FreeCAD User Book (2019) | Hacker News Reader

FreeCAD User Book (2019)

bassmatifreecad.github.io

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I learned the basics of FreeCad because I bought a 3D printer and wanted to do my own stuff. I had no previous experience with CAD programs

I think the best approach is to learn by doing. Watch some YouTube video tutorials and copy step by step what the video shows. I went from 0 to "I can do that" in few sessions.

The parametric design with constraints is ideal to build precise parts for printing. I really enjoy when I need to build something with it and I did not need to learn anything else.

My experience exactly. I wanted to make cases for my electronics projects and just learned following this series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXN7TOg3kj4&list=PLWuyJLVUNt...

Don't forget

https://m.youtube.com/@FreeCADAcademy

and

https://m.youtube.com/@learnfreecad8264

I used the second channel to learn parametric CAD and do my 10-20 first printed designs before I switched to OpenSCAD.

I too have been using FreeCAD for 3D printing. It's generally been going ok, but it can be difficult to achieve some complex things, the learning curve is steep and it's easy to forget the little tricks when you don't do it often enough.

Several times I'll find I've spent hours building something and then it breaks and I have to start again, because of the relationship between features/parts and it just becomes impossible to resolve.

It makes me jealous when I watch YT channels with people using Fusion360 making things with intuitive ease in the UI, it just seems much more straight forward to get things done.

For anything I'm likely to reuse or modify I've started learning SCAD, since I write software for a living, the learning curve isn't as high, but you still need to learn the little tricks for doing certain things more easily.

> Several times I'll find I've spent hours building something and then it breaks and I have to start again, because of the relationship between features/parts and it just becomes impossible to resolve

There is a fix in the works for this notorious topological naming problem:

https://ondsel.com/blog/freecad-topological-naming/

That's good to hear, it will make a real difference to usability.

> The parametric design with constraints is ideal to build precise parts for printing.

Indeed, but FreeCAD needs to do better on this. Changing any single root value recomputes the whole dependency graph, which quickly bogs down in even moderately complex models. They badly need a signal/FRP abstraction to handle these dataflow constraints so only the expressions downstream of that value change.

FreeCAD is great for the effort they put in. Unfortunately it's still very unpolished even for relatively simple work. You can tell they mean well but it's simply not designed by people who have used better tools regularly.

For those of us that cannot deal with F3D being entirely in the cloud there is Alibre which comes at a reasonable price for CAD software. It's very well designed, buy once own forever, and you get a real professional tool.

I hope FreeCAD one day beats the current offerings. But I found the tool to be unusable. The workflow is just so...bad. If you do find yourself making something usable in FreeCAD and want to upgrade to better tools almost nothing will transfer over. I've used Alibre for several years now and it functions almost exactly like Solidworks with some exceptions. Unfortunately, CAD is a space almost entirely dominated by commercial tools and will likely be for the foreseeable future. There's too many decades of collective experience brought to bear on these tools and it doesn't seem like something a really good software engineer can simply design their way into. You truly do need industry experience.

Alibre looks great except that it only supports MS Windows ...

I've switched 100% my of my hobbist design work onto FreeCAD since last year. It's still kind of painful, but I didn't feel limited. I'm waiting for it to have his "blender" moment. It's still far behind, yes, and it still does tend to crap over geometry a little too much, however I don't have to deal with licensing BS, and by knowing python I can actually do way more than what I could do with other cad offerings. The potential is absolutely staggering there.

For reference, I was mostly using onshape+f360 before for my personal work, but my experience includes inventor, solidedge, solidworks and creo. I work close to an HW team, but my employer is stingy to give cad licenses to anybody which doesn't strictly need it due to the outrageous costs these software costs for every single seat. This makes collaboration a ROYAL pain.

So my workflow usually involves importing parts into freecad, reverse engineer them, and then send the actual modeled suggestion back to the HW team. I can work with a good 30% of the parts involved without too much trouble, which is pretty amazing in it's own regard, although it's usually not pretty.

I really wanted to buy Alibre. I can afford the full "alibre design offline license" no problem. It's the only cad program I've seen that has decent pricing and decent licensing, but it doesn't work on linux. And I tried everything to make it work on wine. Hard pass.

