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FreeCAD v1.1
- sho_hn 7mo agoHighlights reel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9biWv_M8p8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9biWv_M8p8 Release Notes: https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.1 https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.1
- bartvk 7mo agoTo add to this. MangoJelly offers very good tutorials, as well as a full course on Udemy. He released a 4 minute overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSwvnZ1jsXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSwvnZ1jsXg DeltaHedra, another great YouTube channel, also released a good video that shows the previous and this version next to each other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYdobpjTypg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYdobpjTypg
- ChristianJacobs 7mo agoThumbs up for both of them, but I must say that DeltaHedra has become my new favourite FreeCAD content creator. Especially after he started using his own voice. His old content was good, but his current his magnifique! The quality of the content he pushes is above and beyond.
- GaggiX 7mo agoI was not expecting so many improvements in this version alone, I'm impressed. I was already using it for 3d printing but now it seems it's getting actually good, makes me wonder how I was able to use the previous version.
- vjvjvjvjghv 7mo agoI am also impressed by how much they are improving things. It just sucks that they are stuck with the OpenCasacade kernel so making stability improvements are hard to make in areas like fillets and others.
- sho_hn 7mo agoI don't follow Open CASCADE very closely, but it looks like they're on the verge of a new major release (v8.0) themselves that looks like a lot of refactoring and cleanup. I don't know hat version FreeCAD is actually bundling, but from GitHub it looks like a fork of 7.8.1?
- kwk1 7mo agoYes, the OpenCASCADE 8.0 release is very promising. There's a FOSDEM presentation from this year by one of their developers which shows what's in the works.
- dghlsakjg 7mo agoThis is great to hear. I tried it a few years ago, and it was just so far behind onshape and fusion for usability from a beginner perspective. This is single want to give it another chance
- jepj57 7mo agoThis is awesome! Kudos to the developers, they really went above and beyond for this release.
- _whiteCaps_ 7mo agoI post this in every FreeCAD thread: If you're going to start designing something with it, use the spreadsheet tool to make everything parametric. You'll save yourself a ton of time as your designs get more complicated. Maybe this isn't anything new to experience CAD users. I don't know if other CAD tools do this as I started using FreeCAD after playing with 3D printing.
- sho_hn 7mo agoIt's very common (Fusion calls it User Parameters, etc.) and indeed nice practice. FreeCAD has a few ways to do it, Spreadsheets but also free-form properties on objects. It's very flexible in this regard.
- gligorot 7mo agoThe Fusion implementation sucks. A spreadsheet is a far more natural way to do this, Im surprised FreeCad is doing it better than the paid variant.
- sho_hn 7mo agoThe Fusion implementation is awful - you can adjust one variable, one time, then you have to reopen the dialog to do another. At least for me it's always become non-responsive after a single edit, for years now. I've always assumed I'm just holding it wrong, but I don't know. I've moved on.
- Lukas_Skywalker 7mo agoThe only issue I have with the Spreadsheet is that I need to add an alias for every value I want to use in the Sketch or Part Design workbench. In practice, this usually looks like A B width 2mm length 3mm and for every cell in B I add an alias with the same value as in column A. Is there a way around that?
- jjkaczor 7mo agoHmmm - I seem to recall there was at least 1-2 scripts or macros available to help with aliasing.
- Alupis 7mo agoRecently one of the magnet holders for my window shutters broke, and I thought I'd take a crack at designing a replacement to 3D Print. I'd never designed anything in CAD software before, so I had no real reference. I found FreeCAD extremely easy to use and intuitive. I watched a couple videos and followed-along with the tutorials, then started on my own item. It's a relatively simple 3-part component. I took measurements with digital calipers, and in a few hours was printing the first prototype. A couple prototypes later (small measurement adjustments to account for plastic shrinkage, etc), I had the final model. Replaced all of the magnet holders since they were sure to go soon, too. I had fun, and finally used my 3D printer for something "real". Pretty cool.
