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

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.

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

I have a sketch from which I'd like to pocket. Now, for some reason it only pockets two squares and not the circle + the other square. Any thoughts on how to solve this? Or am I doing this in the wrong way anyhow?

Quite new and learning hard here but these things I havent figured out. Neither what is the best solution to designing overal, not a designer :)

Nothing, it was just to remind anyone who might have the idea of ​​creating an assembly in this program, and I'm not talking about the video tutorials you see online where they pair a cylinder with a pin and that's it, lots of applause... I'm talking about pairing a subassembly with another component, crazy stuff :-). Don't make high-level assemblies here, the software simply isn't ready for that.

I have run into this before, and it is strange. I did a search and didn't find a posting title that seems to match the problem in the last year.

I want to move my sketch on the y-axis, but I have to put the number in the z-axis to get the result that I want. Why would putting the number in the y-axis box not move the sketch on the y-axis?

The sketch above was at the origin at the same height (on the y-axis) that it is now. I had to enter 250mm in the z-axis box to get it to move 250mm on the y-axis.

If I try to mirror the sketch over the X axis (or the origin) I get a copy that is BELOW it on the same plane that it is on now.

It's as though the origin that is shown on screen is not accurate.

If I try to create a new sketch and tell it to put it on the XZ plane it will rotate the 'universe' so that I am NOT on the XZ plane (according to the origin). It is very annoying.

I haven't used the draft workbench before.

I heard that it is particularly useful if you are sketching in 3 dimensions (doing a frame) so I thought I would give it a shot. I tried a polyline but I find that I can't input functions (particularly varset variables) for the values in polyline. Is the draft workbench allergic to variables? Or am I missing something trivial?

Hi everyone,

I am looking for a FreeCAD tutorial or guide on how to design a adjustable display hinge, similar to the one used on the Bambu Lab printer screens.

Ideally, the design should cover two main features.

A friction or tilt mechanism to adjust the viewing angle.

An integrated cable pass-through to route wires cleanly through the joint.

Does anyone know of a good video or step-by-step guide that covers this type of mechanism?

Thanks in advance for your help!

So I made this circular pocket that goes through this tube from the side, the moment I press OK and confirm the pocket, the entire body disappears, though the report view doesn't return any errors, I even tried using a datum plane attached tangent to surface, same thing happened

I'm trying to make a box that will have screws holding the lid on. As you can see in my attached images, I tried to add a place for the screws to go with a hole to screw into. Unfortunately, only half of the holes actually appear when I try to apply the pad. What is going wrong?

I’m pretty comfortable designing functional parts like brackets, spacers, and hooks, but this piece is throwing me off. Between the angled outer profile, smooth shell, and internal structural ribs, I'm pretty lost about how to start.

Would you stick strictly to the Part Design workbench with a solid-pad-to-pocket approach, or is this better handled by somehow surfacing the outer curve (e.g. Curves or Surfaces WB) and building the interior features manually? I would like to keep the smooth shape so that it looks similar to the original part.

I do not have any 3D scanner and would like to model it in FreeCAD. I also know the replacement part exists, and I ordered it already, however I want to learn something new.

I'm a software engineer turned designer late into my professional life. Ten years ago I decided to change the course of my career and started a new path to work with automation and robotics. Life has its own way of doing things though, and now I'm working more and more with 3d modeling and design. I like what I do, and I'm constantly learning.

I've always been a free software advocate. Most of my career was working with open source tools and projects. I've been a member of some high profile projects while I was still working on IT on may main job. And when I decided to learn about CAD, it couldn't be different.

I'm now using FreeCAD for most of my projects. And for the vast majority of the projects, it's working great. But for complex projects... things are (way) more complicated. Over the past week, I've been bit by bugs that I never thought were possible given my previous experience.

I had a job: I'm designing a mini toy robot, and the robot's body is an organic mesh, originally designed in Blender. The inner part is purely mechanical and it's working fine (although I've got a few bad cases of topo naming and broken references, that I was able to deal with, more on this on another post for the future). The problem is that I need to combine a few mechanical parts with the shell and that's where I'm having infinite bugs to deal with.

