Comment by codazoda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codazoda | Hacker News Reader

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."

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