Recently one of the magnet holders for my window shutters broke, and I thought I'd take a crack at designing a replacement to 3D Print. I'd never designed anything in CAD software before, so I had no real reference.
I found FreeCAD extremely easy to use and intuitive. I watched a couple videos and followed-along with the tutorials, then started on my own item. It's a relatively simple 3-part component. I took measurements with digital calipers, and in a few hours was printing the first prototype.
A couple prototypes later (small measurement adjustments to account for plastic shrinkage, etc), I had the final model. Replaced all of the magnet holders since they were sure to go soon, too.
I had fun, and finally used my 3D printer for something "real". Pretty cool.
_whiteCaps_ 15 minutes ago [-]
I post this in every FreeCAD thread: If you're going to start designing something with it, use the spreadsheet tool to make everything parametric. You'll save yourself a ton of time as your designs get more complicated.
Maybe this isn't anything new to experience CAD users. I don't know if other CAD tools do this as I started using FreeCAD after playing with 3D printing.
sho_hn 13 minutes ago [-]
It's very common (Fusion calls it User Parameters, etc.) and indeed nice practice. FreeCAD has a few ways to do it, Spreadsheets but also free-form properties on objects. It's very flexible in this regard.
DeltaHedra, another great YouTube channel, also released a good video that shows the previous and this version next to each other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYdobpjTypg
ChristianJacobs 10 minutes ago [-]
Thumbs up for both of them, but I must say that DeltaHedra has become my new favourite FreeCAD content creator. Especially after he started using his own voice. His old content was good, but his current his magnifique! The quality of the content he pushes is above and beyond.
jepj57 57 minutes ago [-]
This is awesome! Kudos to the developers, they really went above and beyond for this release.
GaggiX 1 hours ago [-]
I was not expecting so many improvements in this version alone, I'm impressed. I was already using it for 3d printing but now it seems it's getting actually good, makes me wonder how I was able to use the previous version.
vjvjvjvjghv 48 minutes ago [-]
I am also impressed by how much they are improving things. It just sucks that they are stuck with the OpenCasacade kernel so making stability improvements are hard to make in areas like fillets and others.
sho_hn 22 minutes ago [-]
I don't follow Open CASCADE very closely, but it looks like they're on the verge of a new major release (v8.0) themselves that looks like a lot of refactoring and cleanup.
I don't know hat version FreeCAD is actually bundling, but from GitHub it looks like a fork of 7.8.1?
Rendered at 21:31:38 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I found FreeCAD extremely easy to use and intuitive. I watched a couple videos and followed-along with the tutorials, then started on my own item. It's a relatively simple 3-part component. I took measurements with digital calipers, and in a few hours was printing the first prototype.
A couple prototypes later (small measurement adjustments to account for plastic shrinkage, etc), I had the final model. Replaced all of the magnet holders since they were sure to go soon, too.
I had fun, and finally used my 3D printer for something "real". Pretty cool.
Maybe this isn't anything new to experience CAD users. I don't know if other CAD tools do this as I started using FreeCAD after playing with 3D printing.
Release Notes: https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.1
DeltaHedra, another great YouTube channel, also released a good video that shows the previous and this version next to each other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYdobpjTypg
I don't know hat version FreeCAD is actually bundling, but from GitHub it looks like a fork of 7.8.1?