In a certain sense, I'm glad I've stuck with freecad recently, since I know every single design I do I will not have to fight with licensing or obsolete window incompatibilities later on. It's mine forever.

Are there any good tutorials for Alibre? I got into 3d printing couple of years ago and now looking into designing my own functional print models. I played around with fusion 360. But their licensing kinda turned me off. Tried out freecad and found it just as frustrating as others have noted here. So i’m looking for that one tool that I can invest some time into where I can sorted make it my IDE for all things CAD.

I enthusiastically googled that and found that it's Microsoft only. People still use Windows?!/s I need a Mac version and FreeCAD works fine there.

Sadly yes, none of the big players work on anything other than windows as far as I'm aware.

> You can tell they mean well but it's simply not designed by people who have used better tools regularly.

How can developers best learn about features in mature but expensive tools? Is anyone maintaining a list of features a capable CAD tool should have, with links to documentation, tutorials, videos, etc.?

You're probably not going to like this answer, but the best way is to be a regular user of the better tool before trying to recreate it yourself. Yes, this takes money, and that is why some of these proprietary tools have such a long-lasting advantage.

I use Solidworks professionally and for personal use I use SolidEdge. It's almost as good and is free for hobbyists. When needed, I can get a license on a monthly basis for $100. The other pro cad packages have really terrible license schemes which I want to point out. For example Solidworks starts at something like $5000 plus $1500 per year maintenance fee. If you don't pay the maintenance fee you can keep using the latest version you've paid for. But when you eventually need to upgrade to work with a customer, or fix a bug, you have to backpay missed maintenance fees.

Have you used Solidworks or Creo? Is Alibre relatively inline with their workflow/layout?

Like a lot of folks I've spoken to, I've recently switched from Fusion360 to FreeCAD to gain more independence from a subscription model. I will know that I can always rely on this software no matter what, and no Internet connection needed etc.

FreeCAD is pretty good, it's not as refined as Fusion but the functionality seems to be there. As others have already mentioned, it's hard to learn but you'll be doing yourself a favor if you watch those FreeCAD tutorials on YouTube, and maybe this User Book as well.

I'm always excited when FreeCAD comes up in some way here. I haven't learned any CAD software yet but I'm really eager to learn FreeCAD. It may be clunky in comparison to it's competitors now but I feel like it's worth putting some time into it. Reminds me a bit of learning basics of GIMP back then, which I've been using for many years now.

You should try SolveSpace or just pirate SOLIDWORKS. Trying to learn CAD with FreeCAD will be an exercise in frustration.

I experienced the same thing trying to learn PCB design with gEDA and Kicad. I gave up and only managed to learn years later when I discovered Designspark PCB.

CAD and PCB design are not complicated at all. But these open source programs (except SolveSpace) have really terrible UX so you really need to already know what you're doing to use them.

> You should try SolveSpace

I may recommend use both SolveSpace & FreeCAD together[0]:

1) SolveSpace app for preliminary design & export to STEP-file;

2) FreeCAD app for final touches on this STEP-file (fillets, chamfers, etc.).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3LJMeqUDrU

Looks like a great pairing. Subscribed for more! :-)

That was some really odd advice.

I belive fusion 360 is free for personal use and much more popular than solidworks.

Solvespace has a non existing UX. I would very much advise against using it.

People have gone from zero to first commercial PCB in 1-2 weeks using kicad.

Good luck trying to reuse your work in 10 years.

Or export it to a non-autodesk ecosystem today, for that matter.

Autodesk designs its software to maximize customer lock-in.

The whole notion that you own your work and should be able to do what you want with it, especially work on it further in an non-autodesk environment is strictly against their corporate religion.

> I belive fusion 360 is free for personal use and much more popular than solidworks.

It was, and I would have recommended it then, but they pulled the rug a while ago.

> Solvespace has a non existing UX. I would very much advise against using it.

Yeah it's rubbish compared to commercial options but it's still by far the best FOSS option. It has a much better UX than FreeCAD.

> People have gone from zero to first commercial PCB in 1-2 weeks using kicad.

1-2 weeks full time is a lot! You could do it in a day or two with better designed programs. PCB design is really simple conceptually.

I’ve been trying to use FreeCAD for a while now and keep going back to OpenSCAD because, ironically, the FreeCAD UX feels grotesque (I used Fusion before, and have a history of 3D modeling that harks back to things like Caligari and Maya).

