this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
186 points (99.5% liked)
Hacker News
4577 readers
444 users here now
Posts from the RSS Feed of HackerNews.
The feed sometimes contains ads and posts that have been removed by the mod team at HN.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
FreeCAD is a parametric modeler, so it's closer to Inventor, Fusion360 or OnShape than TinkerCAD. FreeCAD is GPL FOSS software, so it was made by programmers for programmers to program on, not for designers to design designs in. For the most part, features aren't implemented in ways that are useful for the user, they're implemented in ways that were easy or straightforward for the developers.
No hyperbole, a functioning understanding of Python is almost a prerequisite for getting anything actually done in FreeCAD, because you'll encounter things like variable scope.
In some ways, I like how FreeCAD handles things better than some other software. FreeCAD has a spreadsheet built in, you can put your dimensions there in one place and then reference them in drawings (again, think Python variable scope. Dimensions.overall_length) and then if you need to make revisions you don't have to hunt through sketches and shit you just change the parameter. And then watch as the model explodes because they still haven't solved the topological naming problem.