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FreeCAD 0.19
- aklemm 6y agoHow well does FreeCAD meet needs of amateur builders, tinkerers, and diy-ers? Say for example 3d printing, small home additions, etc.?
- nikaspran 6y agoI use it for 3D printing mainly. It's pretty good, but 0.18.x had some annoying bugs (i.e. it would occasionally just crash, wiping everything since the last time you saved). Nothing show-stopper if you save often and don't do anything too crazy. I personally prefer Fusion 360 (it feels sleeker and is way more usable with a touchpad), but it's definitely a viable choice.
- TkTech 6y agoPerfectly well. I've used it for models to be 3D printed, as well as plans for building a greenhouse. It's ugly, it occasionally breaks your models, and it's capable of doing anything you could possibly want it to. It's like Gimp (before the new UI) vs. Photoshop. There are lots of tutorials, but the quality is all over the place, and a lot of the wiki articles are out of date. The best way to learn FreeCAD (in my opinion) is to find something you want to accomplish (fix that broken part in the dishwasher) and experiment until you get the hang of it.
- fimdomeio 6y agoI have a version on mac that crashes when I click some cancel buttons. I just learned not to click them. Other than that I serves all my modeling needs for 3d printing.
- _carbyau_ 6y agoI love that very practical approach of "Crashes when I click that? Ok, don't click that."
- calvinmorrison 6y agoIn contrast to FreeCAD I have been using openSCAD. You define basic 3D objects and do transforms, etc on them. It's kind of programming, more like a domain specific language. Here's a tube, which we can think about like the difference of two cylinders. Writing and refactoring into modules (functions) is very natural and allowed me to get more perspective about the relationships of my models module Tube(height, width, thickness) { difference() { cylinder(h=height, r=width); cylinder(h=height,r=width-thickness); }; };
- alpaca128 6y agoI tried FreeCAD a couple times, it's good but I always find it very frustrating to use because sooner or later some operation just doesn't work and I have no idea why or how to make it work. So in the end I always came back to OpenSCAD. It doesn't do curved surfaces all that well, its rendering is sometimes really slow, but it just works. With a couple simple Bezier curve functions certain things can look really nice, thanks to its nice commandline parameters and plain text file format you can always just plug it together with bash scripts or other tools. A list of all its features fit on a single page, and you can do anything with those. It's just a really great program and the only CAD software I don't find unnecessarily frustrating. It has a few quirks but those are really minor details.
- asddubs 6y agoopenscad is good, but i wish it had a way to define negative space within a module. if you have something that has positive and negative features (i.e. it's supposed to punch a hole through another object the module is applied to), you always end up with two modules, one for negative features and one for positive
- neolog 6y agoThere's a new project in julia. Is that the kind of negative space you're talking about? https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ann-constructivegeometry-jl-a-package-for-cad/55810 https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ann-constructivegeometry-j...
- swetland 6y agoDefinitely some rough edges, and like most CAD systems it has a pretty steep initial learning curve, but I've been surprised at how useful it is. Finding a recent youtube tutorial or two can help with getting started (sadly the wiki/docs are a bit sparse). I feel like it's not as far along as say KiCad or Blender as far as "competitive with commercial offerings" open source tooling goes, but development is very active and it seems to be improving at an impressive rate.
- IshKebab 6y agoIt's still at the very unintuitive stage. I've done loads of CAD in loads of different programs and still struggled to figure it out. If you want to do simple CAD e.g. for 3D printing and you must use FOSS then I would recommend SolveSpace instead. It has some awkward flaws (most notably there's no bevel/chamfer feature) but aside from that it is much much better and easier to use than FreeCAD. If you don't want to punish yourself by using FOSS then I would either way use Fusion360 and put up with their recently gimping of the free version, or simply pirate Solidworks. It's still by far the easiest CAD software to use, though the latest versions are getting kind of bloated. FOSS CAD is not in a good shape yet. Off topic, but until recently I would have said the same for EDA. Kicad may be powerful but it was also apparently designed by a UX sadist. Even if you are really familiar with other EDA tools it still makes approximately zero sense and has loads of weird "features" (like if you drag a component in the schematic it doesn't bring it's wires with it!) Eagle and gEDA are even worse. Fortunately there's at least one decent FOSS EDA program now: Horizon EDA. There's also LibrePCB which I haven't tried, but Horizon is good and pretty easy to use (it has a rather confusing and over-complicated component/gate system but you can mostly ignore that).
