I just downloaded FreeCAD to build a simple part and was following this tutorial to learn my way through the basics. Unfortunately I got stuck pretty quickly around the 2:38 part where I need to select a plane to start a drawing in. For some reason, the coordinate system planes don't show up even if the eye icon is lit up. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong here?

Upon posting a screenshot here, I think my CachyOS KDE theme might have something to do with the display as I view a mostly blank white screen while the screenshot is showing black for some reason. I've already tried changing the theme under Preferences but it seemed to make things worse, with some parts of the Start tab being unreadable.

EDIT: I should also point out that the FreeCAD client was downloaded via the CachyOS Package Manager. I heard sometimes using software from Flatpaks and other similar sources clashes with system themes. Should I use a different installation method?

How it's supposed to look like:

How my setup looks like:

GitPDM is an open-source beginner-friendly FreeCAD addon. It connects your Github Account with your FreeCAD files with a single click.

Repo: github.com/nerd-sniped/GitPDM
Website: nerd-sniped.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzf1yP6HUmY

I'm getting errors trying to create a pocket (2:25) because one of the edges of the inner rectangle is right on top of the outer rectangle, and I can't select just the inner rectangle

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/50842014

When I moved into my home many years ago, there was this lock-box mounted to the water main on the side of the house. I figured it was one of those used by real-estate agents to store the house key for viewings, but months passed and it still remained there. No one from my buyer's agent's office had a clue what this was, and the seller of the house had already moved out-of-state.

Recently, I had some plumbing work done, and that also included replacing the main water valve for the house, allowing this lock box to come free from the plumbing. Now inspecting it up close, and looking up the model online, I realized that it has an alphabet wheel and uses a three-letter combination.

As it happens, Thanksgiving weekend was upon me, and since I was bored, I figured I'd try all the possible combinations. Just 17,576 possible combinations, how bad could it be?

The most immediate problem was that due to being out in the elements, the dial did not turn easily. It would move, but was rather rough. And since the knob is only ~1 cm diameter, this is an incredibly un-ergonomic endeavor. I had to stop after the first 100 tries, due to the finger exhaustion.

Knowing this would be untenable for the long-run, I decided to build my way out of this problem. Since a combo lock involves making rotations that almost go all the way around, I drew inspiration from rotary telephone dials, where one's finger starts with the intended number and then swivels the dial around.

But whereas a rotary telephone dial only needs 10 positions, I needed to fit 26 positions, one for each letter. I decided on each hole being 17 mm to comfortably fit any of my fingers, but that also dictated the overall diameter of the wheel. But that's good, since a larger diameter wheel means more leverage to overcome the rough lock movement. It also happens to be that this wheel has a diameter of 180 mm, which is just enough to fit in the 200 mm bed of my 3d printer.

Using FreeCAD, I designed this wheel so that it fits around the splines of the lockbox dial, which held remarkably well. I had thought I would need Blu Tack or something to keep it together.

Using this wheel, I'm able to "dial" combinations much quicker using one hand, while holding the lockbox with my other hand to press the lever down to test the combination. This should be good.

(note: some parts of this story were altered to not give away identifying details)

This article will show how to model sheets of Expanded Metal in FreeCAD, without slowing (or killing) FreeCAD.

• https://www.eco-libre.org/expanded-metal-hatch-freecad/

Who is Eco-Libre?

Eco-Libre is a volunteer-run project that designs libre technology for sustainable communities.

Eco-Libre's mission is to research, develop, document, teach, build, and distribute open-source technology that sustainably enfranchises communities' human rights.

We aim to provide clear documentation to build low-cost machines, tools, and infrastructure for people all over the world who wish to live in sustainable communities with others.

Contribute to Eco-Libre

If you'd like to help Eco-Libre reach our mission to enfranchise sustainable communities' human rights with libre tech, please contact us to get involved :)

Join Us
eco-libre.org/join

Cheers,
The Eco-Libre Team
https://www.eco-libre.org/

This article will show you how to find out exactly which layer is causing your FreeCAD file to balloon in size, by getting a granular list of all of the layers in your document tree, sorted by size.

• https://www.eco-libre.org/big-freecad-file-size/

Who is Eco-Libre?

Eco-Libre is a volunteer-run project that designs libre technology for sustainable communities.

