
FreeCAD 0.17 “Roland” released - kwk1
https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/releases/tag/0.17
======
app4soft
> _This release of FreeCAD is dedicated to our friend Roland Frank[0] who left
> us in 2017. He was an active and well-appreciated member of the FreeCAD
> forum, and his video tutorials on the Learn FreeCAD and BPLFRE Youtube
> channels helped many people get started with FreeCAD._

R.I.P.

[0]
[https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=25673](https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=25673)

~~~
app4soft
Thank You, Roland, for your AWESOME video tutorials on _Learn FreeCAD_ [1] and
_BPLFRE_ [2] YouTube channels!

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HEvhclR4-o&list=PL6fZ68Cq3L...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HEvhclR4-o&list=PL6fZ68Cq3L8k0JhxnIVjZQN26cn9idJrj)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m49z0weonog&list=PLsrwVwvqYb...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m49z0weonog&list=PLsrwVwvqYb8G4Ri0iz1JIebsOXkgoytAY)

------
chuggalo
I encourage anybody to try FreeCAD. 0.17 is the first release I could actually
recommend. The geometric kernel is still quite buggy and still cannot compete
even with the cheapest commercial offerings, but it provides a massive feature
set and some very interesting/unique features.

I use FreeCAD in combination with OpenSCAD and cadquery for my 3d-printed
projects and CNC milling. It's actually good enough for most hobbyist projects
(anything in the range of <5k$).

The ability to model with CSG with OpenSCAD and BREP in a single package
(thanks to the openscad plugin) allows the best of both worlds. The python
scriptability with cadquery allows to generate complex parametric geometries
that would be painful to even approach with a regular CAD package.

With constraint references and indirect formula references you can setup
pretty robust parametric models that can be reused quite effectively.

FreeCAD has _enormous_ potential.

~~~
donquichotte
I applaud the FreeCAD team for their efforts and hope it will become to 3D
mechanical CAD what KiCAD has become for PCB design and schematic capture.

That said, I can get Fusion360 for free, and while I hate the fact that it's
not open-source and that my files are hidden and locked away ond Autodesk's
servers and that they can cancel my free "hobbyist" subscription on a whim,
Fusion360 is so much easier and faster to use for my small weekend projects
that I just cannot bring myself to go through the pain of learning how to
avoid the random crashes of FreeCAD.

EDIT: if there is a donation page for FreeCAD, I am willing to pitch in.

~~~
kwk1
> EDIT: if there is a donation page for FreeCAD, I am willing to pitch in.

There isn't a single donation page. One of the main developers, Yorik van
Havre, has a Patreon [1], and there's a Liberapay [2]. I also just decided to
make a Patreon [3] (I'm the sysadmin for the project as well as a developer.)

1\.
[https://www.patreon.com/yorikvanhavre](https://www.patreon.com/yorikvanhavre)

2\. [https://liberapay.com/FreeCAD/](https://liberapay.com/FreeCAD/)

3\. [https://www.patreon.com/kkremitzki](https://www.patreon.com/kkremitzki)

------
mrreelmo
I really like this effort of creating an open 3D CAD environment. See here the
release notes:
[https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/Release_notes_0.17](https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/Release_notes_0.17)

------
newnewpdro
The last time I tried designing something in FreeCAD it kept crashing at
random inopportune moments, but was so damn close to being good enough. This
was version 0.16 from Debian, I'm looking forward to trying again with 0.17.

~~~
xevb3k
I last tried it maybe 3 years back. It was buggy then too, but the main issue
was that when I sent a part out to fab they couldn’t get the files to
import/render correctly (missing faces).

There solution was “please send us the solidworks file”. So... I gave up.

More recently, I’ve been using Onshape. My understanding is that was designed
by many of the Solidworks team. It works reasonably well and I’ve not had
issues getting parts made.

