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FreeCAD
- villgax 9mo agoFew points that I've not seen being factored in over the past decade- * This needs a better renderer in today's day & age * Need cross-device/web support * Topology Optimization w/ pure physics code ----- Hopefully LLMs can work on forking this or adding better features with AI-assists
- lgtx 9mo agoThe last thing FreeCAD needs is AI integration. LLM contributions to the project have been of poor quality so far (just like most LLM contributions to FOSS)
- kitesay 9mo agoSpent hours and hours learning how to use it to draw a part. Got it done, but then didn't use it for a long time. Next time, couldn't remember how. Finding Cadquery less of a hurdle for casual use. Wish I could run it from Termux though.
- jwrallie 9mo agoI used it once or twice to open an existing .step file just to know if I was exporting it correctly from KiCad. Speaking of KiCad, I am convincing lots of people to move from EAGLE to it now that EAGLE is about to be killed by AutoDesk, and everyone seem to be having a good time. I am hoping FreeCAD can become good to the point I can convince people to move to it too.
- devmor 9mo agoKiCad is frustrating because it’s actually good enough to make a lot of models but it’s just unfriendly enough to make it take way too long to do… but it’s also still way easier than learning how to do it in a full-featured cad program. I would kill for something like KiCad with more refined controls.
- imtringued 9mo agoThere's HorizonEDA. Just be prepared to spend a ridiculous amount of time setting parts up.
- IshKebab 9mo agoI can second Horizon EDA. It's not perfect, but it has the good KiCAD kernel without the abysmal UX. FreeCAD may also be good - it's the only other one I haven't tried. On the other hand if you're convincing EAGLE users to move they'll probably be happy with KiCAD because they're already used to an even worse UX, as if such a thing were possible.
- bschwindHN 9mo agoI wish KiCad had a constraint solver built-in for defining footprints and placing some key parts of a PCB. A better library management system would also be nice. That aside, I think their interactive router is pretty great, and a huge improvement over older versions. I first tried KiCad in 2016 or 2017 and routing traces was pretty dire, especially if you had to redo them for whatever reason. Got any specific pain points for KiCad?
- cracki 9mo agoAutodesk should have started their own ECAD from scratch. They have mountains of CAD know-how in house. Their acquisition of EAGLE did nobody any favors. I am not sad to see it go. The only ones I know of who used to use EAGLE were those who got hooked on it when it was either free or the cheapest option for hobbyists and small businesses. It didn't win any UI/UX competitions, certainly not against the joy that is modern programs for solid CAD.
- dsrtslnd23 9mo agoCadquery looks interesting. In particular STEP support compared to OpenSCAD. Thanks for mentioning.
- klauswunderlich 9mo agoTry Build123d! It is just a joy to work with.
- WillAdams 9mo agoPythonSCAD recently gained STEP export: https://pythonscad.org/ https://pythonscad.org/
- NegativeK 9mo agoTraditional CAD software feels vaguely like programming -- it took a _lot_ of work to understand the fundamentals. But once I did (on commercial software), switching to Freecad really wasn't that bad.
- kuratkull 9mo agoI'm a occasional hobbyist maker and i've used Autodesk Fusion, Solid Edge, OpenSCAD and other niche parametric programs, but always felt FreeCAD was too complex. But I really wanted it to work for me because it's FOSS and 100% offline. So with the new FreeCAD 1.1 RC I found an hour long tutorial and dove in. (1.1 is supposedly much easier to work with) After doing the tut I can say that 1.1 is very nice, i can uninstall Fusion and Solid Edge finally :) The guide i followed, no relation to it whatsoverer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxxDahY1U6E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxxDahY1U6E
- sakras 9mo agoHave you tried SolveSpace? It's easily my favorite open source CAD program. The main things it's missing are shells, fillets, and chamfers. But I've been able to 3D print quite a few parts using it!
