I am trying to switch from Fusion/Inventor/OnShape to FreeCAD, because I just can’t afford the business licenses. And man, it’s hard to learn. Everything has to be constrained correctly or it won’t extrude (which seems pretty great once you understand it, but phew). Fusion etc. really don’t care about constraints, which makes it easy to draw something but hard to change parameters.
I think it’s great to be forced to do it, but man, it’s hard (yeah, I am repeating myself).
Has anyone great tips for starting out with FreeCAD? It seems like a really, really great alternative once you get over the intiial hurdle.
I’ll be watching this thread because I’ve been thinking I should do the same. I’ve been procrastinating though, my excuse for that is FreeCAD version 1.1 is due to be released very soon.
Curious how your FreeCad learning journey goes. I couldn’t figure it out when briefly trying out a while back. Are you doing 3D designs, or would 2.5D be good enough, fixed cost like MillMage would be acceptable?
Are you doing something complicated or could parametric OpenScad (free) work for your project?
If you’re not doing some elaborate construction with purple heart inlay for Valentine’s/Easter, then…
CNC/tool table? There’s some OpenScad based tables scattered across the forum, e.g.
There’s better OpenScad table designs shared by other members, for example. We could probably gather them somewhere, but, maybe you want to FreeCad instead for various reasons. FreeCad seems powerful.
You get used to that pretty quickly and underconstrained designs are bad practice either way, but damn is FreeCAD dumb in cleaning up redundant constraints!
Especially doing circle segments overlaping other circles (imported conture, helper line) has a lot of fighting with the automatic constraints.
I have been trying to learn Freecad occasionally over the last few months after using Sketchup, Solid Edge, and Fusion 360 intermittently for over a decade. Freecad is giving me problems for sure. I keep getting myself into a hole and needing to mash the undo button (but at least that undo button works!).
I use it at work (or rather I use it to open work projects that the real Pros create…).
We have to get special machines, specially tuned, with a dedicated admin to keep them running and maintain things like PDM.
Run, I dare say, RUN from SolidWorks.
Okay, I am beginning to understand the spreadsheets, it’s the parametric design in Fusion where you can change one value and all the rest will still fit. I can now change the width of my wood and the table’s legs stay exactly where they are supposed to be. Only 10823092 more questions, but at least one less now.
I have never tried FreeCAD. I did download it but I don’t think I ever opened it lol. I get along “ok” in fusion. A little better in onshape. But I’m sure I would be in a worse spot than you trying to learn FreeCAD lol. Onshape was the easiest because of all of their learning stuff. Fusion was ok with all of the YouTube tutorials.
I will be interested in following this thread. I downloaded the 1.1rc1 candidate since 1.1 is close to being released. I thought it would be best to start there. I currently use fusion, openscad and an IntelliCAD perpetual license (AutoCAD clone). I find myself using IntelliCAD and openscad less and less. Maybe this will be the year for me to switch to freecad. I tried v0.92 and was too problematic for me. Seems like it has gotten a lot better and has more support.
