This is a pretty good tutorial to get started in FreeCAD. Just watch out for the topological naming issue. They still haven't fixed it, but if you know how to avoid it, you shouldn't have too much trouble.

Solidworks is the same way.

No, it's the topological naming problem. End of.

Isn't like every CAD program single core? People got scammed hard with Xeon in the past. CAD PC salesmen had/have absolutely no idea what they were talking about

Biggest speedup has been the GPU integration. The single core stuff doesn't seem to matter much anymore.

I tried qcad around 2010 or so and found the UI horrible compared to autocad that I was used to. At this point in my life, drafting was pretty useless. So I had no reason to have cad unless it was free.

I found OpenScad in Y2020 and was amazed at how far it had come. It felt much more like the commercial stuff, at least to me, who was behind the times anyway.

Pretty old, I'd say 30 years. It's what made pro/e, one of the first 3d cad systems, so famous within Boeing.

I was disappointed not to see one. That's not a 'no', but I did look for one.

There's basically a tree of operations that have been applied to a model. At any point, you can go back and edit what you've done at a previous step. For example, if you padded a feature out 10 mm, then added more stuff onto that feature, you could still go back and change that padding operation to 15 mm.

I'm still super new to freecad, and I haven't done anything too complex in it yet, but my understanding is that some types of those changes can result in the topological naming problem. The way I understand it, when you make a shape, the software numbers all of the segments, vertices, and faces. If later changes are applied to those numbered faces, etc, and you go back and redo the operation that made those faces, etc, in a different order, the numbering will be different, and it will break your model.

There is a fork of freecad that fixes that whole issue, but the fix hasn't been implemented yet in the main fork cause it's pretty foundational to the working of freecad, so there's a lot of things that can break

Actually that's a great place for some "I want to help but I don't know computers" people to jump in.

I've used it for making models for 3D printing for about 5 years, never seen that issue

I noticed a similar problem importing step files... I no longer had circles, I had nonagons... I would love to delete my windows vm that only exists for fusion 360.

STL is a total abnormally and a piece of shit of a format that doesn't actually represent 3D objects very well and has a ton of issues when it comes to sharing. Unfortunately we're stuck with this shit format and Autodesk with their Tinkercad seems to want to keep pushing it because as long as we use this crappy format we're forced into sharing and collaborating inside their platform - that at some point might require a subscription.

Yes, I've 3d printed circles from freecad without issue. There are some precision options when converting to a mesh. I always set them to the tolerances of my 3d printer.

Overall, it still has a lot of rough edges though.

Last time I tried freecad, the geometry solver was incorrect, so it would sometimes create two (or more) shapes from a fully constrained part. Since learning about openSCAD, I've seen no reason to give it another try.

When I tried it like 7-8 years ago it crashed pretty much every time I touched a constraint. Was I probably doing something very wrong? Yes, but that made it pretty impossible to learn. Opposed to Fusion360 which just yells at you when you do dumb shit.

I have a thing for experimental CAD and modeling softwares, but hadn't heard of PicoCAD! I'll have to try it out, thanks for sharing.

Some other cools ones:

• OpenSCAD
• Dust3D
• Antimony
• LibFive (same dev as Antimony)