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Resources to learn FreeCAD
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this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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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.