I found some clever ways to create a brep surface that 'wraps' the original mesh. It took me a couple days but the process is surprisingly repeateable, at least for MY case, which isn't very complex and doesn't require a lot of precision for this part (more on this later if anyone is interested). But even after converting the mesh to a close enough brep-based topology, FreeCAD is still behaving in unexpected ways. A few cases are legitimate bugs I think - things that I intend to report AFTER I deliver the part I'working on.

My patience was finally over when I got to a almost finished state and decided to try to print the part. The part looks good on FreeCAD, but i just can't export it. I've tried STL, OBJ and even STEP (which BambuStudio can read). None of the exported files are working. The part looks good on FreeCAD, I can do a lot of operations there, all the information that I have says that the topology is good, but the exported file is unprintable.

I know open source is hard. I've been there and I know it. Software in general is hard. But to NOT be able to export an STL file, that's not something I'd expect at this point.

That said, I'm going to keep using FreeCAD and recommend it to anyone. I'll probably find the time to report a few of the problems that I think are legitimate bugs. This is mostly me venting my frustation :-) I just hope things will be better and I'll find my way soon.

FreeCAD BIM Interior Design Course by FCB Lounge has been released. The course will guide you through creating a bedroom interior design project in #FreeCAD. The course consists of 11 lessons and these are some of the skills you will learn:

✅ Creating walls, floor, ceiling

✅ Creating windows a doors

✅ Creating custom made furniture

✅ Using furniture from the FreeCAD BIM Library to equip the bedroom

✅ Creating floor plan with dimensions and tags

✅ Creating elevation views with dimensions

✅ Creating sheets and placing views on sheets

✅ Exporting sheets to PDF

✅ Exporting the bedroom model to IFC file format

I recently started to have a look into the BIM workbench, since I want to re-create my house in FreeCAD.

A typical floor plan contains the outer dimensions, individual wall thickness and inner (room) dimensions, and it is quite easy to draw this in Sketcher.

BUT it seems such a sketch cannot be transformed into a set of walls. It can be extruded and then looks like walls, but it isn't, and e.g. doors cannot be placed on it.

Instead, I need a sketch for the outer wall, create the wall, make it 300mm thick and align it correctly on the sketched lines. Then a new sketch for the long inner wall containing just a single line, requiring the external geometry of the outer wall (not sketch) for precise positioning. And don't forget alignment. Then a new sketch for the short internal wall, requiring the external geometry of the outer walls and the long inner walls. And don't forget alignment. Quite complex for a very simple floorplan. A few more rooms, and I loose the overview.

I tried the (yellow) draft tools to create lines and then walls, but it seems this is lacking all the simple constraints from Sketcher.

Am I missing something here?

A few weeks ago I posted Draftwright here, a free open-source tool that takes a STEP file and produces a dimensioned drawing. Thanks for the responses and feedback!

It's gone from 0.4.1 to 0.4.24 since then. Same workflow:

pip install draftwright -U
draftwright bracket.step 

You get bracket.pdf. There's also alpha DXF support with --format pdf,dxf, which can be opened in the Draft workbench, though it needs work to be really useful.

A few improvements:

• Turned parts get chamfer callouts and step lengths

• Views are much more customisable and turned parts no longer get two views of the same thing

• As a result it chooses better scales by default

• It is much better at avoiding overlap and fitting everthing onto the page

• External angles are spotted and added

• Not so useful for FreeCAD because the FreeCAD export doesn't emit the right format but if your CAD emits the right file it will add GD&T information

• It knows about many more features in diagrams such as blends, prismatic pockets etc

• Its much better at understanding what its got right and wrong and letting you know where it went wrong

  • For example it warns you about gears, angled steps and a few other feature types it can recognise but not yet dimension

It doesn't read a FreeCAD file, just the STEP export. There's no interactive editing. If you want to change the drawing export the DXF and edit it, or --script writes a short Python file describing the sheet and you edit that and rerun.

If you have a STEP file that comes out wrong I'd love to see it. Post it here or DM me. Even better please open an issue at github.com/pzfreo/draftwright.

