====== FreeCAD ======

===== About =====

FreeCAD is an open source CAD package that is pretty usable and only has some minor drawbacks over paid CAD solutions. The biggest and most talked about problem with FreeCAD is the Topological Naming Problem. This is actually a problem that all CAD software shares, but some software is much better at inherently avoiding the problem or using logic to fix broken references. This problem basically occurs because each feature is named internally by the system when it is created. When it is modified by a chamfer or other modification it gets renamed. Then when you try to go back in the timeline and edit the original feature, it can break everything that references it later. That is not a very precise or accurate description, but more about the problem can be read [[https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem|here]]. The other problem people have with FreeCAD is it is just not as graphically intuitive as competitors like Fusion 360. This becomes much less of a problem when you begin to use keyboard shortcuts for everything.

I actually find both of these issues to be features for me. Learning to model in ways that are less likely to run into Topological Naming issues just made me better at using any and all CAD packages. It forces you to think through the part more beforehand and you end up with a model that is always easier to edit later. Not having a super slick UI just makes me more likely to use keyboard shortcuts and that is faster. If I am always tempted to click the pretty buttons, then I don't pick up that extra speed. That is one of the pitfalls I found myself in with Fusion. It has great shortcut abilities, but I found myself clicking through menus instead. I honestly couldn't find half of the tools I use in FreeCAD in their menus because I started using the keyboard shortcut after the first time I had to dig around and find it. I understand that is very frustrating for hobbyists or people that only need to use CAD software intermittently, but if you are doing design work every day you should not be using menus.

There is also a pretty robust 'solution' to the Topological Naming Problem available in the [[https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD|fork]] of FreeCAD created by realthunder. This is planned to be integrated into the 2.0 release of FreeCAD, but that is likely to be months or years away. These two projects have diverged a lot because it has nearly 6000 commits that are independent of the original project. The main FreeCAD project has nearly 14,000 commits since the fork. This means there are around 20,000 commits that could conflict and need to be manually merged.

{{tag>cad}}