[rightbyte]

I guess there is a silly amount of work to make a usefull CAD program. FreeCAD etc has no "auto dimension tool" where you can manipulate dimension or set inter object constraints as in even the worst of the commercial CADs Solid Edge. No assembly either or sheet bending tool.

I tried to use FreeCAD but gave up. It is too limited even for simple designs. I would rather use paper and ruler since you can't easely change stuff anyway.

[imtringued]

>FreeCAD etc has no "auto dimension tool" where you can manipulate dimension or set inter object constraints as in even the worst of the commercial CADs Solid Edge.

Unfortunately since I have only used FreeCAD and no other CAD tool I may not know what you are talking about but it is possible to create a spreadsheet inside FreeCAD and give each cell an alias which makes the spreadsheet basically act like a hashmap/dictionary. Every input field in Freecad can be filled based upon a formula. You can just <SpreadsheetName>.<variableName> as the formula and then changing the value of the spreadsheet cell will change the part.

>No assembly either or sheet bending tool.

There are addons for that and I agree that having a dedicated addon for everything is bad because now you need to know whether an addon exists for your usecase and how to find it. Someone who fires up FreeCAD for the first time is going to get disappointed.

Honestly, my biggest problem with FreeCAD is that it crashes and freezes on basic operations like chamfers and fillets. When an operation takes 20 seconds the entire application just stops responding. If the fillet cannot be created there is basically a 25% chance that it will crash. If your fillet radius is too large it will simply show nothing so now you have to play around via binary search to find the maximum value for the fillet.

The other problem is that curved surfaces are hard to do in FreeCAD in general. Of course there is an addon for that which makes it easier but I already have a backlog of addons to try out...

[rightbyte]

Ye I agree. I tried the assembly addon but I could not get the flow and it did not feel native to the app. If I remember correctly the wiki named three alternative addons.

Honestly my biggest problem with FreeCAD might be that I have already learned Solid Edge and Solid Works in school and at work.

Learning to use CAD software is a nightmare and I rather not do it again.

Since I only do wood work out of work it is just simpler to draw by hand than trying to learn FreeCAD properly to maybe learn that it can't do what I want anyway.

The "auto dimension tool" (I do not know the real name) is a magic ruler that let you change dimensions and inter object relations by just clicking stuff. It introduces constrains too. I understand why it would be a nightmare to program.