FreeCAD puts swiss army knives to shame with its plethora of tools and workflows shipped by default: mechanical design and FEA tools, architecture and BIM tools, 2D drafting tools, CAM tools etc. It’s a very impressive achievement for a project that is operated entirely by volunteers in their spare time. But it’s also a bit of a curse.
“I like to have options. I don’t like the idea of entire industries being beholden unto the whims of big software developers.” — Taste_of_Based on r/PLC
When we talk to customers, the question of import/export comes up repeatedly. Working with DWG files is necessary for collaborating with upstream or downstream partner organizations, but these proprietary formats make things extremely difficult if anyone in the chain is not using an official Autodesk tool.
Look, there are good reasons why the price of a software product could go up: rising R&D and maintenance costs, market saturation, rising inflation rate etc. But Autodesk’s latest announcement of bumping the Fusion 360 price yet again makes people—especially small businesses—cringe, and it’s easy to see why. It’s about what you do and how you communicate that to users:
Source: Lemmy.World
We have just published our own build of FreeCAD with built-in Ondsel Solver and the new integrated assembly workbench. Now everyone can take an early look at the assembly workflow coming in FreeCAD v1.0.
Free and Open-Source Software has a reputation for poor usability and user experience (UX). FreeCAD is no exception. Some of the most common complaints raised by users are about the steep learning curve, inconsistent workflow, and ugly, confusing user-interface (UI). There are dozens of threads on the forum going back years where someone has come forward with a vision to ‘fix’ the usability problem. These efforts always devolve into bike-shedding, and nitpicking. Nothing changes.
The basics of an integrated assembly workbench in FreeCAD are now functional and will be ready for wider testing once another pull request is merged. This means you can play with it now in the development version of FreeCAD and when version 1.0 is out, you will be able to create or link parts, create joints between them, and solve the assembly — in just a few clicks, out of the box, without installing any add-ons.
We’ve already introduced some improvements to sketching with constraints before, when Pierre-Louis Boyer implemented contextual constraints. But there are more usability gaps there, and we are targeting them one by one. There’s another major change currently undergoing code review: on-viewport tool widgets to create fully constrained sketches and tool settings to set various properties and choose drafting behavior.
It’s common for vendors to make free licenses available to educational institutions, and while this can be helpful for enabling students to learn the tools of the trade, it can also set them up to learn some hard lessons about vendor lock-in once they go out on their own.
There’s well over 200 various addons for FreeCAD available just in the official add-on manager. Many more possibly flew under the radar or simply never have been shared with anybody.
For some developers, creating an add-on is a way to test ideas and see if they resonate with a larger audience. For others, it’s the first step towards contributing to FreeCAD itself. The add-on ecosystem is hugely important for the community at large.
One of the hallmark features of FreeCAD is that various parts of its UI have a lot of similar options, which means a lot of cognitive load, especially for beginners. A very popular “offender” here is the geometry constraints toolbar in Sketcher. It has 18 different constraint options, more than most popular commercial CAD offerings like Fusion 360, Onshape, and Creo. That's not a bad thing on its own, but it adds a lot of mileage when you need to dimension an entire complex sketch.