Honestly I do. My workflow is not enviable. I’m a little dabbler. I do like CAD, but I’ve never used it professionally. I have a little, ugly sewing table to prove it.
I learned AutoCAD99 in high school. But I never kept up the skills later.
I learned OpenSCAD to draw models for papers. Or for math problems when I taught. It really is a fun tool to get into the swing of, but I let my skills get rusty and it’s frustrating now.
I never used openscad but checkout tutorials on YouTube that match your skill level: I mostly self teach most apps that I use but some tools are so complex that I benefit from taking a step back and look at what others are doing with them!
I was taught a little bit of old school drafting in high school carpentry class (I have never sat at a drawing board with a T square; I laid out the frame of one wall of a shed to scale on some printer paper with a normal school ruler) and learned a product called TurboCAD in early college. I found a free thing called QCAD which is just a 2D DXF editor, which is fantastic for working with laser engravers. I used to FLY with that software. I kinda simultaneously learned how to use FreeCAD, Fusion360 and OnShape via web tutorials.
None of them are my favorite; OnShape was the most streamlined but the most lacking, running in the browser is a benefit; last time I used it there wasn’t really a central place to put parameters so it was a little limited, and they’re trying to compete with Solidworks rather than Fusion360 so you can have the increasingly drawbackful drawbackware version, or pay $kidney/hr for it. Fusion360 is more capable, but very inconsistent. Using it, you can tell it’s a mass of unmantainable spaghetti code that’s right on the edge of falling apart. FreeCAD is definitely an open source project with a congenitally low version number that ships with well realized features no human has ever wanted in a CAD package, but they haven’t even started on basic features and there are several forks that solve problems that will never be merged into the original. FreeCAD 1.0 is going to be amazing when it comes out in the year 2144.
I remember playing with qcad. It was awful, but it was the best FOSS CAD I found. AutoCAD was unrivaled from when I learned it in 1999 and remained that way until I had drifted away. I think I played with qcad around 2011.
I found OpenSCAD about 3 years ago, and it knocked by socks off. I’d like to see how mature FreeCAD is now.
In my high school, we had semesters. The first semester you took drafting, it was on drafting tables with Tsquare, triangles, compasses, and stuff. In your 4 years there, there were 8 semesters. You could technically take it 8 times. I think I took it four. So I had 3 semesters of autocad.
2006 was an easy time for me to lose Windows. Do you remember how much worse Windows was back in 200*? Everything had viruses. There were TV ads promising they could get your computer running “like new”. Viruses were so common that people seemed to think computers slowed down with age.
So I’m ignorant about FreeCAD, but FOSS is so powerful now I’m excited to check it out.
I never hitched horses with OpenSCAD. Do you model each board individually? What’s your workflow?
Honestly I do. My workflow is not enviable. I’m a little dabbler. I do like CAD, but I’ve never used it professionally. I have a little, ugly sewing table to prove it.
I learned AutoCAD99 in high school. But I never kept up the skills later.
I learned OpenSCAD to draw models for papers. Or for math problems when I taught. It really is a fun tool to get into the swing of, but I let my skills get rusty and it’s frustrating now.
I never used openscad but checkout tutorials on YouTube that match your skill level: I mostly self teach most apps that I use but some tools are so complex that I benefit from taking a step back and look at what others are doing with them!
I was taught a little bit of old school drafting in high school carpentry class (I have never sat at a drawing board with a T square; I laid out the frame of one wall of a shed to scale on some printer paper with a normal school ruler) and learned a product called TurboCAD in early college. I found a free thing called QCAD which is just a 2D DXF editor, which is fantastic for working with laser engravers. I used to FLY with that software. I kinda simultaneously learned how to use FreeCAD, Fusion360 and OnShape via web tutorials.
None of them are my favorite; OnShape was the most streamlined but the most lacking, running in the browser is a benefit; last time I used it there wasn’t really a central place to put parameters so it was a little limited, and they’re trying to compete with Solidworks rather than Fusion360 so you can have the increasingly drawbackful drawbackware version, or pay $kidney/hr for it. Fusion360 is more capable, but very inconsistent. Using it, you can tell it’s a mass of unmantainable spaghetti code that’s right on the edge of falling apart. FreeCAD is definitely an open source project with a congenitally low version number that ships with well realized features no human has ever wanted in a CAD package, but they haven’t even started on basic features and there are several forks that solve problems that will never be merged into the original. FreeCAD 1.0 is going to be amazing when it comes out in the year 2144.
I remember playing with qcad. It was awful, but it was the best FOSS CAD I found. AutoCAD was unrivaled from when I learned it in 1999 and remained that way until I had drifted away. I think I played with qcad around 2011.
I found OpenSCAD about 3 years ago, and it knocked by socks off. I’d like to see how mature FreeCAD is now.
In my high school, we had semesters. The first semester you took drafting, it was on drafting tables with Tsquare, triangles, compasses, and stuff. In your 4 years there, there were 8 semesters. You could technically take it 8 times. I think I took it four. So I had 3 semesters of autocad.
2006 was an easy time for me to lose Windows. Do you remember how much worse Windows was back in 200*? Everything had viruses. There were TV ads promising they could get your computer running “like new”. Viruses were so common that people seemed to think computers slowed down with age.
So I’m ignorant about FreeCAD, but FOSS is so powerful now I’m excited to check it out.
Thought I’d ping you. I checked out freecad and posted some initial thoughts here. https://lemmy.world/post/11352164