- kilpikaarna 9mo agoYou might want to check out Dune3D. It advertises itself as combining the constraint solver from SolveSpace with a OpenCASCADE geometry kernel supporting fillets and chamfers. :) Haven't used it much apart from some minor tests (I tend to prefer MoI3D, but that's in a different category in several ways...), but as far as FOSS solid modelers it seems like the most promising to me. I do remember some small UI quirks, but overall it felt very approachable and streamlined, and looking at the GitHub repo, development is active. FreeCAD IMHO is just too sprawling and complex, with seemingly little tought paid to UI/UX.
- Deep-States 9mo agoAgreed: The Dune3D developers made the wise decision to start from scratch implementing a parametric modeling UI. Extremely robust software; very fast, and almost intuitive (high praise for CAD). The problem with FreeCAD, on the other hand, is that it's a "just two more weeks and it'll be great" solution. The developers are clearly talented in a raw-math kind of way, but FreeCAD offers the eternal promise of usability in the next release; while never delivering it. Those who are profoundly cynical might consider the possibility that the legacy CAD industry has infiltrated the FreeCAD development team and run Pied-Piper ops there to prevent a Blender-moment stealing their revenue. This would perfectly explain why the FreeCAD experience is so consistently bizarre.
- beachy 9mo agoI feel CAD is one area where open source does not shine. The problem space is too complex, and the UIs demand continuous, thoughtful development driven from customer demands rather than developers scratching their own itches. Not least there are free (as in beer) solutions available, like fusion 360, that are enormously capable. Theres certainly a place for open source, and openscad would be a great tool to reach for for procedurally generated models. But in all honesty, Freecad doesn't compare well to the professional tools in this space - not in the way that say, gimp does to its commercial competitors.
- gucci-on-fleek 9mo ago> the UIs demand continuous, thoughtful development The current AutoCAD GUI is essentially unchanged from the 80s, so this shouldn't really be much of an issue. They added a ribbon probably 15 years ago at this point, but I can't think of any other major/recent changes. (But maybe there are some changes that I'm not familiar with, since I don't use AutoCAD very often and only started using it relatively recently)
- cracki 9mo agoPeople aren't talking about AutoCAD, but things such as Autodesk Inventor, AD Fusion 360, ...
- blablabla123 9mo agoI don’t know, I tried FreeCAD a few months ago and it was buggy as hell. I did some really basic extrusions and distance constraints. But ended up with non-perpendicular entities despite not constructing it like this.
- LtWorf 9mo agoI assure you that my 3d prints look like what I designed them.
- obelisk79 9mo agoI've been using FreeCAD for around 5 years no, and I can't ever recall running into such a problem, ever. I first started learning it during version 0.19 at the end of 2020 after years with solidworks and onshape. The user experience just sucked royally, it's far better today than back then.
- CraigJPerry 9mo agoI'm pretty happy with build123d these days https://github.com/gumyr/build123d https://github.com/gumyr/build123d
- klauswunderlich 9mo agoYep. I am doing all my CAD work with build123d. I think it is much more capable than OpenSCAD due to BREP and Python. A shame that it is still relatively unknown.
- jcgrillo 9mo agoWow this looks awesome! Thanks for the link.
- HNisCIS 9mo agoIn a space that's being taken over by cloud shit where you have no privacy, FreeCAD is one of the last good CAD engineering tools left, let alone being FOSS.
- kantord 9mo agoI only used it for some hobby modeling, but I have to say it's fantastic and very impressive. It seems like it's fully community-maintained, there is no big company or foundation behind it. Honestly it's hard to believe! There was just one major problem, the infamous "topological naming problem" which caused issues downstream is you edited a non-leaf node. That was pretty frustrating to deal with, but in later releases they fixed it I think. (Have not tried it since because I didn't have anything to model)
- goku12 9mo agoThe solution for Topological Naming Problem (TNP) was merged just before the 1.0 release. A lot of other significant changes were also merged in at the same time. Some people have reported that the UX has improved a lot since then. I don't know much about the internal architecture of FreeCAD. As far as I know, FreeCAD does a lot of heavy lifting including managing TNP. It's supposed to be handled by the CAD kernel - OpenCASCADE in this case. I suspect that the reason why open source CAD lags behind their proprietary counterparts is really the CAD kernel. Many proprietary CAD software share the same kernel, in fact. For example, SolidWorks, Solid Edge and OnShape use Parasolid. It tells you how critical the kernel is. Perhaps we should be focusing more on a more capable open source CAD kernel. There are a few projects around that are trying this. But they either have very limited scopes, or don't have enough support and momentum.
