FreeCAD

Maybe there's something I don't understand here. I'd love it if someone told me how to do the following.

Let's say I have some really complex shape in a sketch left of the Y axis: it takes me forever to get it just right. Then I need to mirror it on the right side of the Y axis and connect the two halves.

In SolidWorks, it's trivial: mirror the stuff, done. If you change the master shape on the left, the change is reflected on the right.

In FreeCAD, the best you can do is make a mirror copy of the left-hand side elements - which also makes copies of the constraints which are completely independent from the original constraints on the left-hand side - delete the stupid new right-hand side constraints and slowly, painfully constrain the right-hand side copies to the original left-hand side elements, trying to dodge the dreaded orange over-constraints all the time. It's long, it's painful, and the end-result is usually so fragile that if you change anything significant on the left-hand side, the sketch turns orange and then it's back to hunting broken constraints again.

Surely it can't be that painful. Am I missing something obvious?

Thank you FreeCAD for not pay walling the ability to create technical drawings.

So what I did to make this was to create a technical drawing of all the designs I wanted and I made this photo in Inkscape.

Was designed to be a banner for my social media, but loved it so much that I'm just using it as my desktop wallpaper.

Hey everybody,

After a few months without using FreeCAD (but keeping up with the daily updates) I need to model a quick something today.

And I realize there seems to be a new feature in the 0.22.0-dev version that prevents me from orbiting around the model when I'm in the sketcher:

I use OpenSCAD-style 3D navigation, which means I left-click to rotate the model. In the sketcher, left-clicking is used to do a rectangular lasso selection, and that prevents me from orbiting around the model. I tried with shift, ctrl, alt and all combinations thereof, but there seems to be no way to disable that selection feature.

Fortunately I also use a 3DConnexion Spacemouse, so I'm not completely stuck, but it's kind of annoying to have to use that thing when I'd rather not move my hand away from the keyboard.

Anybody knows how to disable the lasso thing?

Anyone aware of a target date for when FreeCAD 1.0 and/or Ondsel 2024.3 will be released?

I am trying to design a simple case for a laptop motherboard, and thought to get around the distortion happening with my pictures by taking a 3d scan of it with Kiri Engine.

Everything looks fine in the preview of it and everything, but when I import the OBJ into FreeCAD it is just grey and I can't distinguish the mounting holes from the rest of the board.

Thanks in advance

Hi c/FreeCAD, totally newbie here! I'm having a ton of fun learning FreeCAD, but I have a small question. I know the toponaming problem is going away soon, and maybe that makes this kind of irrelevant, but I'd still like to know.

Sometimes when I'm watching or reading guides on avoiding the toponaming problem, the person will say something along the lines of: "actually this technique is also more professional/proper/correct anyway, real engineers do it this way." Basically that the methods that avoid the problem are also just best practices in general. But they always say that as kind of an aside, and I wish they'd say more! What makes those methods better? Does anyone have any suggestions for articles or videos about this?

For one example, there was one guide that suggested you should use a datum plane instead of referencing one of the object's surfaces. I understand the toponaming problem well enough to get why referencing a surface can cause it. However, the person in the guide used the same surface that would have been referenced, as the attachment point for the datum plane. Why does that not produce the same issue?

I wanted to try out the FreeCAD beta/nightly builds, and found on the website that you could get it from the flathub beta repo.

After installing though, it is just the same exact app? Did I do something wrong?

The contest from last month had established five finalists:

The first row is the new logo that will be used going forward and in version 1.0 of the program!

There have been 46 submissions to the new FreeCAD logo contest. The user poll is closing on May 1 (this Wednesday). You can still pick your top 5 entries. The 5 winning submissions will then be submitted to the maintainers team for the final voting.

In other cad programs i use two points of a sketch to extrude a feature. In freecad it does not seem to be possible. What are your recommended workarounds for that?

I would like to extrude the base not just from the face of the sketch, but from point 1 to point 2 on the side view sketch. This workflow proved very robust in other cad tools, but I cant get it work in freecad.

Thanks a lot in advance!

And I'm curious if I could map my keys to make Freecad work this way. I don't know how many of the these tools don't exist in Freecad, but if I could one to one make a keybind that works for me, I might start using it instead of sketchup 8

But mostly, this is the because general CAD community on lemmy and I wanted to share, ciao!

Hello,

so i just started to do some macro writing and had to get some help by ChatGPT because i am no programmer. But i made something useful for me.

import FreeCAD
import PartDesignGui
import Draft
import Part
import PartDesign
from FreeCAD import Base

doc_name = App.activeDocument().Label

sels = FreeCADGui.Selection.getSelectionEx('', 0)
facebinder1 = Draft.make_facebinder(sels[0])
facebinder2 = Draft.make_facebinder(sels[1])
Draft.autogroup(facebinder1)
Draft.autogroup(facebinder2)
FreeCAD.ActiveDocument.recompute()
App.getDocument(doc_name).addObject('Part::Loft','Loft')
App.getDocument(doc_name).ActiveObject.Sections=[App.getDocument(doc_name).Facebinder, App.getDocument(doc_name).Facebinder001, ]
App.getDocument(doc_name).ActiveObject.Solid=True
App.getDocument(doc_name).ActiveObject.Ruled=False
App.getDocument(doc_name).ActiveObject.Closed=False

I select two faces from two bodies and it will create two seperate facebinders and performs a loft with those two.

This allows me to make a loft in one fell swoop. However the facebinders created by the

Draft.make_facebinder(sels[X])

will always come out as Facerbinder and Facebinder001 and counting upwards. I don't see any way to change those names. Yes, i can do something with labels, but the following part of

App.getDocument(doc_name).ActiveObject.Sections=[App.getDocument(doc_name).Facebinder, App.getDocument(doc_name).Facebinder001, ]

doesn't seem to work with labels... As you can see Facebinder and Facebinder001 are hardcoded in there. Is there any way to either fully rename items so i could go for facebinder_temp1 and _temp2 and then rename them afterwards to make room for another _temp1 and _temp2 again or if i can somehow let the Loft function know what Facebinders were created prior?

Sorry if this is a little bit unstructured i am bashing my head right now... maybe you can help me out here.

Thanks!

EDIT:

Solution was:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# Macro Begin: /home/frank-garuda/.local/share/Ondsel/Macro/asfasdf.FCMacro +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
import FreeCAD
import PartDesignGui
import Draft
import Part
import PartDesign

# Gui.runCommand('Std_DlgMacroRecord',0)
### Begin command Part_Loft
from FreeCAD import Base

# Get document name
doc_name = App.activeDocument().Label

# Gui.runCommand('Std_DlgMacroRecord',0)
### Begin command Std_Workbench
# Gui.activateWorkbench("DraftWorkbench")
### End command Std_Workbench
### Begin command Draft_Facebinder
sels = FreeCADGui.Selection.getSelectionEx('', 0)
facebinder1 = Draft.make_facebinder(sels[0])
facebinder1.Label = "Facebinder_Loft_1"
facebinder2 = Draft.make_facebinder(sels[1])
facebinder2.Label = "Facebinder_Loft_2"
Draft.autogroup(facebinder1)
Draft.autogroup(facebinder2)
FreeCAD.ActiveDocument.recompute()
App.getDocument(doc_name).addObject('Part::Loft','Loft')
App.getDocument(doc_name).ActiveObject.Sections=[facebinder1, facebinder2, ]
App.getDocument(doc_name).ActiveObject.Solid=True
App.getDocument(doc_name).ActiveObject.Ruled=False
App.getDocument(doc_name).ActiveObject.Closed=False

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)

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.

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