The first release candidate of FreeCAD 1.0 is out

The US national median salary is $59,384 per year as of Q4 2023.

https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/average-salary-in-us/

Whose salaries, exactly? In most of the country, that's a couple months rent for an entire middle class family. I earn well, and I cannot imagine ever paying that much for any piece of software unless I needed it for a profit-making venture and the ROI was very obvious and very positive.

Once they release 2024.3 I probably will! They are definitely saying all the right things. I filled out their user survey and was pleased to see UI/UX at the top of the responses. If they start delivering meaningful UI revamp I will certainly send them some money - I cannot express how much I want a KiCAD equivalent for mechanical CAD to exist.

> ... about FreeCAD, the user interface is terrible and even though Ondsel exists I just can't stand the way the program works.

FreeCAD seems to operate in the same way as Catia (ie v5/v6), or at least have been developed to follow the same approach to things.

Saying that as I used to use Catia years ago, so the FreeCAD approach wasn't completely foreign.

I've been looking for a while at BricsCAD (as an alternative to VariCAD), but when you add in sheet metal folding and ability to export and import STEP, it starts getting expensive.

I just checked their site and their 20% off prices actually seem reasonable—at least before realizing they are yearly costs.. They do sell also perpetual licenses where you pay for the product of your selection and then a yearly maintenance fee, and this would perhaps make the most sense for a hobbyist, but this already feels a bit expensive.

I've been trying to get into FreeCAD, but some of my existing models seem to be a bit slow with it, not to mention the different workflow. But I'll give 1.0 a shot!

I just picked up Plasticity earlier this week to start trying to learn it, it's been on my radar for a while. I've been using TinkerCAD for years for making my simple models, and it works really well for the basics but there are things that become painful there that Plasticity has promise of making a lot easier.

One of the first tutorials I went through was really frustrating though. Some of it may be that Plasticity is a quickly moving target right now (lots of tutorials are for v0.x or 1.4, with current being v24, for an idea).

A lot of the pain was this tutorial just didn't touch on the basics it was assuming you knew. Some of it was just getting used to the tool and figuring out what mode you are in and which you need to be in to accomplish what you need to do. I struggled a lot with just getting keyboard shortcuts and the trackpad navigation to work. I never did find a description of mouse/trackpad mappings (possibly made worse by there being ~5 themes you can select from).

It shows a lot of promise, but there's going to be a bit of a learning curve. But there was a learning curve on TinkerCAD too, I just need to keep that in mind.

Pricing is ok: free 30 day trial, $150 for a license with 1 year of updates, and $299 for the Studio license. I don't use CAD that much, like maybe a model a month or less, so it's kind of a big bite to take for me personally, especially with it being young and likely to need to spend $150/year for a while here as it's revving up. The Studio version's xNURBS feature seems like it might be really enticing, but just makes that even harder for me to bite off.

I probably should try OnShape just because they do have that free plan.

I'm also looking at OpenSCAD for doing parameterized models. I installed it last night and asked Perplexity AI to generate a model, and it made a good start at it, but couldn't quite get the tongue-and-groove right.

I've been using this as well, since the feature set vs license terms and pricing were so good. But man is it slow and clunky compared to Fusion360.

Just trying to model a very basic part, I feel like I'm constantly fighting the software trying to figure out how to get it to understand what constraints I want, or why it won't accept something that feels like it should be obvious. Or jumping through hoops like linking figures across sketches rather than being able to use parts of a single sketch for separate features. Sigh.

You can use OnShape for free as long as you're OK with the models being publicly visible. I find that fine for learning and personal projects.

I've dabbled with OnShape, FreeCAD, and SolveSpace, and of them SolveSpace is the one I've ended up using the most. OnShape was nice, the GUI was pretty intuitive, I liked the way it worked, but I just feel weird trusting anything to a free plan on a cloud service. I don't really mind the public part, but it always felt tenuous that the plan would remain free so I didn't really feel like I could trust it long term.

