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Super excited about this! I hope more people will pick it up in the hobbyist space now that Fusion costs money. I'm not sure what the popularity of these diffe

by eig 2y ago

Super excited about this! I hope more people will pick it up in the hobbyist space now that Fusion costs money. I'm not sure what the popularity of these different CAD softwares are. I've seen quite a few hobbyists use OnShape recently, and a few people use OpenScad. I don't think I've seen another FreeCad user in real life though.

luckydata 2y ago
Hope that the new changes make freecad a little more accessible. Coming from Fusion I really tried to make it work for me but the UI is so awkward and abstruse I quickly gave up.
qwerpy 2y ago
> now that Fusion costs money I know they've been obnoxiously chipping away at the features available in their Personal edition and introducing artificial limitations. But my free installation still works and I haven't seen any indications that it's going away.
- joshvm 2y ago
  Fusion as a CAD engine is great. I've not used the CAM side, and while I used to use Eagle a lot I've tried to invest more energy into Kicad. The online limitations are frustrating though. Randomly and inconsistently not being able to export STLs because of a "translation service error" (when it could 2 minutes ago), or the inability to make drawings with the free edition. I mostly use it because there isn't anything else half as good for OS X that works offline.
  - dekhn 2y ago
    Fusion 360 CAM is great for me (hobbyist doing CNC with wood and other materials). It's handled some pretty tough jobs, like a full topo map of california. It's why I pay for the product. I tried the electronics stuff in Fusion and decided not to use it because it didn't work nearly as well as Kicad.
  - qwerpy 2y ago
    I used it to do some sheet metal modeling, then sent the models off to a laser cutting/bending service that shipped me the pieces. Then I went back to Fusion to 3d print some brackets/scaffolding using the same sheet metal models as a reference, to assemble the pieces into the finished product. This was during a 3 month leave from work, starting from zero knowledge beforehand. It was probably the most fun I've had in years, and mostly thanks to how slick Fusion is and how many tutorials there are out there. There are some export formats that it uses cloud machines for, which I think is silly and arbitrary. It's probably done that way to upsell their premium product for faster wait times or unlimited quota. For my uses I was able to select formats that didn't require the cloud. Fusion is much more polished compared to FreeCAD and so I'm not sure if I'll ever end up making the switch. But I'm glad to see a free alternative, just in case.
    - joshvm 2y ago
      Most of the common translation options should work offline (ie Fusion is capable), but Fusion sometimes gets stuck in a weird state where it insists it needs connectivity. Perhaps it's a quota thing but I've never found it to be consistent. This happens fairly often with STLs for 3D printing. Once it's gotten into that hole it will often refuse to export any other format until connectivity is restored, even if the app is restarted. It's known behaviour, for example the official guidance is that changing binary to ascii might help, or you shouldn't export directly to a slicer when offline, or don't use certain menus. But it seems like a wontfix.
throwgfgfd25 2y ago
OpenSCAD is definitely very popular in the maker/microcontroller/electronics world, which is both a good and bad thing, because it is accessible but also limited/frustrating. It enables some good stuff on Thingiverse but it becomes extremely mathematics-focussed quite quickly. I do wish more of the code-CAD people would look at Replicad, Build123D and CadQuery. I personally like FreeCAD a lot, but I won't push people onto it; if they like TinkerCad that's fine.
- aeonik 2y ago
  I just looked at those other code CAD programs, and I don't see the appeal over OpenSCAD. I have no interest in browser based CAD programs because as models become complex, that platform is too limited in performance. Python and stateful CAD drawings sound like a nightmare to me. OpenSCAD has limitations for sure, but I think a better tool will look different. I do wish OpenSCAD used a more general purpose programming manager.
  - hugs 2y ago
    If OpenSCAD had STEP file support, I could do all my design work in it. But it can't, so I can't.
  - throwgfgfd25 2y ago
    Replicad is quicker to render complex things than OpenSCAD -- significantly quicker. It uses an emscripten port of OCC. It's also embeddable as a library, which means being able to make web-based object customisers: client-side, script-driven tools that don't require CAD knowledge for the user. Like the Thingiverse customiser but on steroids. It's a fascinating project. And I think it's not the statefulness that is the significant thing about CadQuery and Build123D. It's the access to a bRep kernel, so you can do operations with faces and vertices, you can reflect (analyse, measure) the model, etc. Being able to do operations on a generated face or edge means not needing to know (or recalculate) the location of that face in 3D space; it saves you so much in the way of maths. If you have very simple (or very mathematical!) models, OpenSCAD can help. But once things get complex you just have file after file of variable definitions. Functional flows on vertexes, edges and faces created by previous operations is much closer to a code equivalent of GUI CAD.
stn8188 2y ago
I'm also happy for this. I'm an EE with limited MCAD experience, so I usually hop onto Onshape when I need a custom trinket to 3D print. I did use FreeCAD for a small fixture for my day job earlier this year and I was pleasantly surprised. For someone with no experience, it worked very well and when I lose access to Onshape I'll definitely pick up more with FreeCAD.
blihp 2y ago
I use FreeCAD on a very regular basis and can understand why it's not more popular: it's very powerful but has some very sharp edges that will often have me using it in a state of near rage. Topological naming comes to mind but there are other various issues that I've hit like a brick wall (in that you can't work around the bugs/limitations so much as you must rework your design to avoid them which can be tedious and frustrating) when designing something non-trivial. That said, each release continues to improve it just has further to go than most open source projects.

