (check YouTube for tutorial videos). They are somewhat recent features. If you just look up FreeCAD tutorials you'll find a lot that tell you to bind sketches to faces. That's the old way of doing it and it can lead to a lot of problems. Dataplanes are the new way of doing it. And be careful in the sketcher. A number of times I've had it tell me a sketch is fully constrained, but I was scratching my head because I didn't think it was fully constrained. A day later I'll go back into that sketch and it'll have realized its mistake and moved the sketch around (had one failed print because of that bug). > Don't have any source code available? I'm thinking of writing a blog post about the whole project at some point, with all the documentation and such. Bit exhausted right now... Best of luck with your 3D printing!