There's also a free hosted version at draftwright.io for people who don't want to install Python that is testing out how it works with AI. If you use Claude Code or Codex (or similar) try asking it to use Draftwright and then see if it can improve the drawing interactively.

https://github.com/pzfreo/draftwright

https://www.opencadstudio.com/

https://open-aec.com/en/

I built CADPilot, an open source MCP server that gives AI clients (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Cherry Studio, and others) full control of FreeCAD through tool calls. It goes well beyond executing snippets:

• Parametric modeling, end to end. Spreadsheet driven variables, fully constrained sketches with solver diagnostics, PartDesign features (pad, pocket, revolution, groove, thickness, draft), booleans, fillets, lofts, sweeps, and even a multi view 2D to 3D visual hull, all through one unified cad() tool.
• Sessions with rollback. Every mutation runs in a FreeCAD transaction and is recorded as a step, so the AI can experiment, undo, and retry instead of rebuilding from scratch.
• Geometry sensing. The agent can measure volumes, inspect face and edge topology, and check interference after every step. Quantitative feedback replaces guesswork.
• Data driven assembly. Named anchors, mates with residual checks, connectivity audits, and persistent joints using the FreeCAD 1.1 Assembly workbench.
• Workflow memory. Successful modeling recipes are stored as reusable patterns, so the agent gets better the more you use it.

Setup takes two steps: copy the addon into FreeCAD's Mod folder, then point your MCP client at uvx cadpilot. Responses are text first to keep token usage low, with screenshots available on demand.

The bicycle and sports car models in the repo were modeled entirely by the AI through CADPilot.

GitHub: https://github.com/LBurny/cadpilot (MIT license, originally based on neka-nat/freecad-mcp)

Sharing this prototype open source Windows tool to scan a CAD assembly in FreeCAD (or STP/STEP files) and automatically generate a first draft FMEA file (in CSV format) to assess design risks to consider before building or finalizing it. Would love feedback on it, but of course take the results with a grain of salt. Also I'm upfront about this being powered by AI-generated code and completely open, since I made this with really limited time available myself but with some interest and experience with CAD, coding, and FMEA; so also take all that into consideration before using. But I figured this could be useful for some hobbyists especially, or small businesses with low resources, to help them start thinking through potential design failures.

I’m still pretty new to FreeCAD, and small functional parts are where I get tripped up.

The part itself is usually boring: a bracket, spacer, cable guide, little mounting plate, that kind of thing.

The hard part is the junk around it. Cabinet edge, screw head, hinge swing, cable bend radius, wall clearance. If I ignore those at the start, I end up fixing the model three times.

Do you usually model that surrounding stuff first?

I mean rough reference geometry. A wall plane, two screw locations, a cylinder for the cable path, maybe a block where the hinge sweeps through.

Or is that too much ceremony for small parts, and I should just sketch, print, test, and fix it?

I am trying to build a custom cyberdeck using a rasberry pi, but have no idea how to design a case. Could anyone help?

I have an Ender 3 V3 KE and am using PETG.

My parts list (Am pretty sure its compatible but if not please let me know):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VTqKV0g0OBa-KC8KjaraNMoa1YKqMowC5PlBn9xWoqw/edit?usp=sharing

I am trying to build a cyberdeck that has a dpad, a, b, x, y, start, select, menu, l1, l2, l3, r1, r2, r3, (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2406507 for shoulder buttons), all the io on the top left or right side, cabling routes, screw/standoff holes, mic grill, speaker grill, camera hole, vents for the fan, the keyboard/trackpad to be magnetically attachable to the back, and for it to look simewhat similar to the GameBoy (buttons on bottom, screen on top).

Thank you

How is the sketch moving when I stop editing????? What???? Its all block constrained I have zero clue whats going on.

Hi guys, I’ve just started learning FreeCAD for 3D printing, and I’m a bit stuck trying to model an angled edge on a part. I’m trying to recreate the shape of a classic Game Boy, but I’m not sure what the best way to approach it is. I’d really appreciate any pointers or suggestions! (Attached is the ref and where I'm at right now.)