Eco-Libre's mission is to research, develop, document, teach, build, and distribute open-source technology that sustainably enfranchises communities' human rights.

We aim to provide clear documentation to build low-cost machines, tools, and infrastructure for people all over the world who wish to live in sustainable communities with others.

Contribute to Eco-Libre

If you'd like to help Eco-Libre reach our mission to enfranchise sustainable communities' human rights with libre tech, please contact us to get involved :)

Join Us
eco-libre.org/join

Cheers,
The Eco-Libre Team
https://www.eco-libre.org/

If you wanna print it yourself, the model is here: https://www.printables.com/model/1348194-4n-threaded-flat-head-screws-and-nuts-10-32-equiva

Design to be a drop in replacement for 10-32 screws with a much, much higher pitch. These screws are extremely easy to print, is reliable enough that it can hold some weight.

If you wanna print this yourself, you need to make sure that the screw is sideways, so if it breaks it's no on the layer lines.

Using them in my own prints which had metal screws and they are holding quiet well.

The Subtractive Helix is broken and very buggy. But it is the most reliable way to get a screw and nut in the software.

I have to design several wood boxes who will be bases for acrylic showcase boxes. They have all different sizes but the construction is the same and quite simple. So what I'm looking to do is to design a generic construction with constraints once, and then be able to change a few variables like the boards thickness, the thickness of the acrylic and the width height length of the box and I would get the dimensions of my wood boards to do the cutting.

I never used the assembly workbenches, can they be useful in my cases?

I would just like to say thanks to all the devs and users giving feedback for making FreeCAD such a great tool.

I've been using CAD professionally for 25 years, mainly AutoCAD and Solidworks, but have been a Liinux user at home for about 20. As an engineer I've always been looking for a solution for home use, but nothing has ever come close to what I'm looking for. Closest was possibly Onshape, but the public file limitation on the free tier has always rubbed me the wrong way. I would also much rather prefer an FOSS solution.

I've tried FreeCAD on and off over the last couple of years, but just couldn't get the hang of it, until now. It being Easter weekend I had a couple of days off and decided to follow a couple of tutorials on Youtube. Mostly Deltahedra and MangoJelly. It has finally clicked. Yes, it's different to how I'm used to working, but it works. My biggest pain point is probably assemblies.

There is obviously still some pain points, but compared to even just a year ago it feels like a completely different program.

I'm seriously considering starting a monthly donation to the FreeCAD devs as a way to show my gratitude.

Finally managed to actually design, CAM, and post process something all with just FreeCAD! Just a simple sign for a library patron. This finished item obviously still has lots of issues but they're mostly user error and I think I know how to fix them. HUGGGEEE thanks to clsergent for designing a postprocessor for Snapmaker machines, since the company hasn't bothered to maintain theirs for like years and years lol.

Overall couldn't be more satisfied, 10/10, FreeCAD is amazing 🔥

I think opened a debug console or something.

I mean those like that, i did this one manually, but it was quite an annoying process, is there any tool in freecad that can help with these situations?

I have equality between all these lines, but it was still not so pleasant

The .stl and .fcstd files are at the link. All the test joints I printed fit together really nicely, but I'm worried the overall design might have issues that I'm too much of an amateur to identify. It'll need a LOT of filament... Good wooden marudai cost hundreds of dollars, whereas 1500g of my preferred filament is only like $45, but I'd still hate to waste that much of it. The printing itself I'm not too concerned about, it's easy stuff. Just a little bridging and no support. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean the finished/assembled object will be functional. Thanks in advance if you have any tips!

PS: This is also my first use of the spreadsheet function, I usually just rely on named constraints from prior sketches. It's really neat. FreeCAD rules!

after bashing my head in my table for a bit, i finally managed to make something "salvagable"... i think.

this is meant to be a vesa adapter, from 200mm to 100mm; the idea is that 6mm metal screw-posts are melted into the holes

the sketch is quite a bit of a hellscape... i will see if i can figure out symmetry on the next iteration. Do you have any advice on how i can use better this program? it's been quite a bit since i haven't seen such a steep learning curve on a piece of software

And here the real deal:

Only crashed once :)

I’ve tried the dev branch of FreeCAD for a while now, but backed off due to how unpolished it felt. But when I saw FreeCAD V1 RC2 pre-release on GitHub Id thought to try it out.

