FreeCAD after 6 years in Fusion 360

Lathe CNC controller entirely done in FreeCAD: github.com/kachurovskiy/nanoels/tree/main/h4

Free Cad is powerful, It is free!!!!!! I have a BSME 1973 and a Tool and Die Maker Apprenticeship, own my own machine shop 34 years. I went to community college to learn Solidworks and did beginners, intermediate and advanced Auto cad there. I self taught myself Free Cad. I now have strokes and bad diabetes. So I do Free Cad and Open Scad for fun now. I just bought a 3D printer for fun. Free Cad Is the way to go when you have no money and even if you have money!!!!. Harry Lyga

It may take longer (or not) , but trying to sketch on datum planes instead of faces can reduce breakages due the topological naming problem. The devs are close to releasing a version that fixes the TNP

Solid on point review. I switched from Fusion (name changed recently) to FreeCAD about a year ago. Like you, it was a bit rough at first. The sketcher really is the worst aspect of it. When a sketch breaks, you don't get a lot of help finding the problem. Your advice to keep sketches simple is spot on! I find that using the Part Workbench is much less prone to breaking your model than PartDesign (with sketcher). Your example model could easily be done in the Part Workbench and would not barf if you added an extra hole. Despite my frustrations with it, I use it for almost all my 3D CAD work now and have donated.

I had a small Autodesk Inventor course at school. I remember the whole parametric thing blowing my mind. To see it in a FOSS project is amazing. Big kudos to FreeCAD developers.

The sketching speed should speed up a little coming soon. I've seen other YT channels covering the new features in the currently nightly development builds, and one is a setting to turn on that will automatically allow you to type your constraint measurements as you are drawing shapes, like many of the other CAD programs do.

Thankyou for the call to donate to the opensource community. Also thankyou for donating to our beloved FreeCad! I would also like to ask more Youtube content creators to encourage their viewers to contribute a few dollars to the opensource community.

Thank you for sharing your experience and knowledge of FreeCAD in this excellent video. I am a Fusion 360 user that has a paid 'legacy' subscription that has a locked-in annual subscription fee of $310/year as long as I continue to renew it, so I will not be leaving Fusion 360 for modeling any time soon. However, the simulation functions of FreeCAD are of great interest to me, since those same functions in Fusion (except for static stress analysis) are behind an extra 'cloud credit' payment wall in Fusion. Also, I believe the fact that sketches need to be kept simple in FreeCAD is a feature, not a bug. I thnk that even though Fusion allows the user to make complex sketches that can sometimes make an entire model, I believe that making complex sketches in Fusion (or any other parametric, history based CAD modeler) is a very bad practice. With complex sketches, constraints can become very hard to keep track of, and the Fusion group in Facebook is littered with posts where a user asks 'why can't I constrain my sketch' while their sketch looks like a complicated AutoCAD drawing. So, I at least think it is good that in FreeCAD, sketches need to be kept simple.

I started designing for 3D printing with FreeCAD 3 weeks ago. Today I was very frustrated and fundamentally questioned the decision to use FreeCAD. You have encouraged me and I will stick with it.

Amazing and snappy video! As a hobbyist I’ve only ever used FreeCAD and OpenSCAD, and the destructive history changes have made me use the latter more, but perhaps I should try to take some time to contribute to the codebase to give back to the project. It’s amazing how well free open source software can hold it’s ground against industry giants. Blender becoming more industry standard in mesh-based modelling and animation is awesome, and hopefully will push these industries more into supporting open projects.

I moved from Fusion 360 and Onshape (switching from one to the other not to rely on one CAD package in particular) to FreeCAD, and I fully share and endorse your observations. There are a few drawbacks with FreeCAD, but there are so many advantages also... One thing I much prefer in FreeCAD is the TechDraw workbench for 2D drawings that is more versatile. One thing that is overly complex in FreeCAD and that I hope will be streamlined soon with new versions are assemblies of parts, the 3 dedicated workbenches are not frantic at all. Thanks for sharing your experience.

Amazing resume about pros & cons using FreeCAD. I'm a newbie, migrating from AutoCAD (not conect to inventor server since last update, without a valid and very expensive license). God bless open source and Free CAD!

Autodesk tried to charge me over 5g for a 3yr license😂😂. Freecad, Blender, Gimp and Inkscape etc!

Great overview! I think I'll stick with Fusion for now, but I'm excited for the future of FreeCAD. I hope it will become an industry-standard like Blender, but it's much harder to do that, especially with Fusion integrating literally every part of product design and manufacturing; CAD for parts and PCBs, CAM, Simulation and Rendering.

Yeah ! I did switch from another commercial software at the begining of the year, to be able to share models more easily with the community and I think Freecad is now very usable, I personnaly prefere Realthunder build, that has some improvements with topological naming. But this should be ported to main Freecad soon. Happy to see other people taking the same way. Freecad is and will be a great tool.

Totally agree with you, seeing how autodesk changes its mind over time, is just a bad gamble as it might bite you and then you'll have to forcibly learn Freecad anyway. So yeah, let's donate to the project, in the end we all benefit from it

I run Linux on all my home computers, and this limits my choices for CAD software. After I got into 3D printing, I taught myself how to use FreeCAD since there is a native Linux version. And It does seem to be getting more stable as time goes by. I'm thankful there is a decent FOSS alternative to the big expensive commercial CAD programs.

Freecad is actually improving a lot on most of the pain points you mentioned: The infamos toponaming issue which breaks the models has been improved on Realthunder's branch of Freecad, and the principle is now being re-implemented on the main branch. Extruding from sub-sketches is also possible on Realthunder's branch, I assume this will also be merged back to main soon. Setting dimensions right when adding a sketch element: This is has recently been added on the main Freecad. I personally use the Realthunder branch which still has some major improvements, but I am looking forward to seeing them on the main Freecad soon! In my opinion, Freecad is one of the most underrated FOSS tools out there! It suffers from a bad image, possibly because it was very much a "diamond in the rough" until a few years ago. But it is being polished now! And already now to me it is very usable.

I recently switched from F360 and mostly due to woodworking workbench. It's really amazing and you can easily integrate it with a cutlist optimizer. FC is a bit more challenging to work with but once learn it, it works well enough. Plus ability to create plugins or even make design using a programming language.

FreeCAD ist the best example of an open source (and free) project gone wrong. It has the potential of being an exceptional tool BUT in reality its slow, buggy and unstable. I use it frequently and I am still glad it exists.