| ▲ | FreeCAD v1.1(blog.freecad.org) |
| 88 points by sho_hn 3 hours ago | 20 comments |
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| ▲ | Alupis an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| Recently one of the magnet holders for my window shutters broke, and I thought I'd take a crack at designing a replacement to 3D Print. I'd never designed anything in CAD software before, so I had no real reference. I found FreeCAD extremely easy to use and intuitive. I watched a couple videos and followed-along with the tutorials, then started on my own item. It's a relatively simple 3-part component. I took measurements with digital calipers, and in a few hours was printing the first prototype. A couple prototypes later (small measurement adjustments to account for plastic shrinkage, etc), I had the final model. Replaced all of the magnet holders since they were sure to go soon, too. I had fun, and finally used my 3D printer for something "real". Pretty cool. |
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| ▲ | _whiteCaps_ an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I post this in every FreeCAD thread: If you're going to start designing something with it, use the spreadsheet tool to make everything parametric. You'll save yourself a ton of time as your designs get more complicated. Maybe this isn't anything new to experience CAD users. I don't know if other CAD tools do this as I started using FreeCAD after playing with 3D printing. |
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| ▲ | sho_hn an hour ago | parent [-] | | It's very common (Fusion calls it User Parameters, etc.) and indeed nice practice. FreeCAD has a few ways to do it, Spreadsheets but also free-form properties on objects. It's very flexible in this regard. | | |
| ▲ | gligorot 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | The Fusion implementation sucks. A spreadsheet is a far more natural way to do this, Im surprised FreeCad is doing it better than the paid variant. | | |
| ▲ | Lukas_Skywalker 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | The only issue I have with the Spreadsheet is that I need to add an alias for every value I want to use in the Sketch or Part Design workbench. In practice, this usually looks like A B
width 2mm
length 3mm
and for every cell in B I add an alias with the same value as in column A. Is there a way around that? | | | |
| ▲ | sho_hn 33 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | The Fusion implementation is awful - you can adjust one variable, one time, then you have to reopen the dialog to do another. At least for me it's always become non-responsive after a single edit, for years now. I've always assumed I'm just holding it wrong, but I don't know. I've moved on. |
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| ▲ | _whiteCaps_ 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Super flexible. I love being able to use Python to manipulate spreadsheet data. |
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| ▲ | mentalgear 2 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Congrats - the release video is very impressive ! |
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| ▲ | cgearhart 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Slightly unrelated to this story, but I’m curious if anyone has good resources for learning FreeCAD. I have quite a lot of experience with SolidWorks, AutoCAD, OnShape, and similar software, but FreeCAD has always been hard for me to pick up. |
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| ▲ | jjkaczor 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | MangoJelly on YouTube was my primary learning source, and a few other channels - but his "gelled" with me the best. | |
| ▲ | Alupis 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | YouTube was very effective for me to learn FreeCAD. I just searched for some FreeCAD tutorials and followed-along. I had zero prior CAD experience though, so I was a "blank slate" in a way. |
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| ▲ | sho_hn 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Highlights reel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9biWv_M8p8 Release Notes: https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.1 |
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| ▲ | bartvk 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | To add to this. MangoJelly offers very good tutorials, as well as a full course on Udemy. He released a 4 minute overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSwvnZ1jsXg DeltaHedra, another great YouTube channel, also released a good video that shows the previous and this version next to each other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYdobpjTypg | | |
| ▲ | ChristianJacobs an hour ago | parent [-] | | Thumbs up for both of them, but I must say that DeltaHedra has become my new favourite FreeCAD content creator. Especially after he started using his own voice. His old content was good, but his current his magnifique! The quality of the content he pushes is above and beyond. |
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| ▲ | jepj57 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is awesome! Kudos to the developers, they really went above and beyond for this release. |
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| ▲ | GaggiX 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I was not expecting so many improvements in this version alone, I'm impressed. I was already using it for 3d printing but now it seems it's getting actually good, makes me wonder how I was able to use the previous version. |
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| ▲ | vjvjvjvjghv 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I am also impressed by how much they are improving things. It just sucks that they are stuck with the OpenCasacade kernel so making stability improvements are hard to make in areas like fillets and others. | | |
| ▲ | sho_hn an hour ago | parent [-] | | I don't follow Open CASCADE very closely, but it looks like they're on the verge of a new major release (v8.0) themselves that looks like a lot of refactoring and cleanup. I don't know hat version FreeCAD is actually bundling, but from GitHub it looks like a fork of 7.8.1? |
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