- Ccecil 7mo agoLearning to design parts was a huge "unlock" for me. Wasn't just printing other people's designs. Great feeling to measure and design something then have it fit perfectly.
- Gigachad 7mo agoI just saw a great video on how to replicate parts for printing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcMvTfUfNXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcMvTfUfNXo Previously I'd get my calipers first and try to model using the direct measurements. The key point imo of the video was to take photos and model based on the photos, and then correct the measurements with your recorded measurements second.
- TacticalCoder 7mo agoThat is the spirit! A friend recommended me to buy a Bambu P2S: there are parts I want to print and I don't want to model then send them to have them printed, nor to bother my friend all the time. Funnily enough I've got magnets falling too: for an alarm system on the doors/windows and they don't hold well anymore after the years. Then my car's radar detection device (fully legal) doesn't fit nicely in the phone holder I use to that effect: I want it a specific angle (I want it both inclined and facing towards me a bit). So I'll model those and just print them. There are a few things like that where I keep thinking: "If I had a 3D printer, I'd just print a part". Most importantly: I've got a 11 y/o and I think it's cool for the kid to see how it works. Already watch a few vids. Doesn't look too hard for simple things.
- cgearhart 7mo agoSlightly unrelated to this story, but I’m curious if anyone has good resources for learning FreeCAD. I have quite a lot of experience with SolidWorks, AutoCAD, OnShape, and similar software, but FreeCAD has always been hard for me to pick up.
- Alupis 7mo agoYouTube was very effective for me to learn FreeCAD. I just searched for some FreeCAD tutorials and followed-along. I had zero prior CAD experience though, so I was a "blank slate" in a way.
- jjkaczor 7mo agoMangoJelly on YouTube was my primary learning source, and a few other channels - but his "gelled" with me the best.
- jjkaczor 7mo agoOh wow - over on Reddit, someone mentioned that the Deltahedra YouTuber has started using his own voice, rather than a generated one - and - well, his content is now far more watchable than it was previously!
- loloquwowndueo 7mo agoDeltahedra is awesome. “Like a caveman” is hilarious when uttered by the extremely serious ai-generated voice. At least he writes his own material
- bartvk 7mo agoYup, mine too. He has a course on Udemy as well.
- dabiged 7mo agoMy goal this year is to finish his 40ish hour course. Excellent quality course at a good pace.
- 7mo ago
- mentalgear 7mo agoCongrats - the release video is very impressive !
- faangguyindia 7mo agoIn coming time you can see freecad massively improving. This space lacks good opensource solution. I have tried creating my parts, tried tinkercad (which is simple but limited) Tried fusion. And pretty much other things don't support mac. I've a hunch lots of vibe coders are going to come and launch stuff like freecad and Gimp (which I never liked, can't even get simple tasks done in gimp) Future is bright for opensource powered by LLM coding on steroids.
- criddell 7mo agoFreecad is limited by Open Cascade which is the modeling kernel at the heart of the program. I started with Open Cascade then moved on to Granite from PTC (not open source) and the latter is just so much easier, faster, and stable. I’ve heard Parasolid and whatever it is that Autodesk uses these days are both excellent as well. It would be nice for there to be a more modern open source modeling library.
- faangguyindia 7mo agoU only need to get a prototype working, post on show HN and it will attracted others who see point in it. It would be nice to have a CAD which is user friendly. I don't like fusion either but it's necessary evil.
- kwk1 7mo agoThere is promising news on the development of OpenCASCADE front: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/QQRAAF-occt3d-8-kernel-evolution/ https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/QQRAAF-occt3d-8-kerne...
- Gigachad 7mo agoLinkedin sentence structure + baseless LLM promotion. There is no evidence here the latest update was vibe coded. It's fairly offensive to devalue the work that the FreeCAD developers put in like this.
