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How well does FreeCAD meet needs of amateur builders, tinkerers, and diy-ers? Say for example 3d printing, small home additions, etc.?
by aklemm 6y ago
How 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 There are lots of tutorials, but the quality is all over the place, and a lot of the wiki articles are out of date.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...
- asddubs 6y agoisn't that just basically openscad's difference()? I'm talking about defining an object/module with positive space components and negative components. so basically, when you apply union() to that object and another object, the positive parts will be added to the second object, and the negative ones will be subtracted. currently this has to be done in two seperate steps
- 6y ago
- 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!