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CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

mattferraro.dev

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Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#191

Post by virtualritz »

bobby_the_whal wrote: post #106
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can only talk about professional visual effects (VFX) software like Maya and Nuke.

Let's just say I've seen their (internal) bug trackers.

TLDR; you couldn't be more wrong.

When OSS software has bugs, at least someone with an interest in the issue and the skills can do something about it.

For closed source software nobody can. Even the people working at the resp. company who are developers rarely or never decide about priorities.

And as an added hurdle, adding features always has higher priority as it drives sales.

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#192

Post by wdfx »

ajmurmann wrote: post #164
tverbeure wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably spent 100 hours trying to tame FreeCAD, and ended up thinking CAD was just not for me. I then tried Onshape and found out that the problem was elsewhere.

Did you do any tutorials? I've done like 10 hrs of the MangojellySolutions beginner tutorials on YouTube and after that I've been pretty much able to do what I want or only had to look up solutions to a very specific problem. I one time had an issue where I messed up and had to post on the FreeCAD forum and got two of the best responses I've gotten anywhere on the internet ever. Two people opened up my model and took…

On the flip side I spent probably 30 minutes each to get acquainted with Fusion and Onshape, and completed my first designs within a couple of hours.

I've invested several hours already in trying to learn FreeCAD and achieved nothing. Its a hot mess that desperately needs a new UI.

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#193

Post by ecjhdnc2025 »

wdfx wrote: post #192
ajmurmann wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you do any tutorials? I've done like 10 hrs of the MangojellySolutions beginner tutorials on YouTube and after that I've been pretty much able to do what I want or only had to look up solutions to a very specific problem. I one time had an issue where I messed up and had to post on the FreeCAD forum and got two of the best responses I've gotten anywhere on the internet ever. Two people opened up my model and took…

On the flip side I spent probably 30 minutes each to get acquainted with Fusion and Onshape, and completed my first designs within a couple of hours. I've invested several hours already in trying to learn FreeCAD and achieved nothing. Its a hot mess that desperately needs a new UI.

It might take more than several hours. But the Mango Jelly Solutions videos on Youtube will get you into FreeCAD.

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#194

Post by ryukoposting »

pointhi wrote: post #181
ryukoposting wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Live synchronization of layout and schematic files. I consider this essential to circuit design, especially in later iterative stages. That alone totally eliminates KiCAD as a professional EDA in my opinion.

Live synchronization of layout and schematic files is a feature you find in EAGLE, but in almost no other EDA program. If you say KiCAD is not an professional EDA due to missing live synchronization, the same argument applies also to Altium, Cadence Allegro, and most other EDA systems which are considered as professional by most people.

Fine. KiCAD's manual tool still gives me more trouble than Altium ever has. How about the lack of a built in autorouter? Infuriating wire placement UX? We can keep going here.

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#195

Post by pca006132 »

phkahler wrote: post #61
WillAdams wrote: post #40

Why in a browser if it's local-first? Solvespace has the benefit of being a single download/executable. It also has a constraint solver which has been used in a couple of projects: CADsketcher as you noted, and Dune 3D: https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d where the author noted: >I ended up directly using solvespace's solver instead of the suggested wrapper code since it didn't expose all of the features I needed. I als…

>> Manifold was not mentioned Manifold is a triangle mesh library. CAD should use NURBS surfaces and only triangulate them for rendering. I had looked at replacing the solvespace triangle mesh code with Manfold, but it's a lot of work and what we really need is to fix the NURBS bugs so we don't need to lean on the mesh code so much. BTW the solvespace constraint solver is also used in the Assembly 3 workbench of Free…

Yeah, triangle mesh library and NURBS are very different, they do different things. Interesting to know that the solvespace folks wanted to try integrating manifold. Feel free to open an issue or discussion if needed, there were many changes as manifold was actively developed and gaining more users.

I am also interested in having a simple constraint solver for some kind of constructive geometry useful for CAD modeling, but not necessarily a full-fledged NURBS kernel. I think it can be interesting for text-based modeling, probably similar to some of the CadQuery APIs.

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#196

Post by ecjhdnc2025 »

snapetom wrote: post #176
gen3 wrote: post #6

As someone who learned CAD on autodesk (inventor) ages ago, the only free modeling software I could grasp after working for a few hours was Onshape. Usability seems to be a real problem in this space, Freecad for example seemed to have a billion ways to do the same thing, but in the end only one of them was the real way, some tutorials leaving me with a model that doesn't conform. Awesome work! It seems like a hard p…

Man, I thought FreeCAD’s problem was me being an idiot, but glad to hear someone else come to the same conclusion. I recently spent an hour or two almost every evening for about 3 weeks to come up with what I thought was a simple object I needed to print. The cycle was: 1) Watch and do one tutorial that gets you 80% of the way there. 2) Try to stumble together the rest of the way. 3) Find out the fundamental tutorial…

There are many, many bad small tutorials on youtube where the presenter has something that works for them but fails to understand the core principles. Or it's from way back before the 0.18 redesign of Part Design.