Ideally I think I’d like something that was both cloud based and open source.
But I should give freecad or Solvespace another chance perhaps.

~~~
kwk1
> There solution was “please send us the solidworks file”. So... I gave up.

Ack, that sounds rough--there can definitely be some pain on the bleeding edge
(of open-source CAD.)

As far as cloud-based, do you just mean in terms of having that available as a
storage/sharing option? Or are you wanting a browser-based client? I've been
interested in looking at options for the former for FreeCAD, possibly using
either Nextcloud or Mediagoblin servers as backend. (Unfortunately there
doesn't seem to be a good FOSS product lifecycle management software.)

~~~
justinclift
As a thought, I've put time and effort into a potential solution for this, for
a different (non-CAD) project though.

Emailed you the details in case it's of interest. Might need to check your
spam folder as gmail _sometimes_ puts things from my domain in there (mail
config issue on our end, but can't be solved easily).

------
eggy
I have been using FreeCAD for a while for real projects where I would have
used Inventor. My assemblies and parts are not huge, and being able to write
things in python is awesome. You can even use FreeCAD without the gui from
python. I am currently trying to get FreeDyn, a multibody dynamics simulation
program to work with it [1]. I have used the FEM workbench to do simple FEAs
too. It's an amazingly open platform with a lot of potential.

    
    
      [1] http://www.freedyn.at/

~~~
JamesCoyne
How do you handle assemblies efficiently? I found the assembly workbench to be
a major weakness of FreeCad when compared to Solidworks or Inventor.

~~~
eggy
Typically I am not working on assemblies of more than 10 to 20 parts. You're
right though, Inventor and Solidworks do handle them better, but with a lot of
complexity that scales better when you are working on assemblies and
subassemblies of over 100 parts or more. I used to work on machinery with more
parts, but now I work on sub assemblies with fewer parts. The assembly
workbench will improve when people who have a need for it improve it in
FreeCAD. I used to do assemblies with CSG over 15 years ago, and it was
complicated, but I was very frustrated in the early days of Inventor when you
went down a path, and then found yourself painted in a corner by the history
or constraint tree. Changing one thing, and watching it all blow up was my
first letdown after jumping on the parametric/history modeling bandwagon (I
also used SolidWorks and IDEAS). FreeCAD has come a long way, and I use it
more often than before. Quick startup times and fast working with a great
Python API (I used to program AutoLISP for comparison).

------
progval
> Linux users are advised to get FreeCAD from their distribution's repository

Wow, it has been a long time since I last saw a big piece of software
recommending distribution repositories instead of a custom repo, a standalone
package, or a curl|bash.

~~~
opencl
They do have a standalone AppImage. Which somehow managed to hang my entire
GNOME session the first time I ran it, but worked after logging out and back
in.

------
jononor
According to github I've used FreeCAD for 249 designs over the last 3 years.
These parts have been 3d-printed, lasercut and CNC milled. Since 0.16 came out
I've been quite happy with the software, but looking forward to switching to
this release. Especially improvements in Part Design workflow and the
integrated CAM should make my usage much nicer. Major thanks to all the
contributors!

------
MichailP
Are there some news about jupyter-notebook integration? That would be
massive...

~~~
kwk1
There was a potential Google Summer of Code project to work on this last
year[1], but it doesn't look like there were any mentors or applicants this
year.

1\.
[https://freecadweb.org/wiki/IPython_notebook_integration](https://freecadweb.org/wiki/IPython_notebook_integration)

------
gntech
Some highlights in video form
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iLOaL9z59k&t=11s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iLOaL9z59k&t=11s)

------
twarge
Those of you coming from Solodworks beware. There isn’t first class Assembly
support. However Realthunder’s Assembly3 work is incredibly promising.

[https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD_assembly3](https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD_assembly3)

~~~
kwk1
Indeed, now that the Part Design overhaul is complete, Assembly improvements
will be one of the main targets for the 0.18 dev cycle.

~~~
opencl
Is there any estimated timeline for 0.18? 0.16 to 0.17 seems to have taken
about 2 years.

