![]() Take two: a street-address signįor my second experiment, I decided to start from scratch and try to make a street-address sign for my home. I will certainly be revisiting my quest for a milled-at-home cooking spoon using FreeCAD in the future to see if perhaps a fresh start with more knowledge might fix my problems. ![]() Despite the problems I had, many of which can certainly be chalked up to my lack of understanding, it is worth noting that the FreeCAD community was both engaged and extremely helpful to me as a newcomer. I discovered on the forums that the Path Workbench for FreeCAD is under active development for 0.19, including 3D surface-paths, and Working on a file for long periods of time shouldn’t break things, but working from a development branch of the project, those sorts of issues are to be expected. For unfamiliar readers, this feature allows you to carve a model’s outer shell out of a piece of stock material using a CNC - in a way similar to carving a statue out of a block of marble. Specifically, 3D surface-path generation was a key technology I simply had to have to consider a switch. The stable release worked fine, but I quickly realized that features I would have expected to be in the project only exist in 0.18.4 as “experimental” features requiring special effort to enable. One thing I learned as I went, however, was that I was much better off using development snapshots than I was using the pre-compiled binaries from the releases. Getting FreeCADįreeCAD is available for download on the FreeCAD project website, along with development builds for the upcoming 0.19.0 release. The goal of this article, however, is to share what my experience with FreeCAD was, and provide a glimpse of FreeCAD from the perspective of an inexperienced user. My personal goal is to become fluent enough with FreeCAD that I can replace my dependence on the commercial CAD software I presently use in my design work. It is worth noting that before this effort I had never used FreeCAD before. I also looked at using FreeCAD for taking existing models that are available online with an open license and importing them for milling (in this case, a wooden spoon). The design I have in mind is pretty straightforward, so it should be a great way to put FreeCAD through a test on a real project. The plan called for a 700mm x 150mm sign, and I decided to mill it out of a plank of maple wood. ![]() I decided to take on a relatively simple CNC project: milling a new street-address sign for my home. FreeCAD is designed to be cross-platform, supporting Linux, macOS, and Windows, with binary releases provided by the OS-independent package and environment management system Conda. Beyond code contributions, FreeCAD has a welcoming community with active forums to answer any questions users might have along the way. The project’s GitHub page indicates that it has 271 contributors with new commits happening often (generally more than 50 a week). ![]() The first release of the project was in 2002, and its last stable version 0.18.4 was released in October 2019. I had varying degrees of success in my endeavors, but in the end came away with a positive opinion.įreeCAD is an LGPL v2+ licensed CAD and CAM program written in Python. In this article I will walk through my experiences with using FreeCAD for the first time to do a variety of CNC-related tasks I normally would have used a commercial product for. I wasn’t previously familiar with the program, so I decided to check it out. Our look at running a CNC milling machine using open-source software led me to another tool worth looking at: FreeCAD.
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