[HN Gopher] FreeCAD Day 2023: Report and continued discussion
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FreeCAD Day 2023: Report and continued discussion
Author : app4soft
Score : 55 points
Date : 2023-02-05 19:19 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (forum.freecad.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (forum.freecad.org)
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I didn't know that there was a FreeCAD Day! But I'll take this
| opportunity to just give thanks to the FreeCAD developers for
| creating and sustaining an amazing program. We all know it's not
| perfect, but it's already incredibly powerful and I'm now using
| it professionally in place of SolidWorks. Not only do I save a
| ton of money, I feel way more in control of my work, and have
| ownership of my hard-earned skills. I can write my own Python
| routines to automate parametric modelling and use FreeCAD as a
| back-end for doing geometric calculations. It's fantastic and I'm
| grateful for it.
|
| Thank you.
| inamberclad wrote:
| I really want to like FreeCAD, but the lack of a native assembly
| system is the top killer for me. I know that plugins exist, but
| they have too many steps involved. I want to be able to just
| click on two holes on different bodies and immediately mate them
| with a rotating joint. Other nits exist, and random crashes are a
| huge problem for me, but until FreeCAD has better assemblies,
| I'll sadly be stuck with the extremely user-hostile Fusion360.
| khimaros wrote:
| I recommend the assembly3 addon, written by one of the
| developers responsible for solving the hierarchical naming
| issue. the core of FreeCAD is capable of assembly based
| workflows, it just isn't a built-in feature/workbench yet.
| angry_moose wrote:
| Yeah, it's unfortunate. At best they're still 20 years behind
| the major players - I started working in Inventor in 05 and
| Solidworks in 08 and I'd gladly take those out of date versions
| over current FreeCAD.
|
| Its impressive what they've managed to do (geometry kernels are
| incredibly difficult) but its got a long way to go. I'm
| begrudgingly using Solid Edge Community at the moment.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| I haven't had random crashes since 0.19.
|
| 0.20.1 and 0.20.2 seem pretty solid so far but I'm not a pro
| CAD user. Just designing things for my 3D printer.
|
| The assembly situation does suck. But I've been using Assembly
| 4 and that seems the easiest to understand.
|
| But what's worse is that as a non-cad person. It's difficult to
| get started still. The information is there but I've been using
| FreeCAD for years, and often the best place to look is YouTube
| for help.
|
| I've also found the forum a bit hostile because I ask stupid
| questions since I don't know how to ask in the right way with
| the right words.
|
| I didn't even realise why I might need an assembly workbench
| until very recently and then that changed my perspective on how
| I structured all my models. I wish there was a higher level
| explanation of how to use FreeCAD for complete beginners.
| bsder wrote:
| The topological renumbering/renaming problem is _THE_ killer
| bug that FreeCAD has got to fix. Until that bug is gone,
| FreeCAD has no future.
|
| Unfortunately, as I understand it, the only way to truly get
| rid of that is to entirely rewrite the geometry kernel. :(
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