OpenSCAD is great for a lot of the simple electronics enclosure stuff (once you master hulls), but does need better control over 2D extrusions and sorely lacks fillets and chamfers (which are essential for proper finishing of joints and outer edges). Those have been long-standing issues that haven’t been addressed by the core project (or, as far as I know, any forks), and kind of prevent me from going all in on it (although I do use it the most, and prefer writing out the geometry to drawing it).

I have also been looking into the CAD Sketcher plug-in for Blender, which is somewhat unpolished but pretty decent for simple things, and may eventually move to that altogether—although Blender STL meshes usually need a lot of cleaning up.

I used to like OpenSCAD for its simple approach but then I discovered SDF-based modelling with Python made possible with this neat library: [1]. This is perfect if you are a programmer that doesn't know anything about CAD-Software.

1.: https://github.com/fogleman/sdf

Oh cool! I’ve wanted to use an sdf modeler for a while

That is a trifle CPU-intensive, though. Might work OK if you can get it to work with Jupyter, but seems slow for fast iterations and without an interactive view it's hard to model.

Agreed. The display in Jupyter should happen via some inline WebGL-shaders which would be instant rendering. Also the "marching qubes" algorithm to render the stl is not exactly state of the art (use at least octrees or something) and needs very high resolution to achieve good results.

The biggest problem I have with OpenSCAD is that frequently what I need to output are drawings of some sort, which OpenSCAD isn't really suitable for.

You can also get hold of a bang up to date FreeCAD book here:https://hackspace.raspberrypi.com/books/freecad

Unfortunately it sold out on release but is available for free download

its janky as shit, but somehow strangely effective. you just have to overcome several months of frustration. i think its worth it because its open source and scriptable, you can always modify it to do exactly what you need

Or, indeed, years. I've been semi-seriously using it since 0.19 and one of the most frustrating things about it is how poor the affordances are. Going from idea to execution is often completely unpredictable in terms of what intermediate stages you need to go through, especially for things like the Curves workbench where you need to convert between different types of "line in space" representation for, as far as I can tell, no particularly user-relevant reason.

While I'm ranting, the "workbench" abstraction might be very convenient technically, but it's implemented very arbitrarily. What conceptual set contains "Architecture", "Image", "Part", and "Robot"? And what's the conceptual dividing line between "Part" and "Part Design"? I understand the technical difference (in that "Part Design" should really be called "Body" because that's what it's for) but from a user's point of view learning which operations live where, and why there are (for instance) two different ways to do fillets with completely different user interfaces, just exposes them to technical implementation details they shouldn't have to care about.

You often see the justification on the forums that "complex tools are always going to have complex interfaces" - no, that's a failure of UI design. Start by acknowledging that, and things can start to improve.

totally agree. i feel the same way about blender and ardour, and i wonder if the ui layer is the biggest difference between open source and paid software of this type. ths reason being the ui is the first thing you notice so it probably influences sales the most

Blender I have less of an issue with, mainly because they've demonstrated that they're not afraid to do fairly major UI upheavals to improve things. It's a lot better than it was pre-2.8.

Some people won't touch freecad because of the dated UI.

But to me, the main problem with freecad was lack of good organisation among workbenches. Its just too much back and forth between half finished workbenches to get anything done.

> Some people won't touch freecad because of the dated UI.

Not just that.

The UI is horrendous.

There is, as you note, no logic to the "workbenches".

The geometry engine (the "kernel", if you like CAD tongue) is ancient and weak.

The parametric modeling system is not something I've ever managed to make work.

The scripting language is - even though they use one of the best languages ever - hard and convoluted to use to build 3D models.

Polygonal mesh modeling is close to non existent.

NURBS modeling is weak. Getting complex fillet + hole working is a complete crapshoot.

I could go on for a long time.

I do understand it's free software and that there are very few alternative out there, but when you're used to open source stuff like Blender, OpenSCAD, Wings3D and Gimp, FreeCad is simply laughable.

It pains me to say this: folks have been pouring their heart and soul into building FreeCad, but the result is just crap.

For a good CAD user book i find the one for QCAD very good for learning the basics of CAD drawing (and the Qcad software).

