That’s thrown a spanner in the works. Rats. I was thinking to myself that I was just starting to move from complete idiot to partial idiot as a F360 user.
The cloud rendering worries me, does that mean that STL exports have gone. The 10 doc limit is also a pain. I can see those going as well soon…
I am also trying to parse what “stay true to our guiding principles of democratizing design for everyone.” means.
I have tried FreeCAD on a Mac and it wasn’t fit for use, none of the max software I tried was any good (IMHO) on a Mac. I wanted Freecad to work, but it crashed time and time again. F360 is just too expensive for a hobby user so not sure what to do now. I’d pay £5-10 per month for it, but not the £263/year (£20/month) feature.
Oh well, back to the drawing board (no pun intended) though I may just accept I only have 10 live documents.
Apparently it means “Please don’t stop using Fusion, we depend a lot on the feedback and beta testing you’ve done for us.”
You can still render locally. I didn’t see any differences between a couple of things I did locally vs cloud, except that my project didn’t have to wait in a queue for local render. A new graphics card is cheaper than a one year subscription…
yeah, their rendering is for images/animations of your model (AFAIK). I just tried, and I can export a single part to STL in offline mode, so maybe that’s still ok (they are so far still including that function for free). Trying to export an entire model requires “cloud translation”, but that just turned my entire model into a single STL which is probably not what most people want. I certainly don’t.
There also seems to be question in their comments over there about removing simulation. I took that to be the FEA-type module, but a lot of folks are concerned that it also is removing the CAM toolpath simulation as well. That would be really, really, really bad. I don’t think they could keep any CNC users on it at that point.
Thanks for that. A lot really. I’m going to check it out later. I remember a year ago trying to find decent videos and getting really frustrated with the quality that was out there. It felt like either I had to understand a lot about CAD and/or the intent of the software to understand them, or else listen to somebody blather on about a lot of things that weren’t important to skill the video was supposed to show the viewer.
I thought (still do) the interface is a bit on the complicated side, but I messed with it last night and it’s a little easier to understand after all my practice with F360. It just feels really…clunky. But then, so can a performance sports car until you get used to the clutch, and there’s only one way to do that.
I started following freecad on twitter and they recommended that video. They are also asking about what information they can share to make it easier. I suspect they are seeing this as an opportunity and a moment to grab some more users and make things better. This might be very invigorating to the project.
I wouldn’t mind something with a little faster pace. Something meant for people who already know some other similar CAD program.
It’s hard to imagine something like freecad succeeding. It is completely free and open. People volunteer to develop it and some people volunteer to pay for some development. It is built on goodwill. Sort of the opposite of the Boston common problem. But there are other examples of this working. Blender and inkscape come to mind, and of course the linux os. Once a FOSS project gets big enough, it can be sustained by donations and support contracts. It seems like it is close to that.
There was also a walkthrough with freecad, freecad cam, grbl, ugs focused on the mpcnc here:
I’m not sure what the current state of cam and marlin PP is in freecad. I’m sure I’ve been told, but I forget. It might also be a good time to poke at that problem and make it as good as the guffy post processor.
The real pain for me with the 10 document limit is when I have an assembly of referenced parts. Guess I will start breaking those links before exporting the files. I wonder if they will ever consider having the option of your files being located locally or on the cloud so it would not impact their online storage.
The amount of cloud storage used is negligible, these days it’s effectively free for the volumes they will be working at (or the incremental cost is hundreths of pennies). If it isn’t I’m happy to help them out. Our family home server has 24TB of disk. We throw anything and everything on it, I don’t care to be honest. It cost me less than $1K to build.
The reason for the 10 documents limit will be to encourage people to upgrade to the paid version. Just enough to hook you in and then sting you for the ‘heavy’’ stuff’. Mmmm interesting business model, where have I seen that before?
Actually, the more I read about this the less I wonder if I’ll really be affected.
It sounds like the 10 active documents just means I’ll have to shuffle documents if I want to open an older design. I don’t do this very often, so it might not bother me.
You can still export STL files and it sounds like you can still export a dxf from a schematic, which is what I already do.
The simulation might bother me, but I can’t find info as to whether that’s talking about simulating tool paths, or the material simulation (which I’ve never used).
I don’t use the cloud based rendering. I’ve only ever used local.
The only thing I think will really affect me is the lack of rapid movement, but if I can export dxf, maybe I’ll go back to using ESTLCam (really don’t want to do that).
Rapid moves: Rapid moves traverse long distances across large machines at significantly faster speeds than the cut feedrate. Higher end machines typically have longer distances to travel and faster rapid speeds, making this feature valuable to those in a commercial setting but unnecessary for personal use.
I’m pretty sure it’s generative design, not generation. The biggest change to toolpaths I saw was having to make separate posts for different tools. You can still post multiple paths with the same tool together, it SEEMS. Looks like an easy fix if you really really want it, just write out your script, then copy paste the files together or use robocopy (i really love that actually, super underrated function included in windows!). Slightly annoying for us, but a Serious impediment to a production environment, especially with automatic tool changers, i get it.
A few people asked about the cam simulation vs material simulation, but I didn’t see any answers from AD.
Seems the same way for me. Slightly annoying, but it might be worth the tradeoff for the slick interface. A lot will depend on how usable freecad turns out to be now.
It’s a really good point, and odds are solid that they haven’t, and that even if they have they don’t think it’s a large enough user base to push the needle. It really looks like they are trying to punish people using the software on machines that run all day or that have rapids of 300+ ipm. In the cam simulation, you should be able to get details on how much time you spend cutting and how much time in traveling. I think it would be interesting to see how much time that calculates as, and how much time at the lower cut rate. On some of those full sheet jobs, I’m sure it could add up to an hour or more. Again, annoying to us, crippling to a production environment.
The more I read, the more I get it. I don’t like it, and I REALLY don’t like not knowing what they’ll decide we don’t need next month or the month after, but it’s not my stuff. I’m a freeloader right now, so that’s my boat to row.
I’ve watched the first 3 videos in this series, and just starting 4 where it gets into actual cnc paths… freecad looks great. And I’m thinking will fit in great if I can convert to gcode that runs on the MPCNC. Seems quite easy to use now that I’ve watched a couple videos. It might actually become my first choice for 3d print designs.
I read a while back that somebody had put together a marlin pp, and that Grbl already exists. I haven’t learned anything about either, but would that cover your bases?
