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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

#221

Post by ecjhdnc2025 »

schmidtleonard wrote: post #207
ecjhdnc2025 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. And I think it now has the best tutorials on youtube. And the Facebook group is weirdly fantastic. It’s such a nice community. But there’s no denying that FreeCAD is still a bit of a lifestyle choice :-) I love it, but I don’t try to sell everyone on it yet.

Agreed. The UI is painful, but the project priorities are correct: fixing TNP and fillet/chamfer needs to come before the polish. First make it minimum viable for the non-zealous, then we can talk about drawing attention with a sexy dark-mode-by-default UI overhaul. It's getting close, but that makes this the most important time to exercise restraint.

Alas, fully fixing the issues with fillets and chamfers may be impossible, because those specific problems are quite foundational issues in OpenCascade. I don’t know if it’s even possible for FreeCAD to know that a fillet would fail by testing it, because of limitations with the responses that come back from the kernel.

It might be possible to predict which edges would have problems, but I think that would involve repeating geometry calculations outside the geometry kernel?

Specifically the main problem with fillets/chamfers in OCC is that the new face cannot completely consume/replace an existing edge.

That is to say -- I think!? -- that one of the edges of the new fillet/chamfer is always an existing edge just displaced, and no edges are destroyed. If an edge would be destroyed, then it fails?

But this is just my colloquial/folklore understanding.

There have been newer versions of OCC that FreeCAD has not yet switched to, I think. (And there is a new (Chinese) fork, called OpenGeometry.)

So maybe there are some fixes already in the pipeline or in the future. But they are somewhat out of the FreeCAD project's control, is my understanding.

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

#222

Post by Gracana »

iancmceachern wrote: post #216
Gracana wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get Solidworks bugs fixed, and on what timescale? We have ~20 solidworks premium seats, plus a handful of licenses for other dassault products. We've complained loudly about various issues, submitted and voted on feature requests, talked to our VAR at length and in many on-site meetings, and nothing seems to happen as a direct result. At best, a bug is incidentally fixed in a later release. It's still bett…

You submit a ticket with your VAR, and then keep following up with it. I've never once run into something that they didn't have a workaround for, and then eventually fix. Sometimes it takes a service pack or two. They out out 4 or 5 service packs every year along with the major yearly releases, those service packs are basically entirely bug fixes. You may want to look into switching VARs if your not happy with your s…

Our VAR was Trimech for many years, then we tried a few others that were worse, and finally we came back to Trimech.

We've always lagged a year behind the current SW release to try to avoid getting hit by the latest and greatest bugs.

I think we just hit more edge cases than other companies. We have half a TB of stuff in our vault (about 250k files), going back to 2012 for the first import. Lots of legacy files, fairly complex assemblies, heavy use of some tricky stuff like the sheetmetal design tools (where we tend to find the most bugs). And then there's Solidworks Electrical, which I don't think anybody is set up to support well, as it's still a fairly recent acquisition from Trace Software.

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

#223

Post by ecjhdnc2025 »

tverbeure wrote: post #218
ecjhdnc2025 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. But this is the choice, isn't it? I don't know if you can really get away without learning general things about CAD systems if you want to make complex things, because those general things are so influential on the existence and design of real world objects. It's like saying "but I don't really want to learn about different programming languages or software design, because I only want to write apps for iPhone.…

100 hours of watching videos and trying to make something and not getting anywhere vs a few hours. The problem was not about getting away with it without learning general principles. Of course, those 100 hours taught me about principles that were applicable to OnShape as well, so it’s not entirely apples to apples. BTW, the issue was never TNP. It was everything else. The absurd separation between Parts and bodies an…

I've not watched 100 hours of videos at all and I've made and printed fully parametric designs with four variants driven by two configuration tables. I don't think it's that hard to learn.

> The absurd separation between Parts and bodies and whatnot.

Again, Parts/Bodies, it's confusing (and Part Design should be called "Single Body Design" IMO) but there are videos that explain the difference.

(I gather it comes from CATIA, and CATIA users are comfortable. Either way you don't have to use both; it's possible to never touch Part Design and do absolutely everything.)

I don't think I got it initially but now the difference is useful. There could be more work to allow non-Part-Design Parts to be wrapped in Part Design bodies. There's a macro (pdwrapper) for this, and Realthunder's branch built it in.

There could be better explanations on how Part Design works, how you build a Part Design Body from existing Parts and how you later combine them.

> The 5 different assembly benches, none of them good.

