After doing the tut I can say that 1.1 is very nice, i can uninstall Fusion and Solid Edge finally :)

The guide i followed, no relation to it whatsoverer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxxDahY1U6E

I’m an CAD hobbyist, and I’ve tried to work with FreeCAD multiple times over past years, always failing….

…until I saw this video and learned about version 1.1:

https://youtu.be/VEfNRST_3x8

FreeCAD is now in the same ballpark of capability and usability as Solidworks. It can still be a bit clunky and frustrating sometimes, but then so can most CAD programs, in their own ways.

Side note: the creator of the video above also has a video on optimising the FreeCAD interface. (There are some frustrations related to the interface generally, and this would seem to be a low hanging fruit for the FreeCAD team to address.)

This time everything just installed, and Claude Code turned out to be pretty good. Designing with code is sometimes more work upfront, but iteration is so much better. You get proper abstractions: functions, encapsulation, loops. You can drop in a SAT solver to optimize part placement or grab data from an excel sheet. No more clicking through a GUI that crashes and loses your session. I've spent time with Fusion, SolidWorks, NX, OnShape, FreeCAD, and Rhino, and each has its merits, but none of them can benefit from the LLM revolution the way a code-first tool can.

I asked Claude Code to generate a set of Lego bricks in various sizes, apply a nice color palette, and pack them optimally into a grid. It needed some steering, but all in all I was impressed

It seems like it's fully community-maintained, there is no big company or foundation behind it. Honestly it's hard to believe!

There was just one major problem, the infamous "topological naming problem" which caused issues downstream is you edited a non-leaf node. That was pretty frustrating to deal with, but in later releases they fixed it I think. (Have not tried it since because I didn't have anything to model)

Not least there are free (as in beer) solutions available, like fusion 360, that are enormously capable.

Theres certainly a place for open source, and openscad would be a great tool to reach for for procedurally generated models. But in all honesty, Freecad doesn't compare well to the professional tools in this space - not in the way that say, gimp does to its commercial competitors.

My only gripe with FreeCAD is that the program runs on a single CPU core as far as I can tell and it's easy to lock up the program for multiple seconds if you do too complex of an operation. This isn't usually an issue for me though.

Personal Context: I am a civil enginer, and our requirement from CAD softwares are a lot simpler than Mechanical Engineering. Here on HN, whenever I see people discussing CAD, its the mechanical version of parts and 3d printing.

Shameless Plug: I have decided to try building my own! Over a long enough timeline, it is doable, including the UI/UX part.

https://mv.ramshanker.in/

Finding Cadquery less of a hurdle for casual use. Wish I could run it from Termux though.

I spent 2 days crash coursing freeCAD (this is with a general understanding of the theory of 3D design already) to try and make an adapter plate for my car. A plate with 6 holes in precise spots and tapped. It was absolutely brutal and after the first 3D print trial had the a couple holes misaligned, I trashed freecad got the free fusion360.

No shit, in 20 minutes I had made the exact part I needed. The program actually worked the way you would expect. I didn't even need a tutorial it was so intuitive. Even if I hadn't spent the previous 2 days getting bent by freecad, I'm pretty sure it would have taken me only an hour max with a blank slate mind in fusion.

Now I'm getting angry writing this. If the FreeCAD guys see this, thanks for the hard work, but understand your minds must work completely differently than even the average engineers.

- colorise solid faces with random colors

- colorise faces by type (cylinder, plane, etc.)

- add 3D labels in the scene

If you are going to experiment with FreeCAD, I highly, highly recommend starting by learning about parametric modelling. Define everything in the spreadsheet, and relate all of the sizes to each other.

If you don't, it will be a very frustrating experience when you realize halfway into your design that some earlier piece needs to be tweaked, and your whole model falls apart.

https://magazine.raspberrypi.com/books/freecad

for the new UI --- any word on that? (Just an annotated copy would be great)

Apparently, one of the devs from Ondsel has done a soft-fork and is stumping for funding:

https://www.astocad.com/

(but he wasn't interested in the feature I want, see below)

That said, I managed to make it through the tutorial for Dune 3D twice now (after a fashion), and I think that the tutorial needs to do a better job of explaining concepts from first principles: https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d/discussions/118 and https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d/discussions/252 c.f., my own attempt to explain the commercial CAD/CAM software which a company I work for sells/supports: https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing --- is there a really good book which explains fundamental 3D CAD concepts and terminology?

I'm way more successful w/ OpenSCAD (usually by way of BlockSCAD: https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ or https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor) and the available printed books help a lot, though I've been using the new Python integrated version:

https://pythonscad.org/

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

The thing which would really help me in FreeCAD would be having a graphical programming workbench as a first-class citizen, something like Grasshopper for Rhino3D, or the node editor in Moment of Inspiration 3D, or Dynamo as used for AutoDesk software --- any word on that?

I can't compare to any of the paid competitors as I've not used those, but in my opinion FreeCAD is slightly disappointing when it comes to UI, bugs and stability.

It's fine for simple stuff, but man, it can be frustrating to work with especially when working on something more complicated then running into random bugs or application crashes.

It's a great project though and very powerful.

Designing 3D parts is hard enough, and while parametric modeling has uses... come on.

* This needs a better renderer in today's day & age

* Need cross-device/web support

* Topology Optimization w/ pure physics code

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Hopefully LLMs can work on forking this or adding better features with AI-assists