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Recently one of the magnet holders for my window shutters broke, and I thought I'd take a crack at designing a replacement to 3D Print. I'd never designed anything in CAD software before, so I had no real reference.
I found FreeCAD extremely easy to use and intuitive. I watched a couple videos and followed-along with the tutorials, then started on my own item. It's a relatively simple 3-part component. I took measurements with digital calipers, and in a few hours was printing the first prototype.
A couple prototypes later (small measurement adjustments to account for plastic shrinkage, etc), I had the final model. Replaced all of the magnet holders since they were sure to go soon, too.
I had fun, and finally used my 3D printer for something "real". Pretty cool.
A fun thing to do is take a picture and import it. Then you can trace it!
This is best done on some kind of grid background but having a ruler (or two) is usually enough.
One suggestion, print one or two layers first to check the fit. Iterate with that before you print the whole thing.
Another helpful thing is to start drawing things parametrically. This should be familiar to programmers. You're using variables and you want to design things primarily through relationships. This becomes a huge unlock because scaling your parts becomes much easier
for incredibly simple parts that i can describe using measurements, i've had a lot of fun pointing a high-power ai at openscad and letting it iterate through making the design for me
it's still tough to turn it into something i can then keep fiddling with in freecad though
put on "tron: ares" in the background to fully appreciate the model designing something that will be 3d-printed :)
Did you try modelrift.com ? Its openscad + ai but way more convenient to preview results in realtime and iterate via annotated screenshots
I haven't tried it, but FreeCAD has scripting
https://wiki.freecad.org/Python_scripting_tutorial
Edit: Your website is quite confusing. Took me awhile...
ty for 'tearing through' ;)
You can get even more vague and just generally describe the design of something, making sure it leaves exact measurements to parameters, and end up with something usable. ("Make me an openSCAD file for an pointed star with curved points and an inward taper. The number of points, thickness, and angle of taper should be configurable")
For a lot of stuff, you might have better luck getting it to generate something like cadquery
I had the opposite experience. Creating the parts was easy with some tutorials but when I went to the assembly step it failed horribly. There are different plugins/ways how you can do it but none of them worked and the console solely gave cryptic error messages. I gave up and used pen and paper. :(
Learning to design parts was a huge "unlock" for me.
Wasn't just printing other people's designs.
Great feeling to measure and design something then have it fit perfectly.
I just saw a great video on how to replicate parts for printing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcMvTfUfNXo
Previously I'd get my calipers first and try to model using the direct measurements. The key point imo of the video was to take photos and model based on the photos, and then correct the measurements with your recorded measurements second.
It was Onshape for me, but the same idea. The concepts take just a few hours to "click" (the idea that you're stacking changes chronologically, which is different from e.g. layers in photo editing), but then you can suddenly build like 80% of all tools and mechanisms that you've ever seen. Yes, slowly and usually using less efficient tools and approaches, but you can make most things look and work right SOMEHOW.
I had a hard time but I didn’t start with the tutorial first.
But once I saw their “philosophy” as it were, everything became so much easier.
That is the spirit! A friend recommended me to buy a Bambu P2S: there are parts I want to print and I don't want to model then send them to have them printed, nor to bother my friend all the time. Funnily enough I've got magnets falling too: for an alarm system on the doors/windows and they don't hold well anymore after the years. Then my car's radar detection device (fully legal) doesn't fit nicely in the phone holder I use to that effect: I want it a specific angle (I want it both inclined and facing towards me a bit). So I'll model those and just print them. There are a few things like that where I keep thinking: "If I had a 3D printer, I'd just print a part".
Most importantly: I've got a 11 y/o and I think it's cool for the kid to see how it works.
Already watch a few vids. Doesn't look too hard for simple things.
I post this in every FreeCAD thread: If you're going to start designing something with it, use the spreadsheet tool to make everything parametric. You'll save yourself a ton of time as your designs get more complicated.
Maybe this isn't anything new to experience CAD users. I don't know if other CAD tools do this as I started using FreeCAD after playing with 3D printing.
You can also use VarSet[0], which I think is easier than spreadsheet since you don't have to switch the workbench.
