FreeCAD

Original Specification

• See FreeCAD Specification
• FreeCAD is based on the Open Cascade Technology CAD kernel

FreeCAD Review

See FreeCAD Assessment

FreeCAD Download

To get the latest version of FreeCAD open a terminal window and enter the following

sudo apt-get purge freecad

^(Do this first step only if you have already installed an earlier version of FreeCad)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:freecad-maintainers/freecad-stable

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install freecad

Import from Proprietary Formats

• AutoCAD dwg - import appears to be available - [1]

Action Plan

Recruit software developer to analyze FreeCAD and build with/upon their work. Short-term Objective: Get Assembly Module Working.

Document FreeCAD source code in github repository.

Document FreeCAD's code structure.

Info

FreeCAD Website

FreeCAD Bugtracker/Issue Queue

<rss>http://www.freecadweb.org/tracker/issues_rss.php?project_id=0</rss>

OSE FreeCAD Documentation

I (Mark Norton) have created a very simply, introductory guide to FreeCAD. It only covers the very basics at this point, but we can expand on it as needed. - User:Mjn

File:FreeCAD-3.pdf

This document covers the following topics:

• Views
• Workshops
• Sizing a Primitive Part
• Positioning a Part
• Making a Cut
• Combining Parts
• Rotating a Part
• Extrusion

See also, FreeCAD Documentation and Tutorials [2].

Related

• FreeCAD Survival Guide

OSE FreeCAD Requirements

For OSE to use FreeCAD for all of its design needs, these are the functions required. Do these exist? Please comment.

• Freehand drawing of shapes and extrusion (like Sketchup).
• Adding parameters to all of the shapes, so they can be modified.
• Modifying all parameters in 3D parametrically (typing in lengths)
• Modifying all parameters in 3D with the mouse (such as dragging corners, edges, and faces)

Response from FreeCAD developer ickby: "This is not possible and will not be in the future. This kind of behavior needs quite advanced back-end functionality which is not provided by our geometric modeling kernel"

• Adding parameters in 3D parametrically (boolean operations)?
• Adding parameters in 3D by drawing them and extruding (mouse-based boolean operations)
• Adding parameters to shapes in 3D parametrically (such as drawing in new objects parametrically)?
• Adding parameters to shapes in 3D manually (such as drawing in new objects with a mounse)?
• For multiple objects, moving them with the mouse to arrange, mate, align them.

Response from FreeCAD developer ickby: "That is not yet possible. The assembly workbench is in a very early design phase and still needs quite some time. That is true for basic functionality and integration into freecad workflows."

• Grouping and ungrouping objects into assemblies?

Response from FreeCAD developer ickby: "not yet but will be possible with upcoming assembly workbench"

• Maintaining parametric nature of grouped objects?

Response from FreeCAD developer ickby: "not yet, but will be possible with the upcoming assembly workbench"

Now for interoperability with other CAD packages:

• Importing multiple new objects into a drawing - one at a time?

Response from FreeCAD developer ickby: 'currently you can only import whole files, not individual objects from a file'

• Importing multiple objects into a model - all at one time?
• Importing new objects while passing the parametric values into FreeCAD, such as with a STEP file?

Tutorials

Bram De Vries

Tutorials 1-8:

Assembly Workbench

Tutorial: http://freecad-tutorial.blogspot.com/2013/09/how-to-test-assembly-module.html

Contributors and Users

• Yorik van Havre, Daniel Falck, and Brad Collette - Path Workbench - [3]*Jürgen *Riegel is the project founder, working for Daimler Chrysler, his free time is probably limited https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/free-cad/index.php?title=User:Jriegel
• Werner Mayer is the most active developer in terms of commits, he is just awesome, I don't know what he does professionally but if some funding can get him to increase the time of his participation, this would definitely be a great investment of financial resources.
• Yorik is our architect: http://yorik.uncreated.net and he is already dedicating a lot of hours in the development of FreeCAD, since he is a free lancer he is probably quite flexible with time, so maybe he could implement special feature requests for FreeCAD even on a paid basis.
• j-dowset, joined FreeCAD recently and has done a great work on improving blueprints creation in FreeCAD. A very appropriate task for him would be to implement a correct dimensioning system for blueprints. I believe he has the capabilities to implement any kind of feature with relatively short running in time and high quality.
• mrlukeparry is quite experienced with Qt and Coin3D so he can do a lot of GUI work. Being a student his free time is probably also limited except school vacations.
• Ickby has worked on a prototype for applying assembly constraints between parts. A special task for him would be to accelerate the implementation of the Assembly module after jriegel has finished with the basic framework/structure/design.
• tanderson69 is very good in OpenCascade, so he can work on difficult tasks that have to do with the CAD geometry kernel.
• Daniel Falck is the person to contact for CAM integration.
• Ian Rees - crowdfunded individual working on Drawing Workbench - [4]
• gCAD3D appears to be viable for CAD/CAM - [5]
• Przemo Firszt, Bernd Hahnebach - CAE workbench - [6]
• Sebastian Hoogen - OpenSCAD workbench - [7]
• FEA, macros - psicofil, Lucio Gomez - [8]
• Cad1919 - Extreme User - is doing some of the most high level work in FreeCAD - cad1919 on YouTube - [9]
• 61quick - 3D printing complete toolchain within FreeCAD - [10]
• Lars G. - IGES files to house cross sections in architecture - [11]
• Kwasny - macro example of how to create an Icon in the workbench that allows you to draw a piston ring by clicking on the icon. This way, the macro (a set of commands) was actually turned into a tool - [12]
• Dan's Open Source Design Tools, with motto to be free from black-box CAx toolchains - [13]

Main Needs

According to [14], the main need for the project is documentation.

Links

• FreeCAD Survival Guide from Lasersaur.
• Original FreeCAD Specification by Juergen Riegel
• FreeCAD Architecture Design
• Open Source Design Tools - [15]