FreeCAD was complicated and opaque, I never really put in the time to learn it, it just felt a bit clunky, but I keep meaning to come back to it.

SolveSpace seemed a bit mysterious at first, but just a bit of learning and I found myself pretty comfortable with it. It's not nearly as fully featured as some of the others, but it clicked well for me.

SolveSpace and FreeCAD are both FLOSS software.

It's the educational version of Solidworks --- did it a while back when my son was in high school and he found it useful for doing his CAD homework.

When I tried out FreeCAD on Ubuntu a couple years ago, it was an extremely frustrating experience. I was following a tutorial for new users until I got to a part with a simple instruction that involved clicking a button on the toolbar. The only problem was, the button wasn't there, and the instruction was so simple that it didn't specifically say "click this button at this location", it was more like "do this thing". It was worded in a way that made me think "it must be obvious and simple, why can't I figure this out?" After way too much time spent digging through menus, trying to configure the UI and searching online for a solution, I installed the Windows version out of frustration. The button was right there, front and center. The Linux version I had installed was just straight up missing it.

Same boat. Onshape is so intuitive. What many people don’t realize is that onshape is free as long as you don’t mind your designs being public. All of my designs are open source so for me it’s actually a benefit.

Just to start, I want to acknowledge that the problem space is tremendously complex; the FreeCAD developers have put in a lot of effort and it's amazing that a project like FreeCAD exists at all.

Not trying to disrespect the other FreeCAD developers, but it seems like things have improved remarkably since ondsel started taking a more active role.

The project seemed to exhibit a (common) impulse to prioritize extensibility too much. The "workbench" architecture and python API let you do some really neat stuff if you're willing to dig into the weeds. But, from the perspective of a community outsider (so take it with a grain of salt), the development process seemed to be a good example of Conway's Law in action. The workbenches let everyone have their own sub-projects to manage without stepping on each other's toes. This led to a lot of resulting complexities, inconsistencies, and instabilities, which made the approach a net negative (imo) in terms of tradeoffs.

With ondsel, there's been more focus on holistic improvements and getting the individual modules working together more smoothly, which I greatly appreciate.

If you're using it for commercial use, paying for a commercial use license will lift those limitations.

Normally, people assume you use Windows, so it makes sense to mention you're on Mac. I see Linux people doing the same all the time.

Blender changed, FreeCAD can. Just the topology naming fix is a HUGE change that lots of people could have said a couple years ago that it would never be fixed.

CAD is never made quickly, I think.

But FreeCAD was just not that sort of project. It's a C++ and Python wrapper around a CAD kernel, supporting a set of tools -- some frustrating tools, some quite powerful or niche, like the ThreadProfile workbench or the guitar workbench -- and it has never bothered the highly technical community of users much to unify things.

They weren't really trying to make a major competitor to commercial CAD: they were trying to have the tools that they individually needed and collaborate on the problems they had in common.

The balance has markedly shifted since 0.18 and now there is that focus, and significant commercial impetus. In the time I have used it -- about three years on and off -- it has clearly become more of a focus to make a complete product.

ETA: there is no doubt that one of the major things that needs to be resolved is the duality between Part workbench and Part Design workbench flows.

There appear to be some discussions about this -- about how to either merge them or create a new, future workflow that makes better use of them.

The crux of it has always been that a section of the community thinks the Part Design feature-oriented flow is a bit of a crutch, being as it is implemented as a set of implicit booleans on top of the basic flow.

Part Design is more fun to use for a beginner, but it is definitely not faster, and one of the real problems is that once you are in the feature flow you are kind of stuck in it -- it's possible to merge in objects made in the Part flow but only in relatively basic ways (starting a PD body with a "base feature", or fusing the PD body with the non-PD stuff at the end).

I would expect future development to look at this much more seriously, but there was and is no point in getting into it in more depth until the major TNP issues are truly behind FreeCAD, because a feature-oriented flow especially relies on there not being problems there.