My first impressions didn’t blow me away, sure there were nice UI touches here and there. But nothing really stood out to me. But that changed when I started cading.

It’s not a major overhaul to my eyes. But the nice touches are everywhere. Like adding a TinkerCAD navigation controls option for beginners, and smart snapping and auto constraints enabled by default. So, so nice especially for noobs who don’t know that >.< is a centre constraint in the tool bar.

But I had a quick project, tonight. Redesign an older model from scratch to add in new parts. My original designs were some of the first real work I did in FreeCAD so it was nice to see the improvements. Out side of legacy bugs like attaching a 3 point arc to a line still being present, the process was smooth, not as pain free as Fusion, but better.

Then at the end when I was adding text to my part. I got to see the best update of them all. If you aren’t aware, adding text to a model is annoying. Especially if you want it a distance from a side or in the middle. You needed to use the measuring tool to get deltas and re measure after every change. I was using the new measuring tool like that too, and thank you devs for adding manual controls and deltas. But at the end, I left the measurements on the text, updated the values, and noticed the numbers updated on me… OMG best feature of all time 10/10 best CAD software in the world. This makes my life soooooo much easier now.

If you haven’t already try the RC versions of FreeCAD do so. Sure there is still some open source jank in it, but it’s so much more polished than before that I feel this upcoming release deserves the V1 moniker.

It was a pleasure using it. I wanted to switch from Fusion to Ondsel and tried to learn it as an alternative.

Did you use Ondsel?

I'm designing a case for a dew-point ventilator controller to be 3d printed. The controller is implemented using arduino on an esp32. The project is based off of the code and HW implementation by Make Magazine Germany: https://github.com/MakeMagazinDE/Taupunktluefter. When starting out I was thinking this would be an easy project but it turned out that especially the lid with its lip and groove design and the parts fixations were not that easy. I'm excited to finally print it.

The file is parametric to some extent and the main footprint is based off of a master sketch. Many parts were imported as step files from grabcad. I used FreeCAD 1.0-rc1 which works like a charm for many things. Next thing I would like to do is to use the new assembly workbench. What do you think?

Manual "Exploded view",

Opaque view.

I was thinking about trying some sewing for headphone covers and a strap. I can easily disassemble the existing materials and reverse engineer them. I would rather try to learn parametric iterative design of textiles and alter the fit of the pads based on a pattern. Anyone have any experience with this application?

Maybe there's something I don't understand here. I'd love it if someone told me how to do the following.

Let's say I have some really complex shape in a sketch left of the Y axis: it takes me forever to get it just right. Then I need to mirror it on the right side of the Y axis and connect the two halves.

In SolidWorks, it's trivial: mirror the stuff, done. If you change the master shape on the left, the change is reflected on the right.

In FreeCAD, the best you can do is make a mirror copy of the left-hand side elements - which also makes copies of the constraints which are completely independent from the original constraints on the left-hand side - delete the stupid new right-hand side constraints and slowly, painfully constrain the right-hand side copies to the original left-hand side elements, trying to dodge the dreaded orange over-constraints all the time. It's long, it's painful, and the end-result is usually so fragile that if you change anything significant on the left-hand side, the sketch turns orange and then it's back to hunting broken constraints again.

Surely it can't be that painful. Am I missing something obvious?

Thank you FreeCAD for not pay walling the ability to create technical drawings.

So what I did to make this was to create a technical drawing of all the designs I wanted and I made this photo in Inkscape.

Was designed to be a banner for my social media, but loved it so much that I'm just using it as my desktop wallpaper.

Hey everybody,

After a few months without using FreeCAD (but keeping up with the daily updates) I need to model a quick something today.

And I realize there seems to be a new feature in the 0.22.0-dev version that prevents me from orbiting around the model when I'm in the sketcher:

I use OpenSCAD-style 3D navigation, which means I left-click to rotate the model. In the sketcher, left-clicking is used to do a rectangular lasso selection, and that prevents me from orbiting around the model. I tried with shift, ctrl, alt and all combinations thereof, but there seems to be no way to disable that selection feature.

Fortunately I also use a 3DConnexion Spacemouse, so I'm not completely stuck, but it's kind of annoying to have to use that thing when I'd rather not move my hand away from the keyboard.

Anybody knows how to disable the lasso thing?