I feel this pain and I mostly avoided it by just using static placement. There's a new built-in Assembly workbench with a sophisticated solver that is being added in 1.0 which will land in the next two to three months (and is already in 0.22-dev and Ondsel 2024.2). I am going to dive in with that.

> The crashes.

Not a problem I have on the Mac at all now; 0.21 is really stable. Though startup crashes are common on Linux due to W****nd and the complexities of compiling support for it. The Flatpak appears to solve those. Ish.

> The way you need pixel precision to grab a vertex or an edge.

There is a preference setting (a newish one) that makes edge selection rougher/easier.

> And if some operation cuts a part in multiple disjoint pieces, only one survives.

Only in Part Design, which (in mainstream FreeCAD) is concerned with only one contiguous object. In fact, that operation actually fails. (A Body can be started with a compound of multiple pieces, but the first feature has to join them).

RealThunder's branch can support Bodies made of separate solids, and maybe that will come to mainstream once the TNP fix, which is a prerequisite, is in.

Outside of Part Design, objects split as you'd expect.

I don't think FreeCAD is perfect. That would be silly. But none of the "free" plans of the commercial cloud packages are right for me.

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

#224

Post by 0x0203 »

spookie wrote: post #67
RobotToaster wrote: post #59

> In contrast, the open source CAD landscape looks like this: He missed BRL-CAD, which also does brep. The interface is clunky but the kernel seems advanced.

BRL-CAD is a true gem

Do you have any preferred guides for getting started wtih BRL-CAD? I've tried a couple of times, but it seems like it's more a large collection of various tools and it's hard to know where to start. Or even what the general design philosophy is. It looks like the core functionality is more a code-driven approach to modeling? With UI driven design (archer) only in the experimental/early-development stage?

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

#225

Post by pompino »

wg0 wrote: post #201
pompino wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no serious comparison to the performance and richness offered by native applications. Famously (and wisely), Apple quickly reversed their decision on web apps for iOS devices.

That's long gone. Long long gone actually. Now browser is such a huge and capable platform that there's nothing comparable available anywhere. Even XBox controller's drivers come baked into browser. Just check the number of APIs on MDN. As for performance, that's already not anywhere into discussion. Check Google Docs. Everything single thing you are on screen is drawn using Canvas and it works just.... everywhere.

Your bar is much lower than mine, so we won't agree on this.

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

#226

Post by rqtwteye »

ghostpepper wrote: post #91
loughnane wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't do UI in small pieces. Most things like new algorithms or functionality can be added in a very localized way that doesn't impact other components. A UI on the other hand encompasses everything and also needs taste. And tastes are different.

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

#227

Post by loughnane »

prokoudine wrote: post #45
loughnane wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You could tell from the beginning that they cared a ton about usability and had their minds wrapped around how people use CAD. Well, what else can you expect from the very same guy who came up with SolidWorks in the 1990s? :)

Yeah, I know him. Fwiw I think onshape’s UI is much better than solidworks.

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

#228

Post by marshray »

alright2565 wrote: post #92
dcminter wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the developer of a non-open source project The first line of the article says "We're building a new open-source CAD program"

It's elastic license unfortunately: https://github.com/MattFerraro/CADmium/blob/main/LICENSE.md Which is a shame because the AGPL has nearly the same effect & the bonus of unjustifiably terrifying big-corp legal teams.

Oh, I guess I'm not touching it then.

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

#229

Post by Suppafly »

prokoudine wrote: post #151
PetitPrince wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very recently (well: yesterday and today), I made the same non trivial shape for an electronics project, and I tried Fusion360, OnShape and FreeCad. I basically want to extend the base of an Ikea lantern (Enrum); this require creating an (irregular) octagonal shape, and then creating a slot so that the lantern base can sit on it. I had some distant memories of modeling stuff in Solidworks for a project back in univer…

Much of that has been improved for the next release.

>Much of that has been improved for the next release.

Isn't that what OSS project always say?

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

#230

Post by jonathankoren »

prokoudine wrote: post #209
jonathankoren wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can keep assert these things, but do you really think this is acceptable progress of two and a half decades? Look around. It’s not. I gave a concrete example of a task that is trivial in 2024, and it just does not work nearly as well or as easily. It’s the same functionality of 30 years ago. Instead, you’re sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming, “it is progress!” Yeah, well maybe technically correct, b…

Sounds like you are mad at the world and I got in the middle of it. Sorry, I'll see myself out.

Sit by and let nothing happen while you’re out!
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