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Free software is nice, but it should also work, otherwise its just digital masturbation (hey look, I wrote thousands lines of code, isn’t it nice?). Crashing three times in 15min when trying to design a plate with two elongated holes by following a tutorial is not for me. > Also, it is free software that is competing in the realm of Solidworks and Inventor, Ill take weekly crashesĭaily crashes would be ok. I even considered trying to fix it myself (I’m a programmer), but didn’t have enough free time :(.
Freecad tutorial assembly how to#
I tried to file bug reports, but it was too hard to find out how to do it as unregistered user.

Posted in Tool Hacks Tagged drafting, freecad, mechanical drawing Post navigation Now if they would make a schematic workbench, we’d be very happy. However, we did do a tutorial that will get you started.
Freecad tutorial assembly download#
We didn’t try it, but you ought to be able to pull in OpenSCAD files and then create a drawing from that, as well.įreeCAD is changing rapidly, especially if you download the latest versions. If you need a mechanical drawing to show a colleague, a customer, a machine shop, or to file with a patent, FreeCAD has you covered. FreeCAD just puts them where you tell it to. The only things we had to remember from drafting class are which dimensions you need and which you don’t. It creates them and keeps them up to date if you change them in the model later. The program will automatically project the views you select and then allows you to pick dimensions. Machinists everywhere are used to looking at these drawings that typically show a top view, a front view, and a side view. FreeCAD’s TechDraw workbench makes this very easy and has a tutorial that shows exactly how to do it. However, if you have a 3D part - regardless of how you want to create it in real life - having a proper mechanical drawing is very valuable. However, it is a great graphical alternative to OpenSCAD for 3D printing and even incorporates OpenSCAD if you don’t want to choose. If you are trying to draw a schematic, it probably isn’t the best way to do it.

Ultimately, I like the idea of being able to try different ideas, but it sure would be nice if there were one recommended assembly.FreeCAD started out a little shaky, but it has gotten better and better. But the idea of explicit assembly instead of constraints makes a lot of sense to me. The maintainer is still tinkering with what to call the top-level objects. SLDASM in SolidWorks).Īssembly4 clearly could use more refining and documentation, and trying to understand how to use it from the documentation and the single mega-thread on it on their forum is a bit frustrating. It does require adding local coordinate systems to pieces to map together if they don’t map at the origin, or at least it works better that way, not needing to set offsets from the origin.Ĭompared to SolidWorks, I like that Assembly4 (at least I don’t remember about Assembl圓) lets me build both parts and assembly in a single document (vs.SLD /.

The experience using Assembl圓 is a lot like SolidWorks in my experience, both in the mechanisms of constraint and in the fact that sometimes the parts just do something I don’t expect and I have to puzzle out how to get them to behave.Īssembly4 looks promising and doesn’t need a solver, which makes it remarkably more efficient. Fundamentally, finding solutions won’t improve in Assembl圓 without improvements in SolveSpace. I don’t know if I’ve gotten better at avoiding nonsense in sketches or if FreeCAD constraint solving in sketches has gotten better over the past few years. In both cases, if you add a constraint that it has trouble solving for, it makes up nonsense. The bad thing about constraint-based assembly is that it’s like matching sketches. The nice thing about constraint-based assembly is that it’s like making sketches. At least it no longer requires running a fork of FreeCAD like it used to! I would be surprised to see older Assembly workbenches thrown out, making old documents unusable, but I would hope that they would at least get to the point where one particular approach is integrated, recommended, and thoroughly documented…Īssembl圓 depends on SolveSpace which is not license-compatible, so it’s unlikely to be blessed as The One Assembly Workbench unless all the constraint solving is re-implemented internally. One of the upsides or downsides, depending on your perspective, is that different FreeCAD contributors have tried different ideas out. Hopefully they solve that problem, and have a single, working “Assembly” solution in the future that eveyone can use.