by eig 2y ago

luckydata 2y ago

Hope that the new changes make freecad a little more accessible. Coming from Fusion I really tried to make it work for me but the UI is so awkward and abstruse I quickly gave up.

qwerpy 2y ago

> now that Fusion costs money I know they've been obnoxiously chipping away at the features available in their Personal edition and introducing artificial limitations. But my free installation still works and I haven't seen any indications that it's going away.

joshvm 2y ago
Fusion as a CAD engine is great. I've not used the CAM side, and while I used to use Eagle a lot I've tried to invest more energy into Kicad. The online limitations are frustrating though. Randomly and inconsistently not being able to export STLs because of a "translation service error" (when it could 2 minutes ago), or the inability to make drawings with the free edition. I mostly use it because there isn't anything else half as good for OS X that works offline.
- dekhn 2y ago
  Fusion 360 CAM is great for me (hobbyist doing CNC with wood and other materials). It's handled some pretty tough jobs, like a full topo map of california. It's why I pay for the product. I tried the electronics stuff in Fusion and decided not to use it because it didn't work nearly as well as Kicad.
- qwerpy 2y ago
  I used it to do some sheet metal modeling, then sent the models off to a laser cutting/bending service that shipped me the pieces. Then I went back to Fusion to 3d print some brackets/scaffolding using the same sheet metal models as a reference, to assemble the pieces into the finished product. This was during a 3 month leave from work, starting from zero knowledge beforehand. It was probably the most fun I've had in years, and mostly thanks to how slick Fusion is and how many tutorials there are out there. There are some export formats that it uses cloud machines for, which I think is silly and arbitrary. It's probably done that way to upsell their premium product for faster wait times or unlimited quota. For my uses I was able to select formats that didn't require the cloud. Fusion is much more polished compared to FreeCAD and so I'm not sure if I'll ever end up making the switch. But I'm glad to see a free alternative, just in case.
  - joshvm 2y ago
    Most of the common translation options should work offline (ie Fusion is capable), but Fusion sometimes gets stuck in a weird state where it insists it needs connectivity. Perhaps it's a quota thing but I've never found it to be consistent. This happens fairly often with STLs for 3D printing. Once it's gotten into that hole it will often refuse to export any other format until connectivity is restored, even if the app is restarted. It's known behaviour, for example the official guidance is that changing binary to ascii might help, or you shouldn't export directly to a slicer when offline, or don't use certain menus. But it seems like a wontfix.

throwgfgfd25 2y ago

OpenSCAD is definitely very popular in the maker/microcontroller/electronics world, which is both a good and bad thing, because it is accessible but also limited/frustrating. It enables some good stuff on Thingiverse but it becomes extremely mathematics-focussed quite quickly. I do wish more of the code-CAD people would look at Replicad, Build123D and CadQuery. I personally like FreeCAD a lot, but I won't push people onto it; if they like TinkerCad that's fine.

aeonik 2y ago
I just looked at those other code CAD programs, and I don't see the appeal over OpenSCAD. I have no interest in browser based CAD programs because as models become complex, that platform is too limited in performance. Python and stateful CAD drawings sound like a nightmare to me. OpenSCAD has limitations for sure, but I think a better tool will look different. I do wish OpenSCAD used a more general purpose programming manager.
- hugs 2y ago
  If OpenSCAD had STEP file support, I could do all my design work in it. But it can't, so I can't.
- throwgfgfd25 2y ago
  Replicad is quicker to render complex things than OpenSCAD -- significantly quicker. It uses an emscripten port of OCC. It's also embeddable as a library, which means being able to make web-based object customisers: client-side, script-driven tools that don't require CAD knowledge for the user. Like the Thingiverse customiser but on steroids. It's a fascinating project. And I think it's not the statefulness that is the significant thing about CadQuery and Build123D. It's the access to a bRep kernel, so you can do operations with faces and vertices, you can reflect (analyse, measure) the model, etc. Being able to do operations on a generated face or edge means not needing to know (or recalculate) the location of that face in 3D space; it saves you so much in the way of maths. If you have very simple (or very mathematical!) models, OpenSCAD can help. But once things get complex you just have file after file of variable definitions. Functional flows on vertexes, edges and faces created by previous operations is much closer to a code equivalent of GUI CAD.

stn8188 2y ago

I'm also happy for this. I'm an EE with limited MCAD experience, so I usually hop onto Onshape when I need a custom trinket to 3D print. I did use FreeCAD for a small fixture for my day job earlier this year and I was pleasantly surprised. For someone with no experience, it worked very well and when I lose access to Onshape I'll definitely pick up more with FreeCAD.

blihp 2y ago

I use FreeCAD on a very regular basis and can understand why it's not more popular: it's very powerful but has some very sharp edges that will often have me using it in a state of near rage. Topological naming comes to mind but there are other various issues that I've hit like a brick wall (in that you can't work around the bugs/limitations so much as you must rework your design to avoid them which can be tedious and frustrating) when designing something non-trivial. That said, each release continues to improve it just has further to go than most open source projects.