Freecad

[Greeny]

I used it quite a lot about 18 months ago and found it very powerful.
Steep learning curve, but once i got my head round it I liked it a lot.
Unfortunately it was quite buggy at that time and i ended up switching to fusion360.

Fusion 360 is excellent, but you have inspired me to have another look at freecad.
Always good to have options 😊

Cheers

[Leadhead]

I use Fusion360 mostly also. Just fascinated by the development of Freecad 0.17 from the last time I looked at it 18 months or so back. I also like the thought of not having all my eggs in one basket (cloud)

[Boyan Silyavski]

I use it mainly for the purpose of making solids from Openscad. In other words, importing Thingiverse files into my solid drawings for the purpose of integrating some elements and combining them.

The procedure is : Openscad-Export SVG-open in Freecad-Export as IGES-Import and sew surfaces in NX

Discovered after a lot of fiddling and i am not aware of any similar procedure to do that.

[magicniner]

I use it for conversion of STL back to a usable CAD file formats, at the moment it has too many limitations for creation of complex 3D models so I use other CAD and Blender.

[vidya31]

Can someone give the difference between Freecad and Solidworks ?

[magicniner]

There are differences at every level.
Solidworks is an integrated commercial product / FreeCad is a collection of bundled Open Source "Apps"
Solidworks is very expensive / FreeCad is free
Solidworks is professionally supported / FreeCad is supported by the user group on a forum

If you want to get into CAD/CAM Fusion 360 is a great product with free licensing to hobby users and startups.

[routerdriver]

I have used Freecad to generate toolpaths for my homebrew machine as it has an inbuilt postprocessor for LinuxCNC.It works very well for that purpose.It isn't the most intuitive piece of software,but the capabilities are impressive and the price can't be beaten.With just a little more improvement it could knock several expensive software suites into oblivion as they would offer nothing more for the considerable purchase price.