Wanted to share this since this was a long Project. Since Autodesk started changing Fusions functionality, from limiting active projects, to changing their terms of service. Since I need a CAD tool for my 3D Printable designs, I started migrating to a new cross platform CAD tool. That happened to be FreeCAD.
Learning FreeCAD wasn’t easy, but was well worth my time. And after slowly pecking at it for 11 months, I was able to re-build every design I made (that I cared about).
I’ve made my 3D Printable designs available on my GitHub if you are interested: https://github.com/the16bitgamer/16BitVirtualStudiosDesigns
I love them idea of free CAD, but it is so hard to do basic stuff. F360 knows when you click inspect and a circle or something then you’re trying to get a diameter. Fc, was always like, oh you wanted the distance between these arbitrary pixels? That’s 13.00007654 mm
Selection in freecad sketches is really bad. Box select with dragging the mouse doesn’t work, you can’t mask elements (make only points or only curves selectable), selections are added to the current selection instead of replacing it even if you aren’t holding shift, and if you miss and click on the backgeound accidentally it unselects everything. And selections aren’t part of history so if you spend five minutes selecting a lot of specific elements and then misclick once, welp do it all over again, no undo for you.
There are a few tool buttons like “selected constraints related to the currently selected element” which are really helpful though.
FreeCAD is amazing. I never tried any of the “professional” CAD packages but all of the accounts, subscriptions and cloud bullshit makes me never want to either.
Dude, awesome post! In the last couple of weeks I too have switched to FreeCAD. The real turning point for me was finding RealThunder’s fork which is infinitely more usable than the main fork due to stable geometry. At first I wasn’t so sure I could hack it, but in recent days I’ve been getting really comfortable. I haven’t opened Fusion in weeks for anything but to grab measurements from my old designs! Cheers.
I did the same thing over the past 6 or so months ago. There’s nothing I could do in Fusion360 that I couldn’t do in FreeCAD. People love to complain about FreeCAD, and it does have a steep learning curve, but once you learn to design in the way FreeCAD wants you to, it goes quite smoothly.
Nicely done! I’m still in the “slowly pecking at it for 11 months” stage, but in my case its closer to 24 months now. My biggest problem is that FreeCAD still feels like work and Fusion360 feels like something I can just eff-around with and still get good parts out of.
I’ve been thinking about trying out CAD Sketcher for Blender except that I’m not really proficient in Blender either.
If you don’t mind dropping a small amount of coin, Solidworks has a new maker version that is full fledged Solidworks for under $100 a year. Small price for the gold standard in my opinion. I think FreeCAD is better then CAD sketcher for blender. Much higher learning curve.
Lack of Linux or BSD support is a dealbreaker for me.
Been learning FreeCAD myself, recently switched to RealThunder’s Link branch. It’s not the easiest to learn, but I haven’t come across any major limitations either. It’s really nice to have software where you can do what you want and know you have full control over your documents.
I should never have to carefully read a EULA to know what I can and can’t do with my own designs, or whether or not other people can access my designs without permission.
