[HN Gopher] FreeCAD 0.19
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FreeCAD 0.19
Author : this_was_posted
Score : 76 points
Date : 2021-03-21 19:56 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wiki.freecadweb.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (wiki.freecadweb.org)
| manuel_w wrote:
| 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?
| scrapcode wrote:
| If you click and hold, it becomes a free draw selection tool
| with the same rules!
| 10000truths wrote:
| LibreCAD does the same thing.
| iamgopal wrote:
| 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.
| Kliment wrote:
| Freecad does this when editing sketches at least. Kicad also
| does it. It's great, but very confusing for beginners.
| ohazi wrote:
| 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.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| The usual UI indication for a feature like this is for the
| selection rectangle to be green in one mode, blue in the
| other. Or something along those lines.
|
| As so many submissions around here demonstrate, though, UI
| design ain't what it used to be.
| NathanielK wrote:
| There's also frequently a dotted border for inclusive
| selection and a solid border for exclusive selection. Very
| subtle. Makes it easy to remember which is which if you
| know how roads work.
| rhodozelia wrote:
| I had a drafting course as part of my ee degree. It was
| mostly paper and pencil drawing shapes from different
| perspectives but it did have an autocad component once we
| were supposed to know what to draw. One of the first things
| they taught us was this selection feature.
| baybal2 wrote:
| 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.
| aklemm wrote:
| How well does FreeCAD meet needs of amateur builders, tinkerers,
| and diy-ers? Say for example 3d printing, small home additions,
| etc.?
| this_was_posted wrote:
| 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
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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).
| antattack wrote:
| 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.
| mypalmike wrote:
| 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. :-)
| IshKebab wrote:
| That is very surprising. Though I guess if you haven't used
| any other EDA software maybe you just didn't notice the
| really bad bits.
|
| Give Horizon a try - it's really much better!
| TomVDB wrote:
| 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.)
| gerdesj wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ur-whale wrote:
| 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.
| fimdomeio wrote:
| 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.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| TkTech wrote:
| 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.
| antattack wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jbay808 wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| 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)
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(page generated 2021-03-21 23:01 UTC)