FreeCAD 0.19

[manuel_w]

One thing I absolutely love in the Autocad version we got teached back in school was the way the selection rectangle worked.

Drawing the selection rectangle from left to right selects all lines fully covered by the rectangle.

Drawing the selecton rectangle from right to left selects all lines partially or fully covered by the rectangle.

(Either this, or the other way round.)

Does FreeCAD or any other free CAD solution support this? I can't do without this. Which one of the free CAD solutions out there imitate Autocad 2005 the closest?

[ohazi]

KiCad copied this feature, and I was frustrated by the "inconsistent behavior" of the selection tool for years until someone finally explained it to me.

Now it's great, but if you're going to copy features like this, please make sure to document them so that people trying to learn how to use your tool without the requisite historical perspective don't get frustrated.

Eventually computing is going to get to the point where it's no longer possible to learn all of the historical baggage around why things are done a certain way. For a lot of people, we're already there.

[Kliment]

Freecad does this when editing sketches at least. Kicad also does it. It's great, but very confusing for beginners.

[iamgopal]

Try ProgeCAD, a bit cheaper alternative, but not free. AutoCAD is holy grail of 2D CAD. Many cheap alternatives like ProgeCAD etc are usable but no match to the AutoCAD. AutoLISP is of added value.

[scrapcode]

If you click and hold, it becomes a free draw selection tool with the same rules!

[10000truths]

LibreCAD does the same thing.

[antattack]

If you have "rage-quit" FreeCAD in the past, like I have, here are few tips to make it more palatable:

Install PieMenu addon

Install Glass addon

Enable TreeView

Make icons larger so it's easier to tell what function they are for.

[floatboth]

Uninstalled Glass because the transparent area is not click-through (and it covers the whole area vertically) >_<

My must-have is the workspace selector one that makes them buttons instead of that drop-down.

[dang]

If curious, related past threads:

FreeCAD Simulator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25098981 - Nov 2020 (13 comments)

FreeCAD BIM development news - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24951311 - Oct 2020 (23 comments)

FreeCAD: A free and open source multiplatform 3D parametric modeler - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24513340 - Sept 2020 (268 comments)

A Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) workbench for FreeCAD - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23787391 - July 2020 (4 comments)

FreeCAD on Raspberry Pi 4 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22347385 - Feb 2020 (36 comments)

Parametric CAD modeling for open source scientific hardware: OpenSCAD / FreeCAD - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22270981 - Feb 2020 (1 comment)

FreeCAD BIM development news December 2018 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800484 - Jan 2019 (22 comments)

FreeCAD 0.17 “Roland” released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16790814 - April 2018 (58 comments)

FreeCAD Arch development news - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480294 - June 2017 (44 comments)

FreeCAD 0.16 release notes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533435 - April 2016 (75 comments)

[jbay808]

The TechDraw improvements in this version are a big deal. They've made it good enough for me to make actual shop drawings with proper tolerances, section views, and so on.

[aklemm]

How well does FreeCAD meet needs of amateur builders, tinkerers, and diy-ers? Say for example 3d printing, small home additions, etc.?

[TkTech]

Perfectly well. I've used it for models to be 3D printed, as well as plans for building a greenhouse.

It's ugly, it occasionally breaks your models, and it's capable of doing anything you could possibly want it to. It's like Gimp (before the new UI) vs. Photoshop.

There are lots of tutorials, but the quality is all over the place, and a lot of the wiki articles are out of date. The best way to learn FreeCAD (in my opinion) is to find something you want to accomplish (fix that broken part in the dishwasher) and experiment until you get the hang of it.

[IshKebab]

It's still at the very unintuitive stage. I've done loads of CAD in loads of different programs and still struggled to figure it out.

If you want to do simple CAD e.g. for 3D printing and you must use FOSS then I would recommend SolveSpace instead. It has some awkward flaws (most notably there's no bevel/chamfer feature) but aside from that it is much much better and easier to use than FreeCAD.

If you don't want to punish yourself by using FOSS then I would either way use Fusion360 and put up with their recently gimping of the free version, or simply pirate Solidworks. It's still by far the easiest CAD software to use, though the latest versions are getting kind of bloated.

FOSS CAD is not in a good shape yet.

Off topic, but until recently I would have said the same for EDA. Kicad may be powerful but it was also apparently designed by a UX sadist. Even if you are really familiar with other EDA tools it still makes approximately zero sense and has loads of weird "features" (like if you drag a component in the schematic it doesn't bring it's wires with it!) Eagle and gEDA are even worse.

Fortunately there's at least one decent FOSS EDA program now: Horizon EDA. There's also LibrePCB which I haven't tried, but Horizon is good and pretty easy to use (it has a rather confusing and over-complicated component/gate system but you can mostly ignore that).