It was called Path -- in 1.x it has been renamed to CAM, which is a much more sensible name.

I think a lot of that is a Cathedral vs. Bazaar problem.

Programmers like to work on problems which are technologically interesting, and they love adding new features. Dealing with technical debt and solving UX/UI issues isn't as much fun, so in a Bazaar model they'll simply not do it. The result is a product which feature-wise is very powerful, but UX-wise an absolute nightmare to use.

But when there's a party genuinely interested in the product as a whole, they can push more Cathedral-like UX-focused development. Have a handful of devs focus on UI stuff for a year or two, and it has suddenly turned into a world-class product. Blender and KiCad have gone through this before, and it seems like Ondsel is pushing something similar for FreeCAD. Let's hope it works!

The changes from KiCAD 3 => 4 got me to finally switch off EAGLE CAD, for which I had a $1600 license, but could see the looming subscription nonsense coming with Autodesk's interest in EAGLE. IIRC that was the first release after CERN took on development and had been dogfooding it. Every release since then has been a major improvement, and we've converted several customers from Altium to KiCAD in that time.

I can make FreeCAD go, but we still have to manually create dimensioned printsets for our sheet metal shops, rather than just being able to hand off a drawing file. I feel like when we get to the point of just being able to hand off a drawing file, it'll be in a much better place.

I tend not to use the assembly workbenches, I just manually position separate bodies in space at the position and orientation I want them.

You can use "LinkGroup" to group a bunch of them together so that they move as one unit.

I'm not an expert either, but it could be compared to bitmap graphics vs. vector graphics.

3D modelers like blender (or even OpenSCAD) work with a bunch of triangles - there is often not some higher level representation of the geometry. You could put a drill hole in a part, but it ends up as just a ton of triangles that approximate that drill hole, vs. a file format which semantically encodes "there is a cylindrical drill hole at this location, with this vector direction, and this radius".

That's what things like BRep (Boundary Representation) and STEP files give you is that semantic data which describes the part "here are the edges, faces, dimensions, etc.", vs. "here's a bunch of triangles, good luck machining this"

That's interesting, and funny I was just thinking that it was the NURBS stuff that reminds me of the surface modeling in programs like fusion.

Fusion 360 CAM is great for me (hobbyist doing CNC with wood and other materials). It's handled some pretty tough jobs, like a full topo map of california. It's why I pay for the product. I tried the electronics stuff in Fusion and decided not to use it because it didn't work nearly as well as Kicad.

I used it to do some sheet metal modeling, then sent the models off to a laser cutting/bending service that shipped me the pieces. Then I went back to Fusion to 3d print some brackets/scaffolding using the same sheet metal models as a reference, to assemble the pieces into the finished product. This was during a 3 month leave from work, starting from zero knowledge beforehand. It was probably the most fun I've had in years, and mostly thanks to how slick Fusion is and how many tutorials there are out there.

There are some export formats that it uses cloud machines for, which I think is silly and arbitrary. It's probably done that way to upsell their premium product for faster wait times or unlimited quota. For my uses I was able to select formats that didn't require the cloud.

Fusion is much more polished compared to FreeCAD and so I'm not sure if I'll ever end up making the switch. But I'm glad to see a free alternative, just in case.

If OpenSCAD had STEP file support, I could do all my design work in it. But it can't, so I can't.

Replicad is quicker to render complex things than OpenSCAD -- significantly quicker. It uses an emscripten port of OCC.

It's also embeddable as a library, which means being able to make web-based object customisers: client-side, script-driven tools that don't require CAD knowledge for the user. Like the Thingiverse customiser but on steroids. It's a fascinating project.

And I think it's not the statefulness that is the significant thing about CadQuery and Build123D. It's the access to a bRep kernel, so you can do operations with faces and vertices, you can reflect (analyse, measure) the model, etc.

