LWN: Comments on "A survey of free CAD systems"

A survey of free CAD systems

ramcdona — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 13:17:09 +0000

Thanks for writing this summary. Much appreciated.

Good Parametric 3D MCAD with connections to CAM is an essential tool for any Open Hardware project -- as essential as a compiler is to Open Source software.

I.e. anyone supporting Open Hardware needs to be supporting Open Source MCAD.

A survey of free CAD systems

gerdesj — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 18:01:35 +0000

If you want to see what's really possible with OpenSCAD, this chap - JustinSDK was a bit of a legend. He sadly passed away recently:

https://github.com/JustinSDK/dotSCAD

A survey of free CAD systems

joib — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 16:00:41 +0000

As a minor fix(?), AFAICS FreeCAD is under LGPL-2.0-later, not LGPLv3. See https://wiki.freecad.org/Licence and https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/blob/master/LICENSE .

A survey of free CAD systems

LtWorf — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 13:47:22 +0000

I wanted to 3d print something. I had no idea where to start.

I found some youtube tutorial about freecad and I can't complain too much. But perhaps the shape I wanted to produce wasn't too complicated.

A survey of free CAD systems

calumapplepie — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 13:06:59 +0000

Solidworks and onshape and others also suffer from crashes, corrupting their own data, performance issues, weird and fidgety behavior with mate relations, awkward piles of weird tools buried in sub-menus, and confusing and contradictory documentation. They're better, yes, but they are still finicky and frequently unintuitive. The fact that one is often running older versions for licensing reasons doesn't help.

A survey of free CAD systems

atnot — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 10:05:48 +0000

A large proportion of snaps were created because canonical paid one person to write drive-by commits adding snap packaging for as many projects as possible, without consulting with the project first. Since the far majority of these projects never cared about snap in the first place (and said person has now left the company), they usually just bitrot and are forgotten about until someone complains, at which point they have a high chance just delete the snap package.

At least that's what happened in my case :)

A survey of free CAD systems

yootis — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 06:51:30 +0000

Well, the snap of SolveSpace works, and so does Signal desktop.

A survey of free CAD systems

mathstuf — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 06:46:04 +0000

I thought SNAPs required `snapd`. Does `snapd` work (reliably) on non-Ubuntu yet?

A survey of free CAD systems

dgc — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 06:32:22 +0000

Oh, there's been improvements, no doubt about that. Freecad definitely has /more functionality/ than it had a few years ago. But it still has performance problems, UI problems, object model problems, crash and hang problems, and so on. It's still way behind solidworks, onshape, etc in terms of ease of use and learning curves, and it still suffers from poor documentation.

That's the point I'm making - all the observations that I made back in 2017 are clearly still valid today. There might be more functionality in the tools, but the barriers to widespread adoption of those tools clearly have not been addressed in any significant way....

A survey of free CAD systems

Burgundavia — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 05:17:54 +0000

I'd disagree. I've been a FreeCAD user since 2018 and the newer versions are lightyears ahead of where they were. At the level of commercial CAD? No, not yet, but I look at QGIS for the likely picture in a few years - a stable & growing codebase with increasing financial support.

A survey of free CAD systems

yootis — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 04:45:37 +0000

This article inspired me to try CadQuery again. So I installed the SNAP of it on Fedora, and it simply doesn't run:

$ cadquery-editor
/snap/cadquery-editor/2/usr/bin/python3: can't open file 'run.py': [Errno 2] No such file or directory

Isn't this exactly what snaps are supposed to solve?

A survey of free CAD systems

dgc — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 04:22:31 +0000

Here's what I had to say about it in 2017 after a couple of years of struggling with the available CAD tools to design and build a race car:

https://youtu.be/VigVEbeTtXM?t=804

I mention most of the same tools, and talk about all the same problems. i.e. nothing in has really changed that much in the past few years....

A survey of free CAD systems

prokoudine — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 20:24:57 +0000

It's an interesting project indeed, but I had to stop somewhere :) There's also ZCAD, CadZinho, OpenVSP, and probably a dozen other active 2D/3D CAD projects, including somewhat unusual ones (think LeoCAD).

A survey of free CAD systems

jhoblitt — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 18:42:44 +0000

One of the barriers for entry in the CAM space is that often a gcode post-processor, which is machine+cam combination specific, is required to adapt generic gcode to the machine's quirks. Often, the machine manufacturer will provide f360, mastercam, and/or camworks post processors and no documentation as to what gcode mangling is required.

A survey of free CAD systems

smurf — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 17:00:40 +0000

For people who like nicely programmable CAD without all the questionable frills of constraint solvers and 3D editors there's also CadQuery. It's programmed in Python, comes with a nice GUI editor that should be mostly familiar to OpenSCAD users, and (from what I can see) does NOT suffer from OpenSCAD's "add 0.001 to the dimensions of all negative volumes so you get proper geometries" disease.

My only major pain point is that installing it requires a nontrivial heap of work if you're not using Anaconda. *Sigh*.

A survey of free CAD systems

arachnist — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 16:04:57 +0000

One that I like, that wasn't included here is CadQuery: https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery
It's kinda similar to OpenSCAD in that you're actually programming the model, but since it's leveraging python, it's a lot easier to debug when your model does something unexpected, and you can actually export .step files, which is useful if you want to do anything other than just 3d-print your models, though it is also useful there - both PrusaSlicer and Cura (though only in paid version) support importing .step files.