The downside of spreadsheets is they can really slow your model down. Every cell change triggers a full recompute of the 3D model. VarSets offer much faster performance while sacrificing a couple spreadsheet features. So always choose VarSets over spreadsheets if you can.
On the one hand it's clearly suboptimal for any change, even ones that nothing depends on, to trigger a recompute. But also it feels like there's something a bit broken with spreadsheet dependency resolution in the first place. I've never been able to nail down a test case, but models seem to go over a performance cliff at a certain point. Ordinarily I'd put it down to something being unavoidably quadratic, but I've had cases where I'm certain that the same model is radically slower after being reloaded off disk.
Did not know about this. How do you see all the properties?
Just click the varset in the tree view and it lists them in the properties pane
This is an outdated advice. Spreadsheet is hard to use in comparison to VarSets [0]. Recent changes in 1.1 make them even easier and more intuitive to use.
It's very common (Fusion calls it User Parameters, etc.) and indeed nice practice. FreeCAD has a few ways to do it, Spreadsheets but also free-form properties on objects. It's very flexible in this regard.
The Fusion implementation sucks. A spreadsheet is a far more natural way to do this, Im surprised FreeCad is doing it better than the paid variant.
The only issue I have with the Spreadsheet is that I need to add an alias for every value I want to use in the Sketch or Part Design workbench. In practice, this usually looks like
A B
width 2mm
length 3mm
VarSets[0] introduced recently in 1.0 and mentioned in a grand-aunt comment are a good alternative to spreadsheets used this way.
https://wiki.freecad.org/Macro_EasyAlias
EasyAlias macro maybe?
not "maybe" this is an absolute must if using parameters in a spreadsheet :)
Its existence has been used by the devs as a reason not to prioritise fixing user-facing bugs. It really should be in core at this point.
Oh. I didn't even know there were macros. But that looks very useful!
Hmmm - I seem to recall there was at least 1-2 scripts or macros available to help with aliasing.
The worst part about fusions implementation is that you CANNOT edit the User Parameters while you are viewing the part easily. I like to edit the params and drag it around, but it SUCKS in fusion
The Fusion implementation is awful - you can adjust one variable, one time, then you have to reopen the dialog to do another. At least for me it's always become non-responsive after a single edit, for years now. I've always assumed I'm just holding it wrong, but I don't know. I've moved on.
Super flexible. I love being able to use Python to manipulate spreadsheet data.
Some CAD systems, i think NX for example, let you give it a reference to an actual Excel (or csv?) file, that you edit in Excel.
This seems like good advice. To this day I haven't explored spreadsheets or variable sets, which makes resizing stuff a giant pain in the ass.
This is an area where FreeCAD really needs work: scaling stuff.
Or don't and adjust it in the sketcher? If you name your constrains you can just reference them directly elsewhere.
I think that's much easier as you don't have to go back and forth with a spreadsheet.
Tracking down individual values in the sketcher can get annoying too. Just depends on the complexity of your part
Spreadsheets are better in theory but varsets work so much better in practice.
Other cad tools do support this but in my experience it's always pretty awkward to use. I haven't tried the FreeCAD implementation.
I’m a furniture maker (like, for money). I’ve been using it for largely 2-D jig making for a few years and it’s been great in conjunction with a ShopBot for precise templates.
I updated to the 1.1 release candidates, and it’s been great. I do a lot of design for people who are remote, and being able to model things with more complex curves has been a game changer. Sketchup is adequate at the free level and not good enough to convince me to upgrade to paid.
The Assembly workbench has let me use FreeCAD much more closely to how I think about putting a piece together, and the sketcher-based workflow is a godsend for curved work.
1.1 is a huge leap forward. I delivered a table last year that I modeled for the client in FreeCAD. The model was super rough. I’m designing chairs for it now, and for the first time, I feel like my skills are the limit, and not the software.
If you’ve found it clunky before, it still has its rough edges, but it’s legitimately at the point where I think the good parts are good enough for me to overlook the rough edges and move to FreeCAD almost entirely.
Is it any closer to functioning like Solidworks, NX, Creo, and all the other professional CAD software packages?
