FreeCAD 0.20 Release Notes

FreeCAD deserves a lot more recognition. It is literally the only serious open source contender to commercial CAD softwares. There has been a lot of recent positive developments including Realthunder’s continuous effort to solve topological naming problem. I use FreeCAD as my daily CAD software to design some fairly complex assemblies and it has become a joy to use. Hope we can get more developers and companies behind it and witness the same revolution that happened with Blender.

I noticed in the Assembly3 section that it uses SolveSpace as its solver. FreeCAD uses OpenCASCADE as its main CAD kernel, and this supports mating and constraints between parts (at least, CadQuery supports it, and it's essentially just wrapping OpenCASCADE) so I'd be interested to know why they chose to bundle and use a different kernel there.

FreeCAD is a sprawling, incredibly feature filled piece of software that's slowly but surely becoming bug free enough to be usable. It's really impressive how many different aspects of it are under active development - and for simple things the part design workshop is really usable.

The biggest thing I'm looking forward to (assuming it ever happens) is the selection of a single "assembly" workbench. There's a whole load of assembly extensions, all of which take different approaches. A single "official" assembly workbench would give me the confidence to sink time into big, assembly heavy designs and know that it wouldn't all be wasted by the next release.

I want to point out that FreeCAD receives $450/week in recurring donations (https://liberapay.com/FreeCAD/), and that that probably has some impact on how quickly things are moving now!

I personally do CAD less than once a month, but I still donate regularly. If open source CAD is a cause you care about, you can too!

FreeCAD is "feature full", but ... bearer of bad news here (sorry):

   1. The UI is simply *awful*. Reminds me of the bad old days of Blender. Feels like a Motif style UI from the 90's TBH. Freecad needs to do what Blender did, bite the bullet hard and redo the UI from scratch to bring it into the 21st century.

   2. The underlying NURBS engine (OpenCascade) is what's best in the FOSS world, but unfortunately it can't hold a candle to the "kernels" (CAD lingo for engine) that power equivalent commercial offerings (Fusion, Rhino, SolidWorks, CATIA, etc...)

Finally, I really wish FreeCAD had an OpenSCAD-like domain specific language for modeling that can directly create NURBS (there is a kind of an OpenSCAD integration, but it can only do poly meshes).

I _really_ wanted FreeCAD to work for me.

I just don't trust Fusion360 not letting me have my files on my own hard disk.

I'm too much of a beginner to drop thousands on the higher end professional software.

So FreeCAD sounded perfect.

But three main problems made me give up: 1) The "topological naming problem" / random crashing. Couldn't ask a team to put up with that. 2) I found there wasn't a clear path to navigate the choice between the competing versions / forks / assembly things, and learn CAD at the same time. (Don't know enough to know what I'm comparing) 3) The interface just isn't as easy to use or learn. There isn't a long and clear set of tutorials like there is for Fusion360 [1]

So I've decided to settle for learning CAD first via Fusion360 for now, in hope that by the time I've got a good understanding of it, the various FreeCAD tribes will have merged into one solution, or that the main fork has improved enough that someone makes great tutorials for it.

[1] Here's is a great, professional tutorial series for Fusion360 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvrHuaHhqHI (Somehow it's almost too-professional unofficial-official. Does anyone know if this is actually Autodesk?)

I see the need for FreeCAD to form an organization or foundation as a non-profit. This is explicitly mentioned in the wiki. https://wiki.freecad.org/Donate

In FreeCAD, I see a product that is almost there, but suffers from a lack of creative leadership and business thought. Of course, it's being done by long suffering devs with little resources and time. But the truth is this could be a success on the level of Arduino or RPi if the right organizational structure was agreed upon and executed.

Devs need to be paid. Labors of love never turn out as well as well funded endeavors. There are many models to point to but the one I like is RedHat. RedHat serves corporate customers for money, and delivers free products to individuals. Open source software for free but with paid support and custom development. This is the way.

In my opinion this is the perfect model for a CAD system development organization. FreeCAD needs to be free for users to learn and modify. This is goes without saying and FreeCAD is popular with users IN SPITE of it's glaring flaws. If FreeCAD could be developed to a level that made it a viable choice for professionals like myself, a mechanical engineer, to trust enough to base a development toolchain on, then corporate money for enterprise level solutions would flow like water. The CAD market is ripe for disruption and a solid open source model could do that. SW costs ~$4000 plus ~$1000 per year in maintenance fees and let's be honest, it is broken but usable and has a network effect in play. But nothing they do is unique or even especially state of the art, it's stuck in the 80s.

How do we make this happen HN. I see a "FreeCAD is gr8" post like once every two months and looking at it we should be able to org our way to a better solution.

My DMs are open.

I like FreeCAD a lot, but it's too hard to create assemblies and reference other bodies in an assembly. I gave up and moved to Fusion360 where all these things Just Work.

However, I miss the KiCAD plugin with really good integration for the updating board outline and component placements from CAD.

I really wanted to like FreeCAD, but I’d say out of the five or so times I’ve attempted to use it, it crashed and lost my design four times. I picked up Fusion360 instead, then OnShape, and never looked back.

This seems like a really exciting release with all the improvements to the sketch workbench in particular. I look forward to installing the update!

if NX and CATIA would have a child together ...