121–130 of 243 posts
Totally going to check this out. I've been rooting for FreeCAD but I think it's just going to be consumed by Ondsel in the next few years. Does CADmium suffer from a topological naming problem like FreeCAD?
Well this article talks about revisiting venture capital in the future. Which pretty much means the end of cadmium at that point haha
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Have you looked at Build123D?
I haven't. Thanks for the pointer!
Many interesting features, and as it is bRep you have faces and edges, some access to constraints, the ability to import STEP etc. (oh and fillets/chamfers, with the usual OpenCascade caveats)
I have not got into it yet (mostly I am a happy FreeCADder) but your feelings about OpenSCAD resonate with me and this looks like it addresses many of them.
On the one hand OpenSCAD was the first thing that ever gave me any confidence that I would be able to make my own designs to print, and on the other the fact that it is wholly declarative is exasperating.
People make such amazing things in OpenSCAD (like Edgar Kech’s scalable large format field camera) but I do not have the tenacity to keep up with all the maths, or keep consistently avoiding coplanar issues in the preview.
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I had 10y or so experience with CAD when onshape showed up around 2014. You could tell from the beginning that they cared a ton about usability and had their minds wrapped around how people use CAD. It’s only got better since. I highly recommend the cadmium folks just soak themselves in onshape’s UX.
Why is open source always so bad at UUX - it's so frustrating. I believe the people who say FreeCAD is powerful but I'm skeptical I will ever experience it.
I really hope CADmium can wean me off of OpenSCAD. With OpenSCAD, I don't really have to think at first; I use a simple language to write modules that build on other modules. The problem with OpenSCAD is there's no solver: I have variables, but no constraints. As I make changes, suddenly I have to think hard and solve the constraints manually and it's easy to introduce errors. However, the problem isn't severe enough…
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I will say that the FreeCAD weekly builds have made massive strides; I believe the toponaming fix is in the latest mainline weekly now and Ondsel have been contributing great work back from their branch as well. I’ve been playing around with the weekly version and using the OpenDark theme. It looks pretty slick. It seems like a really exciting time for open-source CAD (hopefully!).
FreeCAD suffers from the same issues that much open-source software suffers from: it has bugs. Bugs erode user confidence. Apparently, there are now > 500 bugs open. When commercial software has bugs, you don't even know they exist often. Sure, but there are also ways to make bug free software, but hardly any open-source software exists that uses those development techniques.
You see the same problems with a lot of “flagship” oss ware. Gimp seems to have the same awkward feature set for 25 years. Apparently the only thing that has changed is they no longer compile against Gtk 1.0, and they decided to have all images in a single window.
Still can’t do smart background erase.
Inkscape kinda works, but it always seems like attachment points for easily alignment, and a non sucky text editor are forever out of reach.
I’m sorry. I know software is hard, but it’s been literally decades of stagnation.
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FreeCAD suffers from the same issues that much open-source software suffers from: it has bugs. Bugs erode user confidence. Apparently, there are now > 500 bugs open. When commercial software has bugs, you don't even know they exist often. Sure, but there are also ways to make bug free software, but hardly any open-source software exists that uses those development techniques.
You think professional software is bug-free? I have some experience with NX and I can tell you it’s not exactly bug-free either. It’s very likely better than FreeCAD, but requiring zero bugs is just unrealistic.
Particularly younger engineers have their mind blown over the concept of not immediately upgrading all your software just because there's a new version.
In the physical engineering spaces, it's more valuable to keep using the same software version you started a project with, rather than have hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages because of a dickhead bug.
Totally going to check this out. I've been rooting for FreeCAD but I think it's just going to be consumed by Ondsel in the next few years. Does CADmium suffer from a topological naming problem like FreeCAD?
If you worry about freecad/ondsel Well this article talks about revisiting venture capital in the future. Which pretty much means the end of cadmium at that point haha
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Maybe I'm not enough of an evangelist, but I just want a good, non-subscription local-first CAD package. I've recently moved over to Alibre Atom3D, which, while not open-source, costs $200. Once. Then (as long as your host OS doesn't change too much) you can access your designs forever. It runs on the ACIS kernel. "Browser first" and (from the readme) "Beyond that, I will try to monetize by offering a hosted version…
The problem with Alibre is that it only works on Windows. I switched from FreeCAD to the free (as in beer) version of Onshape, which works in the browser and is a night and day difference over FreeCAD. Your designs are wide open for anyone to see, but I can live with that for hobby stuff.
Getting negative vibes from the name. Cadmium's a nasty substance. I mean, you wouldn't call an augmented reality app ARsenic, would you? Constructive, I hope, criticism.
Why is it that open source programs always want me to use an awful (and proprietary) chat app?