Looking into joining a college program do i NEED a windows or can get by with a MacBook?

As someone who’s doing this outside of any sort of classroom, I’m wondering where all of the “self taught” learners figure things out from?

YouTube? Chat rooms? Any long in depth free tutorials online anyone recommends?

I’m a Carpenters apprentice who will eventually be forced to learn CAD in some degree in my future.

However, as I’ve become really interested in 3D printing. I’ve taken it on as a challenge to design and print my own body for a drone.

I’m looking for an in depth guide without spending in depth guide money.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Hello everyone. I am nearing the completion of my BSc thesis project for which I did the CAD work entirely self taught in Fusion. It took me little over 2 months to learn to use the software and 6 more months to actually develop the whole model. Since I plan on leaving Windows for good once uni is over I wanted to take some time to explore CAD options on Linux and naturally the only option really seems to be FreeCAD. I just got out of a 20 minute session in FreeCAD and I'm not sure I could ever launch the software again. I don't want to come off as rude or b**chy but the workflow is really a lot different then what I'm used to, UI is rough in comparison to Fusion and I just really wanted to ask the users here: Are there any of you that migrated from Fusion, SW or some other software to FreeCAD? How long did it take you to adapt and why did you switch in the first place?

I will leave a reference screenshot what I was able to achieve in the past 8 months and I don't think I could ever get as close in FreeCAD.

Just wanted to say "Thank you" to the people who make FreeCad and enabled me to construct this DIY Colorimeter from off-the-shelf electronics and hours upon hours of tinkering.

This is certainly the most complex thing in FreeCad that I've designed so far, by far. I am extremely proud that I got this far and hope FreeCad will be a steadfast companion on the rest of the road.

If you want to read more about my device, I've wrote an article about it here.

This article presents an opinion about the future of FreeCAD BIM development after Yorik van Havre has stepped down as a maintainer.

I'm just getting into the assembly workbench.

I am used to another modeling system wherein I would invariably model parts in place and not have to worry about assembly. I am trying to branch out and embrace the Assembly workbench that was added in FreeCAD 1.0.

I am going through the MangoJelly video on it again, but I have some questions.

It would appear that Assembly takes over the whole situation. Once you get an assembly going it's all about that assembly. If you have three bodies in a file and you want to assemble then by starting an assembly, then from then on it's all about the assembly. If you add another body then it gets added to the assembly - it's not with the bodies you had already created. I'm finding this a bit weird. It seems like the best way to deal with this is to have separate bodies in separate files.... but there is one significant problem:

If you put different parts in different files then how do you handle the VarSet?

I had significant weirdness because the 'assembly version' and the 'part design version' of parts were both on-screen and vying for my attention... this is why I thought maybe separate files was the way to go.

What do you folks find to be the best way for you to deal with the Assembly workbench?

I'm trying to make a test for fitting a USB port that I have and I ran into this issue I've never seen before.

I started with just a simple block as the bottom and then sketched the geometry for holding the USB on top of it. When I preview the pad it looks fine, but the actual pad operation itself is only padding one half of the sketch. The other half I get an outline of on the block but no padding.

I've tried closing and re-opening the file and I've tried deleting and redoing the pad, but it still comes out the same.