On Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:09:30 -0800, Girvin R. Herr wrote: > Have you, or anyone in the group, used FreeCAD for any useful work?
Like I said before, at this point in time it is still lacking important features. E.g. there is no support for drilling holes. New primitives are inserted with some fixed size. There is no GUI way to choose from the various modes of movement that are essential for building 3D models. There is no library of standard parts like screws and nuts and no way to do your own library, either. Bottom line: If you want to use freecad for productive work, you'd be a very early adopter. That's why I put "on the horizon" in the subject line. That said, it seems like the infrastructure is set up and ready for more. About two years ago, when I searched for open source mechanical CAD suites, freecad was mentioned nowhere. So the project has evolved pretty fast. (I restrain myself to compare to the progress in geda and friends ;-) If the developers can keep up the pace, the issues mentioned above will be resolved in a matter of months. Since it fills a major gap in the open source universe, I expect freecad to quickly gather an active community of users/codevelopers. If pcb is to export, or import 3D data, I suggest to choose freecad format. This is fully documented XML with no NDA restrictions or dubious backengineering. In addition, freecad will be able to export to a number of standard 3D formats. > however, before I install and/or update a lot of Linux > system support libraries for FreeCAD, That's the joy of Debian: The hard work was already done by the maintainer. :^) ---<(kaimartin)>--- -- Kai-Martin Knaak Öffentlicher PGP-Schlüssel: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x6C0B9F53 _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user