[calvinmorrison]

In contrast to FreeCAD I have been using openSCAD. You define basic 3D objects and do transforms, etc on them. It's kind of programming, more like a domain specific language.

Here's a tube, which we can think about like the difference of two cylinders.

Writing and refactoring into modules (functions) is very natural and allowed me to get more perspective about the relationships of my models

    module Tube(height, width, thickness) {
      difference() {
        cylinder(h=height, r=width);
        cylinder(h=height,r=width-thickness);
      };
    };

[swetland]

Definitely some rough edges, and like most CAD systems it has a pretty steep initial learning curve, but I've been surprised at how useful it is. Finding a recent youtube tutorial or two can help with getting started (sadly the wiki/docs are a bit sparse).

I feel like it's not as far along as say KiCad or Blender as far as "competitive with commercial offerings" open source tooling goes, but development is very active and it seems to be improving at an impressive rate.

[ur-whale]

Freecad's UI is awful

But then so is Autocad's

TBH, neither are real 3D modeling softwares.

In both packages, you have do all your thinking in 2D, which is ideal if you did learn to design parts back in the 20th century with paper and pen, and an absolute torture if you did with real 3D software in the modern computer era.

For example, building a real 3D curve, i.e. something that has actual 3D curvature and no simple plane projection is simply a nightmare.

[gerdesj]

I have a 3D printer (Prusa) on my dining room table, just to the left of my laptop with extra monitor. I run Arch on the lappy.

I'm a PHB! When I'm not doing PHB things, I indulge my guilty pleasures.

OpenSCAD is pretty much tamed by me now. I'm not an expert by any means but I can design and print a mount for my Doorbird to toe it in towards the ringer. I use FreeCAD with my browser open to look up what to do. It is rather good and keeps on improving. I'm aware of Blender but it scares me. LibreCAD is available. I use SweetHome3D for home/office related stuff.

We have a decent pool of open source tools for CAD. FreeCAD is extremely capable already and keeps on getting better. I used to run it on Gentoo a few years back and simply getting it to compile was a pain. It is rapidly improving but do make sure you keep incremental backups for important work.

Have a look at this lot for some idea of what is on offer: https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Tutorials Those are quite old and there is a lot more on offer.

[nikaspran]

I use it for 3D printing mainly. It's pretty good, but 0.18.x had some annoying bugs (i.e. it would occasionally just crash, wiping everything since the last time you saved). Nothing show-stopper if you save often and don't do anything too crazy.

I personally prefer Fusion 360 (it feels sleeker and is way more usable with a touchpad), but it's definitely a viable choice.

[mch82]

It’s quite useful for 3D printing enclosures or mechanical devices. Edit: FreeCAD is designed to work the way tools like CATIA work. Think of parametric CAD less as a “concept development tool” and more a “programming language that can be compiled to gcode”. Then a CNC machine can build your object from gcode. The expectation is a designer works on paper or a drawing tool first to conceptualize a part (like a UI designer might work in Sketch) and then a mechanical designer works in FreeCAD (like a software developer works on Angular).

MagicaVoxel is a much simpler tool that’s more like working on a sandcastle & can be 3D printed.

Blender is probably better for animation / games.

For home additions, Trimble SketchUp is more productive because there is a large library of building components pre-modeled (like doors or standard pieces of wood that can be purchased at Home Depot).

For PCB layout, there are other specialized EDA tools references in other comments.

[fimdomeio]

I have a version on mac that crashes when I click some cancel buttons. I just learned not to click them. Other than that I serves all my modeling needs for 3d printing.

[this_was_posted]

I use it quite a bit for 3D printing. Its user interface is a bit daunting at first but with the part design workbench I’m now able to create moderately complex parametric parts in a matter of minutes. Commercial software might be more feature rich and intuitive but freecad comes along nicely

[hobo_mark]

Sad to see that the (confusingly named, because they have no relationship with each other) Assembly3 vs Assembly4 split is here to stay.

[baybal2]

I use SolidWorks on a dedicated workstation.

FreeCAD is far from it in terms of number of geometric tools, and especially 3D path stroking.

Freeform surfaces are a great pain in any CAD, but FreeCAD barely does even basics.

To catch up to SolidWorks, FreeCAD needs like tenfold increase in effort for the geometry kernel.

[kragen]

https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/12/understanding-the-inn...

That is, some people have different needs, and so dismissing FreeCAD because it doesn't yet fulfill your needs is a mistake.

[konjin]

That sounds like 3 years of work given how much it has improved between this version and 0.14 which is the last one I used extensively.