- luke5441 9mo agoNot a solution, but could be one of the problems we should tell the "LLMs will replace software engineers" crowd to implement. Maybe then they'll notice that without Open Source training data it won't be able to solve the problem.
- kantord 9mo agoIt's possible that the training data (and research data) is already out there, just not (yet) combined into a single open source CAD kernel. Then again, the success of such a project might depend on other factors. Given the complexity of the task, I can imagine that just "lucking into" the right design decisions early on could have a major impact.
- lich_king 9mo agoI really want to support open-source CAD, but it's so hard to take FreeCAD seriously. It reminds me of POV-Ray, which was (and still is) a parametric raytracer. An impressive feat of engineering completely derailed by the choice of a "UI" paradigm that made the simplest things unreasonably hard. Designing 3D parts is hard enough, and while parametric modeling has uses... come on.
- VorpalWay 9mo agoParametric modelling is not the cause of the bad UI in FreeCAD, Fusion 360, Onshape, etc are also parametric. No, the main problems (last I tried it around 1.0) were that it had a clunky UI and that it was buggy. It would refuse to chamfer or bevel edges for no apparent reason that other CAD software wouldn't have issues with. There were occasionally crashes. Editing previous steps would destroy the later steps much more often than in other CAD software. Etc. I would love to go back to FreeCAD, but for now I'm using Onshape (I run Linux, so Fusion isn't an option).
- _flux 9mo agoFreeCAD relies on OpenCascade kernel to actually deal with the models, and yes, there's still room for improvement.. As I understand it, there are no other open source alternatives around. On the commercial side there are some, perhaps the foremost being the venerable Parasolid, which is used by Onshape, Solid Edge, Solid Works, Siemens NX, Shapr 3d and others. Creating a solid 3d kernel is hard. Parasolid is from 1986.
- lm28469 9mo ago> It would refuse to chamfer or bevel edges for no apparent reason that other CAD software wouldn't have issues with. These are almost all caused because they use Open Cascade under the hood
- rounce 9mo ago> It would refuse to chamfer or bevel edges for no apparent reason that other CAD software wouldn't have issues with. I'm guessing you're trying to set a fillet which would completely consume one of the faces adjacent to the edge being filleted. In these cases I've found that a workaround is to make the fillet 0.001mm smaller than the size which would consume the entire face. You end up with a very very small amount of flat area but it's so small it doesn't show up during machining or 3d printing.
- gdevillers 9mo agoA very powerful feature of FreeCAD is its Python console. It is very useful when debugging software that uses/produces 3D solids. With it I was able to: - colorise solid faces with random colors - colorise faces by type (cylinder, plane, etc.) - add 3D labels in the scene
- joelthelion 9mo agoFreeCAD is not great, it's painful to use but it's free and it works. I'm thankful for it.
- ghayes 9mo agoI’ve really enjoyed Shapr3D (built on Parasolid). Nothing particularly better than the usual competitors but the interface is really intuitive and you can realistically develop on an iPad. Curious if anyone else has had experiences with it.
- rcarmo 9mo agoIt’s my default. It is hands down the easiest to use modern CAD software today, and I’ve tried most of them. I too use it on the iPad and Mac, wish I could get it to install under WINE.
- magneticmonkey 9mo agoI like it to. I am just not happy with how they handle model history. And it is missing many of the tooling I like from things like Fusion. A thread tool would go a long way for hobbyists.
