Back in college, I had a few classes on CAD (mostly for engineering design), and I became decently proficient with CATIA, SolidWorks, and Autodesk Inventor. Now that I’m getting into 3D printing, I’m coming back to CAD and finding my skills pretty rusty.
I plan to use FreeCAD as my main tool. Could anyone please recommend some tutorials that I can complete that would give me a solid working knowledge of FreeCAD and help me brush up on CAD in general?
Even if you’re not a veteran, Solidworks for makers is $48/year, or $38/year through “Titans of CNC.” You get a grace zone of up to $2000 in profit before they expect you to get a non-hobbyist license, which unfortunately is quite pricy.
For comparison, Fusion only gives you $1000 of revenue, but the cheapest commercial license for them is much cheaper; basically, they just want you to buy the license once you pull in enough sales to cut them their check. OnShape has no similar scheme, forces free users’ designs to be open, AND has a clumsily worded EULA that raises a distinct possibility that other users can take your stuff and sell it, but you can’t. Solid Edge is a simple “non-commercial use” for the free tier. Alibre doesn’t do free at all, but offers a very cheap version that’s limited by features instead of license rights.
Meanwhile, you can use FreeCAD for whatever the hell you want, forever, with no one looking over your shoulder.
I know which avenue I’d much rather take, quirks of the software be damned.
In my experience I have two possible decision paths: Do something using a commercial solution, OnShape in my case or try to do something using FreeCAD, get nowhere, look up tutorials, get somewhere but nowhere near what I need, give up, everything collects dust in the corner.
I get the free software idea and spirit, but I’d rather actually be able to just draw and print things I need. Between work, having a house, friends, voluntary firefighting, building automation for tasks in our little village and everything else the day only has about 24 hours and I can’t just cut sleep anymore as I did in my twenties.
To each their own, but I have been able to make FreeCAD do everything I needed it to do, sometimes at the beginning with a short trip to the forums or watching a youtube video. I didn’t have to lose any sleep over it. It wasn’t any different than learning any other piece of software.
I dabbled with several (pirated) commercial CAD packages in the late '90’s and early 2000’s and I honestly don’t find FreeCAD to be any more byzantine than any of those. I think the oft-repeated canard that “FreeCAD is impossible to use” is no longer based on reality.
The point is: With OnShape, I’m able to wing it. Scan something, load the STL, define a few planes throughout the whole thing, freehand a few lines, extrude, offset here and there for clearance, print, forget. With FreeCAD I need to do it correctly and, as I just need a physical thing, I just don’t have the patience to find out what correctly would mean.
Thanks for the info. I didn’t know about the Titans of CNC option. I can pass that along to people who are not able to get the Veteran deal.