Edit: After opening it up it seems better than before but still not a replacement. I can use the draw tool to create a rectangle but than immediately cannot apply symmetry or equal length constraints until I delete others which shouldn't overlap. Clicking to create a cut or hole opens up a window that does not make it easy to create a new sketch from within or place something from within (but you can just make a sketch were you want something and then open them up and that they lock onto).
I've generally been a pretty harsh critic of FreeCAD because it represents the only entry in the market of linux CAD and it has frustrated me that it does not just do what is known to work. This seems usable. Still annoying, still not a replacement, but usable. So progress.
My impression of FreeCAD as a project is that for much if its life it has suffered from a certain amount of developer churn and lack of focus. It's like somebody builds a workbench and gets it working just good enough using a workflow that makes sense to them, but then nobody ever really bothers to flesh out the rest of it, so if you try to do things in a different way that may be perfectly sensible to you the result is a broken mess. Eventually somebody decides they can do better, and maybe they do, but the replacement still has a lot of rough spots that never get finished and the cycle starts again.
It seems like the development team has gotten much more organized in the last couple years, so I have a lot of hope for the future. I think that good open source parametric CAD is something the world really needs.
[dead]
It's inherently limited by its geometry kernel. Most "real" CAD suites use something like parasolid, usually with a bunch of extras slapped on top. Making a new one from scratch is a massive undertaking, but I'll remain forever hopeful that we get a new, modern, open-source kernel one of these days...
I don't necessarily agree in this case - OCCT is more than capable for what FreeCAD is offering. Add to that the development trajectory of OCCT also seems to be really taking off recently (with the 8.0-RC, they've re-worked how all B-Spline algorithms work, with implications for all operations).
Not gonna lie I just hope the rewrite it in rust community takes a stab at it at one point,
This isn't really true. The vast majority of problems are in the UI. The geometry kernel is limited, but it's good enough for an open source project. Compared to say OpenSCAD, Open CASCADE is leagues ahead.
What's wrong with OCCT?
The entire FreeCAD development philosophy is to not compare FreeCAD with commercial CAD tools. That's a cardinal sin. Basically, they are completely hostile to feedback from people who've spent their entire career doing CAD.
Slightly unrelated to this story, but I’m curious if anyone has good resources for learning FreeCAD. I have quite a lot of experience with SolidWorks, AutoCAD, OnShape, and similar software, but FreeCAD has always been hard for me to pick up.
I often recommend https://youtube.com/@deltahedra3d - some good tutorial videos and other excellent FreeCAD content.
Just a pre-heads-up: depending on what you're trying to do, the exact tool and thus tutorial you need maybe slightly different.
For example, I made a gasket for my mini PC awhile ago using FreeCAD. Designing it was a hell until I discovered the Sheet Metal Workbench in the plugin manager, and just like that, I got it designed & manufactured within ~4 days.
During my experience, most of my time was spent on learning how to use the Sheet Metal Workbench as well as how it interacts with other FreeCAD builtin features. FreeCAD itself is not that hard to learn.
Also, there are Piping Workbench too if you want to work on pipes, Wood Work Workbench if you want to do wood work etc, see: https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD-addons. Use the correct workbench for the right job will save you a lot of time.
plug-in
built-in
Hyphens FTW!
MangoJelly on YouTube was my primary learning source, and a few other channels - but his "gelled" with me the best.
Oh wow - over on Reddit, someone mentioned that the Deltahedra YouTuber has started using his own voice, rather than a generated one - and - well, his content is now far more watchable than it was previously!
Deltahedra is awesome. “Like a caveman” is hilarious when uttered by the extremely serious ai-generated voice. At least he writes his own material
My goal this year is to finish his 40ish hour course. Excellent quality course at a good pace.
Yup, mine too. He has a course on Udemy as well.
I am hopeful of:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/245787716-freecad-beginn...
and will be adding it to my next Amazon order.
YouTube was very effective for me to learn FreeCAD. I just searched for some FreeCAD tutorials and followed-along. I had zero prior CAD experience though, so I was a "blank slate" in a way.