- mypalmike 6y agoKiCAD's UI isn't that bad. I was productive almost immediately using it, and it was my first exposure to PCB design. I can't say the same for FreeCAD though. :-)
- IshKebab 6y agoThat is very surprising. Though I guess if you haven't used any other EDA software maybe you just didn't notice the really bad bits. Give Horizon a try - it's really much better!
- TomVDB 6y agoWeird. I gave up on Eagle before I was able to get PCB ready for manufacturing, but I found KiCad to be very intuitive. (Except when importing external libraries, that’s one horror show.)
- gerdesj 6y agoI have a 3D printer (Prusa) on my dining room table, just to the left of my laptop with extra monitor. I run Arch on the lappy. I'm a PHB! When I'm not doing PHB things, I indulge my guilty pleasures. OpenSCAD is pretty much tamed by me now. I'm not an expert by any means but I can design and print a mount for my Doorbird to toe it in towards the ringer. I use FreeCAD with my browser open to look up what to do. It is rather good and keeps on improving. I'm aware of Blender but it scares me. LibreCAD is available. I use SweetHome3D for home/office related stuff. We have a decent pool of open source tools for CAD. FreeCAD is extremely capable already and keeps on getting better. I used to run it on Gentoo a few years back and simply getting it to compile was a pain. It is rapidly improving but do make sure you keep incremental backups for important work. Have a look at this lot for some idea of what is on offer: https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Tutorials https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Tutorials Those are quite old and there is a lot more on offer.
- ur-whale 6y agoFreecad's UI is awful But then so is Autocad's TBH, neither are real 3D modeling softwares. In both packages, you have do all your thinking in 2D, which is ideal if you did learn to design parts back in the 20th century with paper and pen, and an absolute torture if you did with real 3D software in the modern computer era. For example, building a real 3D curve, i.e. something that has actual 3D curvature and no simple plane projection is simply a nightmare.
- floatboth 6y agoParametric solid CAD != mesh modeling. For technical parts, mechanisms and assemblies, you generally don't care as much about complex curvature, you care about parametricity, the constraint solver, and solid operations.
- leoedin 6y agoThere's all sorts of designs which benefit from being parametrically constrained but need complex curvature. Enclosures for instance. It's so useful to be able to do both in one environment.
- this_was_posted 6y agoI use it quite a bit for 3D printing. Its user interface is a bit daunting at first but with the part design workbench I’m now able to create moderately complex parametric parts in a matter of minutes. Commercial software might be more feature rich and intuitive but freecad comes along nicely
- mch82 6y agoIt’s quite useful for 3D printing enclosures or mechanical devices. Edit: FreeCAD is designed to work the way tools like CATIA work. Think of parametric CAD less as a “concept development tool” and more a “programming language that can be compiled to gcode”. Then a CNC machine can build your object from gcode. The expectation is a designer works on paper or a drawing tool first to conceptualize a part (like a UI designer might work in Sketch) and then a mechanical designer works in FreeCAD (like a software developer works on Angular). MagicaVoxel is a much simpler tool that’s more like working on a sandcastle & can be 3D printed. Blender is probably better for animation / games. For home additions, Trimble SketchUp is more productive because there is a large library of building components pre-modeled (like doors or standard pieces of wood that can be purchased at Home Depot). For PCB layout, there are other specialized EDA tools references in other comments.
- _carbyau_ 6y agoI use only Blender for 3D printing. It's feature set isn't great for accurate mechanical engineering where you can find the measurement for every bit nice and easy. It really is "Connect the Dots 3D". It is more of a "make a cool digital object" thing. But for example, I can take an object, turn it to "goo", play forward 5 seconds of animation and 3D print a "melted" version of that object. I mean, I don't know why you would, but you can. Blender enables artistic possibilities for objects in ways that FreeCAD doesn't. But you can use both!
- jbay808 6y agoThe TechDraw improvements in this version are a big deal. They've made it good enough for me to make actual shop drawings with proper tolerances, section views, and so on.
