The standard go-to for accessible FreeCAD instruction videos.

Great tech demonstration here, just a few steps below the Doug Engelbart demo in how futuristic it must have seemed, IMHO. Loved the light pen and macro-pad interface.

Also, your speakers are fine. The audio for me played mono and right channel only.

What CAD can you guys recommend for progressing beyond TinkerCAD?

I really enjoy OpenSCAD and will continue to build that skillset but sometimes I just want to much about with a mouse in 3D space. I used to really enjoy doing mockups in SketchUP when that was still a free Google project.

I'm definitely not designing engines or commercial products. I'm mostly just designing small things for the 3D printer.

Also, Open Source is a must. I'd rather struggle with a free product that could be made better than pay for a commercial product that does way more than what I need it for.

An industrial designer does a write-up on four well-known packages.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/28087243

I really like the design and iteration process he goes thru.

Current news: New logo contest, and toponaming integration work continues, among other things.

No, it’s not the main program I use, but its constraint solver gets around, and doing a couple of tutorials helped me understand parametric design better. The forum on the site is also active and helpful. Definitely worth having installed.

From the article:

Note: as a for-profit company, we are certainly interested in knowing what users are willing to pay for. If we’re going to survive, we have to do that. But that was not our primary motivation in asking these specific questions. FreeCAD is not only free-as-in-speech, it’s also free-as-in-beer. We wanted to know if that was the main reason that people use it.

Our thinking is that if users are willing to sacrifice financially to make the software better, then it means they value the ‘free-as-in-freedom’ aspect of FreeCAD even more. It would give us confidence that we can build a business model that gives users real value and is also financially sustainable. We were blown-away by the results.