FreeCAD

Hi! I started to fiddle around with freecad a little again tonight. I still find many things unintuitive. And I just watched a video about master sketches, because they are essential in my workflow on other programs. It makes it soo much easier to keep the overview and change little things quickly because I don't have to search for the responsible sketch.

In this video the person demonstrates at around 9:15 how to use the master sketch as a reference in the sub bodies. I can get used to only get one body from a sketch, but man, how many steps does it take to just reference a sketch?! You even need to use a differen workbech, use the clone tool, but not this one and then drag and drop the duplicate into the same body you are working on? Why?! I mean the sketch is right there, just let me click it!!

This got me wondering it those rough workflows are just designed badly or if this is a limitation of the engine or whstevery it's called, that freecad is based on? Because in my limited programming mind it does not make a difference what file is referenced. If it is some file on a directory above, just use something like "./" Before to go up one directory.

And I think those little things that just work in other cad software, makes freecad so much less approcavhabel and so much harder to jump in.

If I want to make a complicated part, that is not just a box with a hole, I don't want to Google around until I found a solution, I want the intuitive solution to work without 3 extra steps. This just hinders my design process a lot.

Maybe someone knows how freecad works on the background and can explain why freecad works like that.

Thanks!

I am working on making my own lithophane calling card in freecad, but i find it a Bit of a hassel that i cant just turn a whole textblock into a extrusion. Right now i make every single line with a seperate ShapeString but there has to be a better way.

How are you working with multiple lines of text in your models?

Hey there! I love the idea of freecad. But I have so many troubls learning it. I started with fusion360, used solidworks for some time, used inventor a bit and use onshape mostly now. So I think I know how to navigate and learn new cad software. But its not as easy with freecad sadly.

I Would love this product to be more accessable and easier to use and undertand. What can we do besides jumping in on developing ourselves?

Switching form fusion or onshape to freecad feels like switching from python to assamlby.

So how can we help to improve freecad and make it a more usable program? It seems as if the devs try to reinvent everything and every menue compared to all other cad programs i have used. I am totaly fine with some issues or bugs, but i feel like its not up for success currently.

Thanks a lot, I hope you have some ideas

I pop in to this Lemmy community every once and a while hoping for new content or discussions, but there is not a ton of activity. I ended up finding the FreeCAD discord channel and it seems to have a ton of engagement/activity, so I wanted to share. (but still post here, I would love to see this community become more active).

Also, the users on the discord are super helpful...like, insanely helpful. I am still learning, so it has been priceless for me (along with MangoJelly on YouTube)

Has anyone encountered this issue when launching the software?

The only fix I've found so far is to uninstall and reinstall FreeCAD. Is there a better way to fix this? I wish the error message was more descriptive...

Edit: It seems that I can only launch FreeCAD by ticking the "Launch FreeCAD" checkbox in the initial installation wizard. All subsequent attempts to launch FreeCAD seem to fail. I can uninstall the software without removing my user preferences, so it's not terrible, but having to reinstall the software every time I want to close and reopen the software is a bit... undesirable.

Edit2: If it helps narrow things down, I'm on a Windows 10 machine.

Edit3: I found a forum thread with a workaround. For some reason, right-click and "Run as administrator" launches the software without triggering this error. Big thanks to Bside2234, whoever you are. Looks like the devs are aware of the problem, so hopefully it will be fixed in an upcoming version.

Edit4: This seems to have been fixed in FreeCAD 1.0.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/7885746

I created a lib for designing cabinets. I'm not a woodworker, but I can design some for myself and I found this lib useful enough to share. So enjoy.

Hi everyone,

I have some prior experience with Solidworks, but I wanted to try out a FOSS alternative. I've been messing around in FreeCAD for a couple hours and I have the following question:

How do I polar pattern a revolved surface?

I want to accomplish something similar to what is described in this video (12:14 to 13:44).

My ideal workflow is as follows:

1. Create sketch (e.g. square)
2. Pad sketch to create body (e.g. cube)
3. Create new sketch (e.g. line)
4. Revolve sketch to create surface (e.g. disc)
5. Polar pattern the surface to create multiple (e.g. 4) discs
6. Slice apart cube by 4 discs to yield 9 separate bodies

I'm stuck on step 5. Is this possible in FreeCAD? If not, are there any recommended workarounds to achieve the same result?

Thanks in advance!

Just doesn't live up to expectations. Entering an alias always feels like a double chore, even with the macro.

When I want to add a hole feature, I need to first sketch and constrain a circle where the hole is supposed to be. This would make a bit more sense if the hole actually followed the constraints of the circle, but it doesn't -- I could constrain the sketch of the circle to be one radius, and then, at the same time, specify that the hole be a completely different radius. I feel like it would make much more sense if the hole actually followed the dimensions of the sketch of the circle. If the sketch is just used for the placement of the hole, then it should be enough to simply place a point (which does not currently work -- I must sketch a circle).

Edit 1: It looks like there is an open issue for this on GitHub.

I have the following:

I want the center rectangle to be concentric with the outer rectangle (the separation of each edge should be equal). What's the best way to do this?

Hi there, i just stumbled across the whole fediverse thing with lemmy, because of the reddit incident. i heard of mastodon before but that's about it, but i love the idea of fediverse. i also love FreeCAD even if it can be tricky sometimes. are any of you guys still active here?

Instructions are in the this ticket: https://github.com/dracula/freecad/iss...