4 ms·

I love FreeCAD. It’s not the most fully featured CAD software of course, but I love that my designs are not encumbered behind a paywall or a freemium model tha

I love FreeCAD. It’s not the most fully featured CAD software of course, but I love that my designs are not encumbered behind a paywall or a freemium model that will go away when it becomes inconvenient for someone. FreeCAD is my current go-to CAD program. I’m really glad I finally took the time to learn it.

gdelfino01 4y ago
What path did you take to learn it? YouTube?
- crtified 4y ago
  To chime in with my own learning experience so far. I've done the standard: Google "freecad tutorial", click open a bunch of likely-looking result tabs, and have a quick browse to locate quality. From youtube, to written and illustrated guides, etc. It's not difficult to find useful instruction. But the overall pool of easily-searchable knowledge suffers from that standard internet Time Fragmentation effect : that is, within months and years of publication, most of it is out of date by anywhere ranging from A Little to A Lot; a degree which is only determinable to the casual reader through trial-and-error. So a certain degree of inefficiency and double-work is near guaranteed.
- sircastor 4y ago
  I think I watched a couple of videos - really just to get going from the "How do I make a block that looks like this?" I didn't initially understand the idea of workbenches so just having someone say "Do this here" helped. A recent example of using a video to help me understand was how to generate a bevel gear. After that, I would run into questions and google searches tend to help a lot. Just last week I was trying to figure out how to cut a hole in a curved surface and found a forum thread that suggested a good solution. (That solution felt a little weird from a design standpoint, but it worked, and the history was maintainable.) Searchable forums are tremendously useful for software packages at this level.
sgt 4y ago
Recently started with FreeCAD because for [reasons] Fusion360 no longer worked. So I gave in and gave FreeCAD a chance. At first I tried without reading documentation and simply clicking around. Quite difficult. But start reading some docs and watch a turorial on how to use sketches and it makes a lot of sense. Very happy to "own" my own CAD package as well. Got really tired of the SaaS nature of Fusion.

gdelfino01 4y ago

What path did you take to learn it? YouTube?

crtified 4y ago
To chime in with my own learning experience so far. I've done the standard: Google "freecad tutorial", click open a bunch of likely-looking result tabs, and have a quick browse to locate quality. From youtube, to written and illustrated guides, etc. It's not difficult to find useful instruction. But the overall pool of easily-searchable knowledge suffers from that standard internet Time Fragmentation effect : that is, within months and years of publication, most of it is out of date by anywhere ranging from A Little to A Lot; a degree which is only determinable to the casual reader through trial-and-error. So a certain degree of inefficiency and double-work is near guaranteed.
sircastor 4y ago
I think I watched a couple of videos - really just to get going from the "How do I make a block that looks like this?" I didn't initially understand the idea of workbenches so just having someone say "Do this here" helped. A recent example of using a video to help me understand was how to generate a bevel gear. After that, I would run into questions and google searches tend to help a lot. Just last week I was trying to figure out how to cut a hole in a curved surface and found a forum thread that suggested a good solution. (That solution felt a little weird from a design standpoint, but it worked, and the history was maintainable.) Searchable forums are tremendously useful for software packages at this level.

sgt 4y ago

Recently started with FreeCAD because for [reasons] Fusion360 no longer worked. So I gave in and gave FreeCAD a chance. At first I tried without reading documentation and simply clicking around. Quite difficult. But start reading some docs and watch a turorial on how to use sketches and it makes a lot of sense. Very happy to "own" my own CAD package as well. Got really tired of the SaaS nature of Fusion.