Being able to do operations on a generated face or edge means not needing to know (or recalculate) the location of that face in 3D space; it saves you so much in the way of maths.

If you have very simple (or very mathematical!) models, OpenSCAD can help. But once things get complex you just have file after file of variable definitions.

Functional flows on vertexes, edges and faces created by previous operations is much closer to a code equivalent of GUI CAD.

OpenSCAD basically has no tools to aid complex modeling. You have to know trigonometry and often use pen and paper to calculate points.

Build123d has stateless algebra mode. And you could replace math with simple construction elements and simply ask intersection points.

> Python and stateful CAD drawings sound like a nightmare to me.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t appear stateful to me. The context managers mostly make the organization of objects be reflected in the organization of the code.

They’re stateful in the sense that some bits are part of a larger assembly, but I think that’s inherent in the domain. The features of the object have to relate to each other so it knows how to stitch the object together (eg which side of a face is external and which is internal).

Yes -- the STEP thing was a big part of why I wanted to switch.

I actually switched via CadQuery: a few minutes with that made it clear that the bits I didn't understand (edges, faces, planes, all that stuff that freaked me out) were simple and logical and had a sort of common sense integrity, and that I might as well try to learn them in the context of FreeCAD.

Had Build123D existed at that point, or Replicad, maybe I'd have pushed on for longer. Build123D is my "fallback toolbox" at this point.

I don't think OpenSCAD can produce STEP, ever. Importing it is another matter; that's a one-way meshing operation. But creating it means having a kernel that understands more than CSG operations -- a bRep kernel like OpenCASCADE, that FreeCAD/Replicad/CadQuery/Build123D etc. use.

You can of course run your OpenSCAD in FreeCAD, but certain operations (hulls, Minkowski I think?) end up as meshes, because there is no easy equivalent. Still, that's better than every operation ending up a mesh.

The rendering is also very slow, even on powerful machines.

JSCAD is a thing:

https://openjscad.xyz/

But I really only fight with it because I know JS moderately well.

There is now a Python-enabled version:

https://pythonscad.org/

Using the # operator to make things transparent red helps a lot when stepping/iterating through code.

Is that really "counterfeit"? As you mentioned, CAD is Computer-Aided Design, and OpenSCAD is certainly aiding in the design process by interpreting higher level commands about where to place geometry.

I have a lot of criticisms for OpenSCAD but I wouldn't call it a counterfeit, it's just a code-based approach to constructing something vs. a GUI-based approach.

The major advantage of Build123D for your use case -- sending it to someone else to fabricate it -- is STEP output support.

This really expands your options for what you can make and who you can ask to make it. There are now some online fabrication places that will do CNC from mesh formats, but really the only way to have proper control is sending them a STEP file.

It is C++/Qt/Python/OpenCASCADE, runs on Linux, Windows, Mac.

Pretty low compromise in terms of portability; surprisingly good on Mac, has ARM support. I think on FreeBSD/OpenBSD as well via ports.

It is a bRep GUI CAD system with 2D drafting, 3D CAD, a technical drawing workbench, FEM, mesh tools etc., and now a core CAD assembly tool. It has a "workbench" (think GUI plugins for specific task) approach, supports macro recording of Python macros, has many third-party workbenches, It is constraints-based and fully parametric: designs recompute and reflow when underlying measurements change.

It's also a 20 year labour of love by a bunch of CAD users.

If you are familiar with QGIS, it's really a lot like that but for CAD. It's less like GIMP than some people say, but it is a bit like GIMP (and like GIMP, is in a long battle with a core architectural problem; FreeCAD 1.0 includes a big victory over its worst core problem)

Here ya go!

https://wiki.freecad.org/Frequently_asked_questions

https://www.freecad.org/features.php

> Yes, that part's obvious just by the name. But what OS does it run on, or does it run in the browser?

The 'download now' button is right on the home page above the fold. When you click it, you see three huge icons for window, linux and macos. Not sure how you could've missed that, but it's there.