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There are lots of tutorials, but the quality is all over the place, and a lot of the wiki articles are out of date.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.
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).
KiCAD's UI isn't that bad. I was productive almost immediately using it, and it was my first exposure to PCB design. I can't say the same for FreeCAD though. :-)
> 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.
Kicad is way better than it used to be.
> (like if you drag a component in the schematic it doesn't bring it's wires with it!)
This is usually different modes in a schematic editor, because often "bringing the wires" does more harm than good. The default is different in KiCad from most-- "g" to bring wires, drag to not.
Weird. I gave up on Eagle before I was able to get PCB ready for manufacturing, but I found KiCad to be very intuitive. (Except when importing external libraries, that’s one horror show.)
Horizon EDA is nice, with push and shove router (from KiCAD), but I truly dislike (in addition to part management you mentioned) that instead of highlighting track/part/via it draws, often ambiguous, ugly, bracket around it.
FreeCAD is great and very capable (I used Fusion 360 before) if you spent more time with it and switch to glass add-on and other tweaks. Program defaults make it unappealing.
This was actually a bonus for me. The minimal capabilities of SolveSpace made it much easier to pick up what was going on with constraint-based modelling and just getting the mental model sorted out in my brain. Then going to FreeCAD after that was pretty much "oh, this UI wants me to do that thing in this particular way" rather than needing to learn it all at once.
Oh wow I've been looking for something like that for ages! Not surprising I didn't find it given that that page seems to be literally the only place they mention it.
Also, unfortunately it seems to already require a licence key of some kind to download. How do you even get one of those?
Oh, you're right. Just tried it again now, and it's clearly not working properly.
I've just emailed their customer support people to find out what's going on.
Hopefully they haven't changed their mind about giving people access to Solidworks for free. A decent alternative to Autodesk's Fusion 360 is kind of needed. ;)
Strange because they told me that that version is only for "SWUG Leaders" (SolidWorks User Group), and they are planning a separate version for makers that costs $99/year and also seems to be some shitty cloud-based version (it's exact nature is shrouded in marketing nonsense):
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
I tried FreeCAD a couple times, it's good but I always find it very frustrating to use because sooner or later some operation just doesn't work and I have no idea why or how to make it work.
So in the end I always came back to OpenSCAD. It doesn't do curved surfaces all that well, its rendering is sometimes really slow, but it just works. With a couple simple Bezier curve functions certain things can look really nice, thanks to its nice commandline parameters and plain text file format you can always just plug it together with bash scripts or other tools. A list of all its features fit on a single page, and you can do anything with those.
It's just a really great program and the only CAD software I don't find unnecessarily frustrating. It has a few quirks but those are really minor details.
openscad is good, but i wish it had a way to define negative space within a module. if you have something that has positive and negative features (i.e. it's supposed to punch a hole through another object the module is applied to), you always end up with two modules, one for negative features and one for positive
isn't that just basically openscad's difference()? I'm talking about defining an object/module with positive space components and negative components. so basically, when you apply union() to that object and another object, the positive parts will be added to the second object, and the negative ones will be subtracted. currently this has to be done in two seperate steps
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.
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.
Parametric solid CAD != mesh modeling. For technical parts, mechanisms and assemblies, you generally don't care as much about complex curvature, you care about parametricity, the constraint solver, and solid operations.
There's all sorts of designs which benefit from being parametrically constrained but need complex curvature. Enclosures for instance. It's so useful to be able to do both in one environment.
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.
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.
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.
It's feature set isn't great for accurate mechanical engineering where you can find the measurement for every bit nice and easy. It really is "Connect the Dots 3D". It is more of a "make a cool digital object" thing.
But for example, I can take an object, turn it to "goo", play forward 5 seconds of animation and 3D print a "melted" version of that object. I mean, I don't know why you would, but you can.
Blender enables artistic possibilities for objects in ways that FreeCAD doesn't.
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.
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