The Mango Jelly Solutions videos, the Joko engineering videos, the Adventures In Creation videos and thehardwareguy's videos are excellent.

There is no doubt that understanding how to mitigate TNP is important, though. Many of the videos do not go into this each time (which will be good once the issue is mitigated, very soon, but is obviously an issue at the moment).

The fundamental issue I see with bad Youtube tutorials is people skipping from Part Design to other workbenches without understanding that they are not wholly interchangeable. That is, all Part Design Body objects are Parts, but not all Parts are Part Design Body objects. Part Design is a subset.

There is at least one excellent video by Mango Jelly Solutions going into the detail of why you should choose one over the other.

But the guts of it is that Part Design does have an ordered flow -- it's a sequence of steps from a simple to a complete object, executed one after the other and implicitly booleaned together. So it has additive features and subtractive features.

Whereas in a non-Part-Design workflow, you are in charge of when something is cut from something else; there's no subtractive tooling, only boolean tools. More CSG-ish.

A good grasp of FreeCAD involves understanding Part Design's relatively special guided flow, and that outside of it is a more open-ended approach.

The RealThunder developments to Part Design after TNP was fixed do go a long way towards making this less relevant (Part Design can work with multiple bodies rather than being focussed on a single body, and you can "wrap" non-Part-Design objects in a Part Design Body object more freely without using a macro). And that way you get to use Part Design much more like Fusion 360.

But there are definitely FreeCAD proponents who would say that Part Design is training wheels for what is really going on, and that there's no substitute for many general concepts inside Part Design. The latter is true; also the implicit booleans in Part Design make some of the PD operations slower.

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#197

Post by btreecat »

snapetom wrote: post #176
gen3 wrote: post #6

As someone who learned CAD on autodesk (inventor) ages ago, the only free modeling software I could grasp after working for a few hours was Onshape. Usability seems to be a real problem in this space, Freecad for example seemed to have a billion ways to do the same thing, but in the end only one of them was the real way, some tutorials leaving me with a model that doesn't conform. Awesome work! It seems like a hard p…

Man, I thought FreeCAD’s problem was me being an idiot, but glad to hear someone else come to the same conclusion. I recently spent an hour or two almost every evening for about 3 weeks to come up with what I thought was a simple object I needed to print. The cycle was: 1) Watch and do one tutorial that gets you 80% of the way there. 2) Try to stumble together the rest of the way. 3) Find out the fundamental tutorial…

> Does the order typical matter that much in CAD? I went all in on this thinking it was a simple object and how hard can FreeCAD be. Turns out, very hard.

Yes, it does matter. I discovered this through my own self learning with OpenSCAD, FreeCAD and OnShape. I actually prefer the workflow of FreeCAD to OnShape for a lot of tasks.

FreeCAD isn't that hard, cad isn't that hard. Especially for any developer with some level of XP in breaking down a complex problem domain into smaller composable parts.

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#198

Post by btreecat »

hathawsh wrote: post #86

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…

FreeCAD has a built in OpenSCAD engine.

I started with OpenSCAD but found FreeCAD to be way more productive for me when it came to actually producing 3d objects. Sometimes I want to start with a square, then delete a line, and add a semi circle. But I don't always know that until I start sketching. With OpenSCAD I feel you have to know the shape primitive you need, then the exact way to modify it, and the fact that it encourages 3D primitives over 2d w/ extrusion and rotating was kinda annoying imo.

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#199

Post by btreecat »

mijoharas wrote: post #180

This looks cool. What would people recommend for a CAD program to run on Linux that I could use now (that is either free or cheap). I have simple requirements, I want to make a box for some electronics, but need the ability to import (and extrude etc) SVGs. I couldn't see the SVG feature when I looked at dune, and I had some problems when I used freeCAD, but was planning on looking into it again. What would people su…

FreeCAD is my go to currently but you can also do all that in OnShape if you can swallow the public only files and always online requirements.

FreeCAD has really good file format support in my XP.

https://wiki.freecad.org/SVG

Re: CADmium: A local-first CAD program built for the browser

#200

Post by wdfx »

ecjhdnc2025 wrote: post #193
wdfx wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side I spent probably 30 minutes each to get acquainted with Fusion and Onshape, and completed my first designs within a couple of hours. I've invested several hours already in trying to learn FreeCAD and achieved nothing. Its a hot mess that desperately needs a new UI.

It might take more than several hours. But the Mango Jelly Solutions videos on Youtube will get you into FreeCAD.

Sure, but my primary objective is not "to learn CAD systems" - I just want to get models done for making things.
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