This is for after you've done a tutorial or two:
There was a PDF I had a while back (can't remember the name) which has a bunch of shapes you had to design in a 3D CAD program, with some guiding measurements.
The shapes got harder to create as you progressed through the book. That was a good, fun way to sharpen my skills after I learned the basics.
Probably this one: https://ko-fi.com/offsetcad/shop
I have it, it's great. There's a free one, I paid a few bucks for the full set. Guy has a Youtube channel too where he shows how he does a few of the designs. Good guy, I had some troubles with the payment getting through to him and then the download didn't work for some reason (some weird combination of issues, don't remember details), and he just send me the whole pack without even knowing if I was going to actually put in the effort to make the payment work.
Commenting here in case you or someone else remembers what this is. I'm always on the lookout for practice resources I can recommend to CAD beginners.
Maybe something like: https://www.solidworks.com/sites/default/files/cswpsampleexa... (jump to page 18).
I'm similar with 20+ years of experience with Autodesk products so freecad was (and often still is) frustrating for me because I know what I need to do but don't know the freecad ways. Claude has been very helpful when I give it the context of my experience because it relates the Autodesk way to the freecad way in its explanations.
Highlights reel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9biWv_M8p8
Release Notes: https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.1
To add to this. MangoJelly offers very good tutorials, as well as a full course on Udemy. He released a 4 minute overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSwvnZ1jsXg
DeltaHedra, another great YouTube channel, also released a good video that shows the previous and this version next to each other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYdobpjTypg
Thumbs up for both of them, but I must say that DeltaHedra has become my new favourite FreeCAD content creator. Especially after he started using his own voice. His old content was good, but his current his magnifique! The quality of the content he pushes is above and beyond.
FreeCAD is really the only serious contender for CAD on Linux. I love how everything is hackable via Python APIs. Every release seems to fix more and more UX issues. I have very high hopes for it to eventually start attracting more commercial usage, much like KiCad and Blender did in their spaces. We need more open software like that.
Almost purely for amusement, I played around with letting Claude generate Python code for FreeCAD. I actually got a coherent part out of it, that I sent out for fabrication. The practical motivation is that my needs are extremely basic (plates, brackets, etc) but I have some physical issues that prevent me from using GUI based CAD directly.
>I love how everything is hackable via Python APIs.
It is hackable with languages other than Python too. The Python interpreter has no restrictions to access and execute everything it likes. Contrast this with Gimp, which it's Scheme interpreter cannot access anything except objects inside Gimp.
This opens some security hole risks in Freecad, given that plugins can execute arbitrary code in the user's machine, but that means one can write C, C++, Rust and automate the gui.
Freecad btw, very unfortunately, it loads each .so external library only once, and it will load the library only with different name or version number. I lost 5 hours messing up with Python versions and .venv installations till I figured that out.
You can run Solidworks or Onshape as well. The former via Wine, the latter in Chrome.
This is wild. I'll be honest I've long been scared away from FreeCAD because of the overwhelming number of buttons and hotkeys but have recently started 3D printing and using deliberately limited tools like TinkerCAD and OpenSCAD and quickly found those limits. "Simple" things like easing an edge, adding clearance, or cutting threads.
On the suggestion of one of these comments I've started watching Deltahedra videos on YouTube [and they're great] but after watching his 1.1 release video it looks like half his tutorials could be remade with the new shortcuts. It's also pretty humbling to see someone who knows their tools make something.
I'd worry if I was AutoDesk. Given the way they treat their customers like pinatas, I'm surprised they've maintained their dominance.
I vibecoded a suitcase handle months ago with its Python interface. A pleasant experience.
Would like to hear more about how you did it. Did you connect it up to Claude Code?
Just asked for boxes, curved shapes, cylinders, cuts, mirroring, gave exact dimensions and it built up to ~400 lines of FreeCAD python.
3d printed handle was exactly how i wanted it to be
Freecad never really clicked with me. Tried it most recently in 2023 and the user experience just didn't make sense to me. My impression was that freecad is one of those projects were things have been a certain way for a long time (UX/UI wise I mean) and it works for those people so it will never change. For my small cad usage I just went with onshape.