There's a roadmap page but it lists 0.18 as "Scheduled For Release
2017-11-03".

~~~
jononor
Estimates are hard enough in the professional world where one pays X
developers to do Y. In a volunteer-ran open source its nearly meaningless...

Start to use it today, use extensions like Assembly2/3 to compensate for
missing features and do your best to help out if that is not enough. Or have
patience :)

~~~
opencl
Oh yes, I'm well aware of this. I wouldn't still be using GIMP after 10 years
if I wasn't a patient person. :)

Though I fiddled with an example file for ~5 minutes and it crashed twice in
that timespan. Exactly like the last time I tried FreeCAD a few years ago. But
I would really like to move on from F360 so I will try to give it more of a
chance this time, and hopefully I'll find the time to contribute something.

~~~
jononor
Crashed in FreeCAD 0.17? Is the bug reported with clear steps to reproduce?
Ensuring that is in place is already a good contribution!

------
grondilu
Is there any effort towards a webassembly port?

~~~
jononor
Would need Python and Qt5 and OpenCascade. Huge undertaking. And for what
gain? It's available on all common desktop platforms already. And one can
export 3d-model viewers that can be embedded in HTML.

On web side of things what I think would be desirable is a webUI for
parametric designs, ala Thingiverse Customizer

------
leoedin
For those interested in open source 3D CAD applications, there's a really
interesting application called SolveSpace which is a very, very fast and low
resource 3D parametric CAD application.

It's really useful, really fast and very stable - all in a tiny executable.
Definitely worth a try if you're coming from a CAD background - it's the first
open source 3D CAD application I've used which could replace Solidworks for
quick, painless part modelling.

[http://solvespace.com/index.pl](http://solvespace.com/index.pl)

~~~
newnewpdro
Interesting bit of trivia: SolveSpace comes from M-Labs, formerly known as
Milkymist, creators of the Milkymist One video synthesizer. M-Labs now focuses
on quantum information experiment control software. [1]

I remember watching Milkymist/Migen talks [2][3] given by creator Sébastien
Bourdeauducq years ago and stumbling across the early SolveSpace site at the
time in researching his background. It was already looking quite promising
back then, and I got the impression they were using/developing it for their
own CAD needs based on what I saw in their IRC channel. There's clearly a lot
of talent in that group.

[1] [https://m-labs.hk/about.html](https://m-labs.hk/about.html)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se0VhwgpzZg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se0VhwgpzZg)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zADdKAtHM1Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zADdKAtHM1Y)

~~~
jwesthues
> Interesting bit of trivia: SolveSpace comes from M-Labs

I developed SolveSpace, and whitequark (via M-Labs) is the current maintainer.
He's responsible for all the non-Windows ports, plus the last few years of
features and some significant refactoring. We hope the latter will make the
codebase more accessible to other contributors.

SolveSpace's NURBS operations are worse than OpenCASCADE's, but they're
literally orders of magnitude smaller. There's still no great free alternative
to Parasolid, SOLIDS++, etc. SolveSpace's constraint solver is pretty good,
and people seem to mostly like the UI.

~~~
app4soft
Jonathan, You write faster than me[0] :-)

> _plus the last few years of features and some significant refactoring._

Last few years there only Alexey Egorov's new features... :-/

While 'whitequark' is good programmer, his role as maintainer very bad for
SolveSpace project itself - he don't work well with community at all. He fully
non-responsive to Linux users, he not want hear any ideas from community...

Project now mostly in freeze...

Hope, You will find better project manager (such as Yorik now is in FreeCAD)
for SolveSpace for make it more friendly for community. 'whitequark' should be
just one of SolveSpace programmer, not maintainer, IMHO.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16797563](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16797563)

~~~
jwesthues
> He fully non-responsive to Linux users

Well, he was nice enough to write the Linux port in the first place, and he
personally develops under Linux, so...

To develop free, general-purpose, desktop, parametric 3d CAD software is
fairly thankless work. It's a huge task, and relatively few developers have
the necessary mathematical skill and ME domain knowledge. The commercial
market is mature, limiting opportunities to monetize. I have great respect for
the time and other resources that whitequark (and others) have chosen to
expend here in spite of that.

~~~
app4soft
It's look like nothing changed - _whitequark_ still respond[0] to users and
contributors in wrong way...

[0]
[https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/318](https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/318)

