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I use FreeCAD with the ship design/testing module and it makes my (beefy) desktop warm up the room a bit. I suspect that you could use the Pi 4 for drawing (to

by smoyer 7y ago

I use FreeCAD with the ship design/testing module and it makes my (beefy) desktop warm up the room a bit. I suspect that you could use the Pi 4 for drawing (to some limit) just fine but if you're calculating a lot of splines and then displacement, I really doubt you'd want to wait for the results (if there was enough memory to finish).

justinclift 7y ago
Been trying out FreeCAD recently (0.19 development), but there seems to be a lack of coherent story about "how to put more than 1 part into an assembly". eg the Part and PartDesign workbenches seem ok, but there seems to be no stable way of assembling multiple parts together. Instead, there seem to be several competing assembly modules, all incompatible with each other. And none of which are stable. So, when I create a part intended to be a reference design, I can't use it in any assembly as it'll then be incompatible with every other one. How do you do things with FreeCAD, as the above assembly problem seems like a complete blocker for any real world use? :(
- jstanley 7y ago
  I tend to just manually position the bodies to see if parts look like they will fit together properly. You can reduce opacity (right click a body in the tree view, appearance..., drag the slider) to see how things fit internally. Obviously this is impractical for larger projects with more parts. I believe "Assembly4" is the most advanced assembly workbench but I've never tried it, I'd be interested in hearing from someone who has.
  - justinclift 7y ago
    Thanks. :) Yeah, I've tried both A2+ (A2plus) and Assembly4. Both seem to work ok for at least basic things. However Assembly4 requires attachment points to be defined in the source parts instead of just storing the attachment info in an Assembly file. That means source parts will have Assembly4 stuff added to them, ruining their re-use (eg with external people) unless they're also using Assembly4 exclusively. It's really unfortunate, as I wanted FreeCAD to be useful for publishing reference designs people could use even (say) 10+ years in the future. :(

by smoyer 7y ago

justinclift 7y ago

Been trying out FreeCAD recently (0.19 development), but there seems to be a lack of coherent story about "how to put more than 1 part into an assembly". eg the Part and PartDesign workbenches seem ok, but there seems to be no stable way of assembling multiple parts together. Instead, there seem to be several competing assembly modules, all incompatible with each other. And none of which are stable. So, when I create a part intended to be a reference design, I can't use it in any assembly as it'll then be incompatible with every other one. How do you do things with FreeCAD, as the above assembly problem seems like a complete blocker for any real world use? :(

jstanley 7y ago
I tend to just manually position the bodies to see if parts look like they will fit together properly. You can reduce opacity (right click a body in the tree view, appearance..., drag the slider) to see how things fit internally. Obviously this is impractical for larger projects with more parts. I believe "Assembly4" is the most advanced assembly workbench but I've never tried it, I'd be interested in hearing from someone who has.
- justinclift 7y ago
  Thanks. :) Yeah, I've tried both A2+ (A2plus) and Assembly4. Both seem to work ok for at least basic things. However Assembly4 requires attachment points to be defined in the source parts instead of just storing the attachment info in an Assembly file. That means source parts will have Assembly4 stuff added to them, ruining their re-use (eg with external people) unless they're also using Assembly4 exclusively. It's really unfortunate, as I wanted FreeCAD to be useful for publishing reference designs people could use even (say) 10+ years in the future. :(