- ramshanker 9mo agoI will try the newer version again. Last I tried 2 years or so back, it was crashing for me. Personal Context: I am a civil enginer, and our requirement from CAD softwares are a lot simpler than Mechanical Engineering. Here on HN, whenever I see people discussing CAD, its the mechanical version of parts and 3d printing. Shameless Plug: I have decided to try building my own! Over a long enough timeline, it is doable, including the UI/UX part. https://mv.ramshanker.in/ https://mv.ramshanker.in/
- pkphilip 9mo agoIs there a reason you don't just use FreeCAD, SolveSpace, Dune3D etc instead of attempting to develop all of this from scratch given that all of this software is open source in any case?
- ramshanker 9mo agoAs I said, all these are optimized for Mechanical engineering, to the best of my knowledge. In civil, there are lots of standardization in 3D part and a lot more focus on 2D side. Major part of building design is using standard steel section. Mechanical side, apart from nut bolts, everything seems to be custom. Software interfaces prioritize these use cases. Think of I beams, all major countries have national standards of shapes and sizes. There are many "devil in detail" nuances. So, giving it a go myself. If not for others, at least for my own itch. This is one aspect of open source.
- criddell 9mo agoUI/UX is not the difficult part. The hard part is the geometric modeling kernel.
- jlarocco 9mo agoIn practice everybody uses an off the shelf modeling kernel like Parasolid, ACIS, C3D, or OpenCascade.
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- mft_ 9mo ago(I’ve posted this before on HN but it’s worth repeating) I’m an CAD hobbyist, and I’ve tried to work with FreeCAD multiple times over past years, always failing…. …until I saw this video and learned about version 1.1: https://youtu.be/VEfNRST_3x8 https://youtu.be/VEfNRST_3x8 FreeCAD is now in the same ballpark of capability and usability as Solidworks. It can still be a bit clunky and frustrating sometimes, but then so can most CAD programs, in their own ways. Side note: the creator of the video above also has a video on optimising the FreeCAD interface. (There are some frustrations related to the interface generally, and this would seem to be a low hanging fruit for the FreeCAD team to address.)
- randusername 9mo agoAwesome, thanks for repeating. I have, like, an old married couple relationship with SolidWorks. Stockholm syndrome may be more accurate. It shaped how I think, it aggravates me as only a long-time companion could, but overall I'm fond of it. It gives me hope that others have made the switch. I've wanted to love FreeCAD for a long time, too.
- mft_ 9mo agoI think we’re in a similar place. I invested enough time over several years to understand the quirks and avoid the frustrations of a certain CAD package (allegedly, possibly Solidworks). And it’s now helpful to remind myself, each time I find FreeCAD difficult or clunky, of all of those times that Solidworks was also, just in different ways. Or the time that Fusion lost a whole part of a model. Or the lack of a parametric history in lots of other competitors. Or the awfulness of trying to refer to specific parts of a model in progress of OpenSCAD. And so on…
- mijoharas 9mo agoIn terms of ux as a beginner what made me able to learn effectively was a command palette add-on (outlined here)[0]. It really sped up learning for me. (because I'd know what the thing I wanted was called, but couldn't find them, and having to google and search before every click is... not fun) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088675
- ReptileMan 9mo agoFreeCad - the Dark Souls of cad software.
- tda 9mo agoI recently gave CadQuery (a Python wrapper around OpenCASCADE) and its Jupyter and VSCode integrations another try. Two years ago installation was a mess across conda, Docker, and pyenv, and the API itself felt like a dense, bespoke DSL you had to fight. This time everything just installed, and Claude Code turned out to be pretty good. Designing with code is sometimes more work upfront, but iteration is so much better. You get proper abstractions: functions, encapsulation, loops. You can drop in a SAT solver to optimize part placement or grab data from an excel sheet. No more clicking through a GUI that crashes and loses your session. I've spent time with Fusion, SolidWorks, NX, OnShape, FreeCAD, and Rhino, and each has its merits, but none of them can benefit from the LLM revolution the way a code-first tool can. I asked Claude Code to generate a set of Lego bricks in various sizes, apply a nice color palette, and pack them optimally into a grid. It needed some steering, but all in all I was impressed
- jcgrillo 9mo agoI believe there's a cadquery workbench for freecad, I messed around with it about a year ago but ran into similar struggles as you describe. I'll have to give it another try.
