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by phkahler 530 days ago
>> I do wish I did pay some attention to CAD now. I want a 3D printer and have no idea how to design objects for it.

Get Solvespace: https://solvespace.com/index.pl

Do the tutorials. If/when you outgrow it, the concepts will carry over to FreeCAD which otherwise has a steeper learning curve but has more capabilities.
1 comments
smj-edison 530 days ago
An aside, but I found FreeCAD to be a real pain. The dependency tracking across sketches is really quite horrid. If I have sketch2 linked to sketch1, and I delete a line in sketch1, it will arbitrarily reassign all the sketch2->sketch1 dependencies. Maybe they fixed that since I've used it, but I've transferred over to Onshape for all my hobby stuff...

EDIT: looks like they finally addressed the topological naming problem, I guess I better give it a second chance!

link
phkahler 527 days ago
Solvespace handles topological naming almost flawlessly. Even in a repeat group, the first and last copies of a sketch are "named" first and last rather than given a number. This is because constraints are often applied to those copies. This way they won't break if you go back and change the number of copies.
link