My experience is similar, except that I gave up and did OpenSCAD (now PythonSCAD) and am trying Dune 3D.
Looking forward to this update. There are so many hidden gotchas in FreeCAD once you get past the basics. Load of bugs and head scratching issues. However its free and local so can’t complain to much.
This is awesome! Kudos to the developers, they really went above and beyond for this release.
In coming time you can see freecad massively improving.
This space lacks good opensource solution.
I have tried creating my parts, tried tinkercad (which is simple but limited)
Tried fusion. And pretty much other things don't support mac.
I've a hunch lots of vibe coders are going to come and launch stuff like freecad and Gimp (which I never liked, can't even get simple tasks done in gimp)
Future is bright for opensource powered by LLM coding on steroids.
Linkedin sentence structure + baseless LLM promotion.
There is no evidence here the latest update was vibe coded. It's fairly offensive to devalue the work that the FreeCAD developers put in like this.
They recently posted rules about submitting AI generated code:
https://blog.freecad.org/2026/03/16/rules-regarding-ai-gener...
You might want to learn to read comments before commenting on them.
Freecad is limited by Open Cascade which is the modeling kernel at the heart of the program. I started with Open Cascade then moved on to Granite from PTC (not open source) and the latter is just so much easier, faster, and stable. I’ve heard Parasolid and whatever it is that Autodesk uses these days are both excellent as well.
It would be nice for there to be a more modern open source modeling library.
There is promising news on the development of OpenCASCADE front:
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/QQRAAF-occt3d-8-kerne...
U only need to get a prototype working, post on show HN and it will attracted others who see point in it. It would be nice to have a CAD which is user friendly. I don't like fusion either but it's necessary evil.
I like FreeCAD but I use it so rarely that I forget how to use it by the time I need it again.
So I returned to Fusion 360 (for the time being).
Maybe this new FreeCAD version is easier to use?
I've designed some basic parts in Tinkercad and openscad but have never really been able to grok Freecad or Fusion. Is there a good resource for making that leap? Just the explosion of menu bar options is a lot
Fusion is very easy to learn. If you can use tickercad.
Just draw sketches, learn to extrude, push pull, and it all depends on how good you are at sketching in 2d, setting up constraints, workflow is simple and it works most of the times but when it doesn't work, it's pain.
I am pretty sure fusions workflow sucks but I can't put my finger on why. I am still waiting for a better product which is also free and opensource.
Maybe llm vibe coding will unlock this finally. Where bunch of people come together to take up parameterized 3dmodeling.
I really like Mango Jelly Solutions on YouTube but DeltaHedra is very good as well.
Congrats - the release video is very impressive !
I was not expecting so many improvements in this version alone, I'm impressed. I was already using it for 3d printing but now it seems it's getting actually good, makes me wonder how I was able to use the previous version.
I am also impressed by how much they are improving things. It just sucks that they are stuck with the OpenCasacade kernel so making stability improvements are hard to make in areas like fillets and others.
I don't follow Open CASCADE very closely, but it looks like they're on the verge of a new major release (v8.0) themselves that looks like a lot of refactoring and cleanup.
I don't know hat version FreeCAD is actually bundling, but from GitHub it looks like a fork of 7.8.1?
Yes, the OpenCASCADE 8.0 release is very promising. There's a FOSDEM presentation from this year by one of their developers which shows what's in the works.
This is great to hear. I tried it a few years ago, and it was just so far behind onshape and fusion for usability from a beginner perspective.
This is single want to give it another chance
TL;DR: I wish they'd just align with Blender on UX, TBH.
I wish they settled on a nicer UX with less visual clutter. I use Blender and it is a _massively_ more complex application in every regard, yet its right-aligned panel and progressive exposure of toolbars feels infinitely more polished than FreeCad's clunky panel (which is often rendered with huge, oversized fields and buttons) and their legendary five-stacked toolbars.
Feels like that satirical Gillette ad, and is much harder to use and navigate, especially since quite a few UX options need to be turned on in Preferences to be usable...
The day I found out there’s a dropdown menu that turns blender into a multi-track video editor on par with Vegas if not Final Cut… blender hides its complexity well.
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code