- NetMageSCW 7mo ago
- eblanshey 7mo agoFreeCAD is really the only serious contender for CAD on Linux. I love how everything is hackable via Python APIs. Every release seems to fix more and more UX issues. I have very high hopes for it to eventually start attracting more commercial usage, much like KiCad and Blender did in their spaces. We need more open software like that.
- emporas 7mo ago>I love how everything is hackable via Python APIs. It is hackable with languages other than Python too. The Python interpreter has no restrictions to access and execute everything it likes. Contrast this with Gimp, which it's Scheme interpreter cannot access anything except objects inside Gimp. This opens some security hole risks in Freecad, given that plugins can execute arbitrary code in the user's machine, but that means one can write C, C++, Rust and automate the gui. Freecad btw, very unfortunately, it loads each .so external library only once, and it will load the library only with different name or version number. I lost 5 hours messing up with Python versions and .venv installations till I figured that out.
- analog31 7mo agoAlmost purely for amusement, I played around with letting Claude generate Python code for FreeCAD. I actually got a coherent part out of it, that I sent out for fabrication. The practical motivation is that my needs are extremely basic (plates, brackets, etc) but I have some physical issues that prevent me from using GUI based CAD directly.
- criddell 7mo agoYou can run Solidworks or Onshape as well. The former via Wine, the latter in Chrome.
- rcarmo 7mo agoTL;DR: I wish they'd just align with Blender on UX, TBH. I wish they settled on a nicer UX with less visual clutter. I use Blender and it is a _massively_ more complex application in every regard, yet its right-aligned panel and progressive exposure of toolbars feels infinitely more polished than FreeCad's clunky panel (which is often rendered with huge, oversized fields and buttons) and their legendary five-stacked toolbars. Feels like that satirical Gillette ad, and is much harder to use and navigate, especially since quite a few UX options need to be turned on in Preferences to be usable...
- jazzyjackson 7mo agoThe day I found out there’s a dropdown menu that turns blender into a multi-track video editor on par with Vegas if not Final Cut… blender hides its complexity well.
- briandw 7mo agoLooking forward to this update. There are so many hidden gotchas in FreeCAD once you get past the basics. Load of bugs and head scratching issues. However its free and local so can’t complain to much.
- class3shock 7mo agoIs it any closer to functioning like Solidworks, NX, Creo, and all the other professional CAD software packages? Edit: After opening it up it seems better than before but still not a replacement. I can use the draw tool to create a rectangle but than immediately cannot apply symmetry or equal length constraints until I delete others which shouldn't overlap. Clicking to create a cut or hole opens up a window that does not make it easy to create a new sketch from within or place something from within (but you can just make a sketch were you want something and then open them up and that they lock onto). I've generally been a pretty harsh critic of FreeCAD because it represents the only entry in the market of linux CAD and it has frustrated me that it does not just do what is known to work. This seems usable. Still annoying, still not a replacement, but usable. So progress.
- digdugdirk 7mo agoIt's inherently limited by its geometry kernel. Most "real" CAD suites use something like parasolid, usually with a bunch of extras slapped on top. Making a new one from scratch is a massive undertaking, but I'll remain forever hopeful that we get a new, modern, open-source kernel one of these days...
- madushan1000 7mo agoWhat's wrong with OCCT?
- mastermage 7mo agoNot gonna lie I just hope the rewrite it in rust community takes a stab at it at one point,
- WillAdams 7mo agoThere are already at least two geometry kernels being written in scratch in Rust (see fornjot.app for one) --- the problem is the first parts are obvious/easy, so initial progress is rapid, then one hits the difficult/intractable parts and progress stalls, usually to be abandoned. There are a couple of doctorates available for folks who are willing to research and publish in this space --- the commercial products are all holding their solutions as trade secrets in their code --- even then though, the edge cases are increasingly difficulty to solve in such a way as to not break what is already working, hence the commercial kernels having _very_ large teams working on them, or at least that is my understanding from what Michael Gibson (former lead developer of Rhino 3D, current developer of Moment of Inspiration 3D) has written on the topic.
