gerotakke5d ago

I'm sure there are some people here who are in the same frustrating situation regarding CAD programs as myself:
SaaS stuff is straight out, Blender very much feels like the wrong tool for the job, FreeCAD is incredibly frustrating, OpenSCAD is just too much work.

Let me tell you: CascadeStudio is *by far* the best experience I've had so far.
I would love for it to blow up.
Yes, it's code, but it's so much easier than anything else I've tried.

https://zalo.github.io/CascadeStudio/

Cascade Studio

A Full Live-Scripted CAD Kernel in the Browser

Show threadÖlbaum

@gerotakke I started with OnShape because a colleague told me about it, my local FabLab recommends it for one-off jobs, and it doesn’t require installing anything.

I meant to switch to FreeCAD if I stuck with FabLab projects, so I tried it, it was frustrating, and crashed a bunch of time on trivial things.

Meanwhile, over the course of three weeks, I became so ludicrously efficient in OnShape that it’s not even funny. There are basically no hurdles.

Mar 26 at 8:08pmWeb
Show threadÖlbaum4d ago

@gerotakke To the point that I’d rather stick with it, save the outputs and drawings as a backup, and have to redo everything in something else in the unlikely event that they screw me over.

My (same) colleague installed the latest FreeCAD a couple of days ago. We wanted to try it out today, and we didn’t even manage to draw a circle in a sketch. We had a sketch, were editing it, the sketching tools were shown, but nothing was drawing.

Show threadgerotakke4d ago
@oscherler Yeah, I can absolutely see that. Of all the closed source options, OnShape looks like the most interesting one to me. My refusal to use it is largely political, especially since I'm releasing my own work as open source. I just don't feel like I can leave large parts of that depending on a single commercial vendor.
Show threadÖlbaum3d ago

@gerotakke I totally get it.

I have the same problem with PCBs. My first three projects are in JLCPCB’s EasyEDA, because it was quicker to get started. It’s nice, but it’s not awesome either. I want to get them out of there to regain control, but for that I need to learn #KiCAD, and I don’t know whether it’s going to be frustrating. There’s also #LibrePCB, which is nice, but I’m not sure whether it’s going to become too limited.

At least simple PCBs like mine are easy to redo from scratch.

Show threadcpresser3d ago

@oscherler @gerotakke I can totally understand the frustration. And at the same time say that freecad and kicad are excellent tools.

Find someone that teaches you the first steps. Its way more fun and productive than trying to find the right workflow yourself. For that reason I teach kicad at basically every hacker event I attend.

Show threadozeng3d ago

@oscherler @gerotakke I use kicad and freecad. There’s always some friction with any cad tool, every one is weird in its own way. Both of these apps have been improving rapidly though, and they are a great long-term investment if you can push through the early suck

I find simple youtube examples to be very helpful at showing where and how to click on things (a rare case, I usually despise videos in favour of written docs)