FreeCAD is fairly good. Some of the controls are a bit wonky, but that is just a minor gripe. If you are starting on FreeCAD, that doesn’t matter so much. FreeCAD is good to know if you design components for KiCAD as well.
Parametric modeling is fucking awesome, btw. I am not quite sure how old that concept is though.
Yeah if you want to be reductive about it, FreeCAD is a GUI wrapper for OpenCASCADE, its CAD engine. FreeCAD is designed to be extensible; the workbench system allows for several different workflows, and using the Python API it’s not that far out there to make your own workbench for specialized tasks. You could build a clockwork workbench if you were interested in designing escapements and such.
The tradeoff is it can seem overhwelming because there’s a LOT of functionality in there. I do almost all of my work in the Spreadsheet, Sketcher and Part Design workbench, plus the A2Plus assembly workbench from the addon manager.
Curious to hear what it’s like making parts with a spreadsheet. Is it like coding?
I use openscad a lot, and just tried using spreadsheets – adding parameters to each property in a part still seems really clunky, compared to editing a scad file in Emacs, which I vastly prefer, especially now that there’s AI code autocomplete.
I use the spreadsheet to hold dimensions/variable and formulas, makes it easier to modify designs. If I want to change a length, hole size height etc just change the spreadsheet values don’t have to mess around with the sketches or 3d part designs directly.
One slightly frustrating thing i found is sometimes it fails to recompute the design or processes it incorrectly when values are changed by large amounts, that’s probably more to do with how I design things though
Seems like a good opportunity to ask if anyone can recommend learning materials for FreeCAD? Used Solidworks and AutoCAD in school but fell back on tinkercad for a recent project just cause I didn’t have time to invest in learning.
Parametric is such a leap, when coming from toy blocks like TinkerCad in which I can really easily do all that I want except those sexy fillets…
I really want to learn it but it feels so convoluted and difficult. I’m aware that FreeCAD is not the easiest, and some commercial packages are easier to grok but their licensing is really hostile to simple hobbyists so I am trying to to take the high road, for now anyway.
scan2cad.com
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