- Rebelgecko 7mo agoI've designed some basic parts in Tinkercad and openscad but have never really been able to grok Freecad or Fusion. Is there a good resource for making that leap? Just the explosion of menu bar options is a lot
- MegaDeKay 7mo agoI really like Mango Jelly Solutions on YouTube but DeltaHedra is very good as well.
- faangguyindia 7mo agoFusion is very easy to learn. If you can use tickercad. Just draw sketches, learn to extrude, push pull, and it all depends on how good you are at sketching in 2d, setting up constraints, workflow is simple and it works most of the times but when it doesn't work, it's pain. I am pretty sure fusions workflow sucks but I can't put my finger on why. I am still waiting for a better product which is also free and opensource. Maybe llm vibe coding will unlock this finally. Where bunch of people come together to take up parameterized 3dmodeling.
- mauvehaus 7mo agoI’m a furniture maker (like, for money). I’ve been using it for largely 2-D jig making for a few years and it’s been great in conjunction with a ShopBot for precise templates. I updated to the 1.1 release candidates, and it’s been great. I do a lot of design for people who are remote, and being able to model things with more complex curves has been a game changer. Sketchup is adequate at the free level and not good enough to convince me to upgrade to paid. The Assembly workbench has let me use FreeCAD much more closely to how I think about putting a piece together, and the sketcher-based workflow is a godsend for curved work. 1.1 is a huge leap forward. I delivered a table last year that I modeled for the client in FreeCAD. The model was super rough. I’m designing chairs for it now, and for the first time, I feel like my skills are the limit, and not the software. If you’ve found it clunky before, it still has its rough edges, but it’s legitimately at the point where I think the good parts are good enough for me to overlook the rough edges and move to FreeCAD almost entirely.
- raziel2701 7mo agoFreecad never really clicked with me. Tried it most recently in 2023 and the user experience just didn't make sense to me. My impression was that freecad is one of those projects were things have been a certain way for a long time (UX/UI wise I mean) and it works for those people so it will never change. For my small cad usage I just went with onshape.
- WillAdams 7mo agoMy experience is similar, except that I gave up and did OpenSCAD (now PythonSCAD) and am trying Dune 3D.
- vjerancrnjak 7mo agoI vibecoded a suitcase handle months ago with its Python interface. A pleasant experience.
- sgt 7mo agoWould like to hear more about how you did it. Did you connect it up to Claude Code?
- vjerancrnjak 7mo agoJust asked for boxes, curved shapes, cylinders, cuts, mirroring, gave exact dimensions and it built up to ~400 lines of FreeCAD python. 3d printed handle was exactly how i wanted it to be
- sgt 7mo agoI like FreeCAD but I use it so rarely that I forget how to use it by the time I need it again. So I returned to Fusion 360 (for the time being). Maybe this new FreeCAD version is easier to use?
- oliwarner 7mo agoThis is wild. I'll be honest I've long been scared away from FreeCAD because of the overwhelming number of buttons and hotkeys but have recently started 3D printing and using deliberately limited tools like TinkerCAD and OpenSCAD and quickly found those limits. "Simple" things like easing an edge, adding clearance, or cutting threads. On the suggestion of one of these comments I've started watching Deltahedra videos on YouTube [and they're great] but after watching his 1.1 release video it looks like half his tutorials could be remade with the new shortcuts. It's also pretty humbling to see someone who knows their tools make something. I'd worry if I was AutoDesk. Given the way they treat their customers like pinatas, I'm surprised they've maintained their dominance.
- fileoffset 7mo agoFreeCAD is great for small things but any time I tried a complex model I get performance issues, lock ups and crashes pretty consistently. There are still a lot of hard edges. I switched to Solid Edge free community edition, much more stable and the workflow is less bespoke.