This book is not free (35$), but it's available in multiple languages (english, french, german, italian). Even if you use another CAD software, its a good starting point.

https://qcad.org/en/documentation/the-qcad-book

As a free alternative to QCAD book, here are few books for LibreCAD.

BTW, Its just for 2D/2.5D CAD (CADD), while for 3D CAx (CAM, CAE, FEM, etc.) you need a lot more knowledge.

[0] https://librecad.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[1] https://heikell.fi/downloads/LibCAD_220rc1.pdf

This is interesting. I recently downloaded FreeCAD and abandoned it after just a few minutes. So, I think I can understand where this project came from.

I have experience with 2D CAD programs like LibreCAD and CadStd and 3D geometric tools like TinkerCAD, OpenSCAD, the late ABC 123, and Sketchup. But, FreeCAD doesn’t really seem to work like these tools. There seems to be a lot to learn and I just found myself frustrated. I did manage to create a general shape I was working on but I didn’t feel like I understood very well. Anyway, some simple primer for people without a drafting background may be in order (and I imagine that isn’t too hard to find).

This primer also seems to be over my head, getting into language I don’t understand right off the bat. Seems like the author has a bit of background I lack.

I've spent some time trying to learn FreeCAD and ultimately decided that the cost of Fusion 360 pays for itself several times over in productivity compared to trying to deal with how clunky and difficult FreeCAD is.

Alternatively PCB stuff in Fusion is pretty horrible and IMO worse than Eagle was before they all but abandon it and started shoe honing it into Fusion. Meanwhile KiCad continues to get better and more feature rich.

I tend to feel the same way about F360 -- I'm productive in it -- but the increased amount of 'cloud credit' usage within the app is driving me away from the product faster and faster.

It's mostly superficial stuff behind that right now, but I can see the writing on the walls. There's no real valid technical reason why I can't render a carousel rendering of a design locally, especially after I am already wrangled into a subscription fee for a product that would've been a one time (albeit large) purchase a few years back.

I tried to use FreeCAD once because I needed to generate some G-code for my CNC router.

I ultimately wrote my own G-code generator because that was less frustrating than memorizing the sequence of steps necessary to do anything in FreeCAD. It seemed like the answer to "how do I do X" was always "you can't do that; those two workbenches aren't compatible."

This is a good opportunity to bring up Blender. Its quite powerful as a full 3D suite and can be used for modeling in 3D printing.

You also have the CAD Sketcher plug-in, which supports constraints.

CAD Sketcher is based on SolveSpace's geometry constraints solver.

Share the same experiences as here, don't care about the outdated UI, I spend a lot of time figuring out how to build my rather simpel model, but always had to relearn stuff to make modifications. Went over to onshape and works great for my use case (free version)

Slightly off topic but does anyone have a recommended paid alternative to FreeCAD? Preferably one that is non-subscription and sub 5k?

Good luck with the non-subscription part these days.

Yeah, Solidworks is the only big player that hasn't moved to that model yet (that I know). Makes it incredibly difficult for folks looking to do commercial work (that can't be done on student licenses) and who don't work at large companies.

You can download a legit SOLIDWORKS license for free if you pay the $40 a year membership to EAA (experimental aircraft association)

I believe that has been reduced to EAA members getting 50% off the SOLIDWORKS for Makers edition (normally $99/yr).

Is there an actual physical book for FreeCAD too on the market?

Here is a list of known FreeCAD books:[0]

But all of them are a bit outdated as for actual FreeCAD 0.20.x/0.21.x and RealThunder's FreeCADLink.

[0] https://wiki.freecad.org/Books

In addition, there is the FreeCAD black book: https://cadcamcaeworks.com/product/freecad-0-20-black-book/

Fairly up to date, covers considerably more ground than most other FreeCAD books I've encountered, and the authors seem to know a lot about various CAD systems. There are also numerous nontrivial tutorial examples worked out in considerable detail.

As a downside, the book is somewhat pricy (very much so for the paper edition) and written in a very dry style, going through menu options one by one in a very formulaic language. I would recommend it, but it does not necessarily make for recreational reading.

> and written in a very dry style

That is why I'm not listing it here — it looks more like compilation from FreeCAD wiki docs & various guides.

Author printed already tons of such books, and all of them looks like Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V.[0]

[0] https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AGaurav+Verma...

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