- manuel_w 6y agoOne thing I absolutely love in the Autocad version we got teached back in school was the way the selection rectangle worked. Drawing the selection rectangle from left to right selects all lines fully covered by the rectangle. Drawing the selecton rectangle from right to left selects all lines partially or fully covered by the rectangle. (Either this, or the other way round.) Does FreeCAD or any other free CAD solution support this? I can't do without this. Which one of the free CAD solutions out there imitate Autocad 2005 the closest?
- 10000truths 6y agoLibreCAD does the same thing.
- iamgopal 6y agoTry ProgeCAD, a bit cheaper alternative, but not free. AutoCAD is holy grail of 2D CAD. Many cheap alternatives like ProgeCAD etc are usable but no match to the AutoCAD. AutoLISP is of added value.
- Kliment 6y agoFreecad does this when editing sketches at least. Kicad also does it. It's great, but very confusing for beginners.
- ohazi 6y agoKiCad copied this feature, and I was frustrated by the "inconsistent behavior" of the selection tool for years until someone finally explained it to me. Now it's great, but if you're going to copy features like this, please make sure to document them so that people trying to learn how to use your tool without the requisite historical perspective don't get frustrated. Eventually computing is going to get to the point where it's no longer possible to learn all of the historical baggage around why things are done a certain way. For a lot of people, we're already there.
- exmadscientist 6y agoThe usual UI indication for a feature like this is for the selection rectangle to be green in one mode, blue in the other. Or something along those lines. As so many submissions around here demonstrate, though, UI design ain't what it used to be.
- dang 6y agoIf curious, related past threads: FreeCAD Simulator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25098981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25098981 - Nov 2020 (13 comments) FreeCAD BIM development news - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24951311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24951311 - Oct 2020 (23 comments) FreeCAD: A free and open source multiplatform 3D parametric modeler - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24513340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24513340 - Sept 2020 (268 comments) A Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) workbench for FreeCAD - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23787391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23787391 - July 2020 (4 comments) FreeCAD on Raspberry Pi 4 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22347385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22347385 - Feb 2020 (36 comments) Parametric CAD modeling for open source scientific hardware: OpenSCAD / FreeCAD - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22270981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22270981 - Feb 2020 (1 comment) FreeCAD BIM development news December 2018 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800484 - Jan 2019 (22 comments) FreeCAD 0.17 “Roland” released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16790814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16790814 - April 2018 (58 comments) FreeCAD Arch development news - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480294 - June 2017 (44 comments) FreeCAD 0.16 release notes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533435 - April 2016 (75 comments)
- baybal2 6y agoI use SolidWorks on a dedicated workstation. FreeCAD is far from it in terms of number of geometric tools, and especially 3D path stroking. Freeform surfaces are a great pain in any CAD, but FreeCAD barely does even basics. To catch up to SolidWorks, FreeCAD needs like tenfold increase in effort for the geometry kernel.
- kragen 6y agohttps://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/12/understanding-the-innovators-dilemma/ https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/12/understanding-the-inn... That is, some people have different needs, and so dismissing FreeCAD because it doesn't yet fulfill your needs is a mistake.
- baybal2 6y agoI do not understand you
- sonthonax 6y agoSolidWorks is pretty much by any objective standard better software. It's also extremely expensive and a product of the French military industrial complex; the fact that FreeCAD wasn't developed to aide the design of French warplanes, and that it is free, is really the only good thing about it.
- kragen 6y agoRunning only on PDP-10s was enough to make ITS useless to maybe 90% of the people who used Unix at the time of that story, regardless of whether or not it was, by any objective standard, better software. Being extremely expensive is enough to make SolidWorks useless to maybe 90% of the people who use FreeCAD. I mean, SolidWorks is fine for hobbyists, who don't need to worry about getting reported to the BSA by a disgruntled employee, or for organizations that have very large budgets. But a lot of people using FreeCAD aren't hobbyists and don't have very large budgets.
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- antattack 6y agoIf you have "rage-quit" FreeCAD in the past, like I have, here are few tips to make it more palatable: Install PieMenu addon Install Glass addon Enable TreeView Make icons larger so it's easier to tell what function they are for.
- floatboth 6y agoUninstalled Glass because the transparent area is not click-through (and it covers the whole area vertically) >_< My must-have is the workspace selector one that makes them buttons instead of that drop-down.
- hobo_mark 6y agoSad to see that the (confusingly named, because they have no relationship with each other) Assembly3 vs Assembly4 split is here to stay.