- yehoshuapw 9mo agonot really. cadquery started as a freecad workbench, but moved out a long while ago. So current cadquery isn't usable inside freecad (which is a shame). also worth a look: build123d
- 9mo ago
- kypro 9mo agoNice too see this here. I've been using FreeCAD a lot recently for various personal 3d projects. I can't compare to any of the paid competitors as I've not used those, but in my opinion FreeCAD is slightly disappointing when it comes to UI, bugs and stability. It's fine for simple stuff, but man, it can be frustrating to work with especially when working on something more complicated then running into random bugs or application crashes. It's a great project though and very powerful.
- WillAdams 9mo agoI've crashed and burned in FreeCAD each time I've tried it (to be fair, that's happened in every other traditional 3D CAD program I've tried except Dune 3D) --- hoping that someone will update: https://magazine.raspberrypi.com/books/freecad https://magazine.raspberrypi.com/books/freecad for the new UI --- any word on that? (Just an annotated copy would be great) Apparently, one of the devs from Ondsel has done a soft-fork and is stumping for funding: https://www.astocad.com/ https://www.astocad.com/ (but he wasn't interested in the feature I want, see below) That said, I managed to make it through the tutorial for Dune 3D twice now (after a fashion), and I think that the tutorial needs to do a better job of explaining concepts from first principles: https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d/discussions/118 https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d/discussions/118 and https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d/discussions/252 https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d/discussions/252 c.f., my own attempt to explain the commercial CAD/CAM software which a company I work for sells/supports: https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing --- is there a really good book which explains fundamental 3D CAD concepts and terminology? I'm way more successful w/ OpenSCAD (usually by way of BlockSCAD: https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ or https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor) and the available printed books help a lot, though I've been using the new Python integrated version: https://pythonscad.org/ https://pythonscad.org/ https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview The thing which would really help me in FreeCAD would be having a graphical programming workbench as a first-class citizen, something like Grasshopper for Rhino3D, or the node editor in Moment of Inspiration 3D, or Dynamo as used for AutoDesk software --- any word on that?
- rounce 9mo ago> for the new UI --- any word on that? (Just an annotated copy would be great) I also am not a fan of the icon-only toolbars and so I always use this plugin: https://github.com/APEbbers/FreeCAD-Ribbon https://github.com/APEbbers/FreeCAD-Ribbon IMO it's a big improvement (I have it configured to only show small sized icons with labels) but then again I know not everyone is a fan of this type of toolbar because of the amount of screen space it takes up.
- giantg2 9mo agoI like freecad. I'm just not very good at using it. I rarely do sketches and part design. I end up doing stuff the kiddie way with just joining and cutting out basic shapes from the parts bench.
- aw-engineer 9mo agoMangoJelly makes great video tutorials for FreeCAD: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUWhaOxsRk_5oPPq00_Y7Dw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUWhaOxsRk_5oPPq00_Y7Dw "MangoJelly Solutions for FreeCAD"
- Klaster_1 9mo agoMJ is awesome, but I recently discovered this another treasure trove of a YT channel that has only 5k subscribers and covers topics MJ has less focus on, like reverse engineering or surfaces: https://www.youtube.com/@DuyQuangDang/videos https://www.youtube.com/@DuyQuangDang/videos
- class3shock 9mo agoI wish they would just copy the gui format of Solidworks, Creo, NX, etc. Every time I open it to try and learn it, it frustrates the crap out of me and I close it until it's been long enough that I'm willing to try again.
