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I thought I would knock some dust off my drafting skills after a small chat with @captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works
Seeing this image on the tutorial made me realize, FreeCAD seems to be a Technical Geometry Super-Suite. It makes sense that CAD would grow to include all of these things. But I thought sharing the initial perspective of some one who hasn't looked at this stuff in about 18 years might be interesting.
Granted I'm not actually familiar with most of this stuff, and none of it from the POV of FreeCAD. If this can deliver 10% of what I'm looking at, I'm in for a treat.
Yeah somehow I never hitched horses with OpenSCAD; like I can't imagine designing a table or cabinet purely through code. Using the Part Design workflow can work a lot like how tools work, lay out the location of the feature, draw the profile of the feature, then do an additive or subtractive operation to create the feature...the design process in basically any similar CAD package becomes a dress rehearsal for the build in a way.
That makes total sense. I was on my way to mechanical engineering when I was learning autocad and autodesk mechanical desktop if you remember that. Now it's just in autocad. (I guess that's an example of how things used to unshittify. I bet adobe would bring back MD as a separate product nowadays.)
So if you try to enter woodworking after that experience, it feels right to model projects like that. I had learned a lot of coding by this point. So adding the code into parts for flexibility felt great.
This is going to sound complicated. That's because I bet you can do this with one click. But I thought it was cool I model a compound mitre angle for a cut using numbers I calc'd on Octave (matlab-like foss). Since I'm just a tinkerer, I could only imagine how powerful that could be for pros. Lots of "where was this when I needed it" thoughts.