- WarmWash 9mo agoFreeCAD is the first program I ever used where I actually drafted hate mail to the devs (but the oss nature gave me restraint in actually pressing send) I spent 2 days crash coursing freeCAD (this is with a general understanding of the theory of 3D design already) to try and make an adapter plate for my car. A plate with 6 holes in precise spots and tapped. It was absolutely brutal and after the first 3D print trial had the a couple holes misaligned, I trashed freecad got the free fusion360. No shit, in 20 minutes I had made the exact part I needed. The program actually worked the way you would expect. I didn't even need a tutorial it was so intuitive. Even if I hadn't spent the previous 2 days getting bent by freecad, I'm pretty sure it would have taken me only an hour max with a blank slate mind in fusion. Now I'm getting angry writing this. If the FreeCAD guys see this, thanks for the hard work, but understand your minds must work completely differently than even the average engineers.
- cracki 9mo agoI am not trained to be a mechanical engineer. I wanted to explore 3D printing. The usual suspects (FOSS missionaries with a deep-rooted hotly burning hate for capitalism) gave me OpenSCAD, which was okay to dick around with but QUICKLY showed its clunkiness ("compiling"... what a joke). So then I gave FreeCAD a look, because everyone said it's just like the commerical programs. It was not. Documentation and tutorials were a mess. The program itself was a mess. UX that makes you want to strangle someone. So then I looked for free student versions of commercial software. They had a clear UI and UX, clear tutorials. It was a joy to model the parts I needed. If I needed 3D modeling for engineering in the future, I would absolutely pay for a commercial program. FreeCAD was simply no competition. I don't know if it is now. Nor do I have any motivation whatsoever to even bother to give it another look. If I need a license for hobbyist purposes, I'm sure some of the commercial offerings are happy to give me one for free because that would translate into commerce for them if I ever needed it professionally.
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- the__alchemist 9mo agoI get frustrated when people recommend FreeCAD as an alternative to SolidWorks, Fusion etc. The comparisons often miss the point of it being substantially worse. We understand this, but someone new (Maybe you or I prior to learning CAD) do not; it feels dishonest, and disrespectful of peoples' time.
- mechette 9mo agoI learned CAD (formally, in a classroom) on Solidworks/AutoCAD, and once I understood the difference between part and part design, I didn't have major issues with FreeCAD-the concepts of good modeling are the same. I had some "okay, what does this software call this function" moments, but it wasn't nearly as bad as when I learned NX and couldn't find the constraints menu. I personally find the shortcomings in techdraw & assembly to be a much bigger problem than the UI-frankly, if I compare it to every engineering software I've used, it is solidly middle-of-the-pack in UI. The worst ones were commercial, expensive software. At least with FreeCAD if something is unbearably stupid I can go in and _fix_ it.
- burnt_toast 9mo agoI'm a big fan of FreeCAD and have been using it to design and sell 3d printed parts. The learning curve was kinda steep because FreeCAD really wants you to things the "FreeCAD way" but once I got past that I started to enjoy using it. My only gripe with FreeCAD is that the program runs on a single CPU core as far as I can tell and it's easy to lock up the program for multiple seconds if you do too complex of an operation. This isn't usually an issue for me though.
- bityard 9mo agoWhat kind of parts do you sell? Do you print them yourself?
- _whiteCaps_ 9mo agoI have no formal CAD experience, I just wanted to build some stuff with my 3D printer. If you are going to experiment with FreeCAD, I highly, highly recommend starting by learning about parametric modelling. Define everything in the spreadsheet, and relate all of the sizes to each other. If you don't, it will be a very frustrating experience when you realize halfway into your design that some earlier piece needs to be tweaked, and your whole model falls apart.
- autumn-antlers 9mo agoI've enjoyed Build123d (and it's over-loaded python operators) as an alternative to OpenSCAD, backed (like FreeCAD) by the OpenCascade CAD kernel... but now they're vibe-coding PRs, and I'm even more exited to adopt real constructive-modeling (rather than emulating it on-top of edge & face representations) as libfive matures -- it's already widespread language bindings and a few lightweight dedicated editors
- artzev_ 9mo ago[dead]
- tomjuggler 9mo agoI started learning CAD with Free cad and never looked back. Yes it's clunky but it's free, and does the job!