FreeCAD: May's 5 Tips To Save Time And Frustration

[@vincentchov5760]

I'm a simple man. If I see Mango Jelly Solutions videos, I upvote.

[@ninetydirectory3798]

Every time I see his video, I hit sub button.

[@takedainf9852]

I would make a reference plane and place the sketch on it, before creating additing loft.

[@pileofstuff]

That final tip is going to save me hours of confusion and frustration at some point in the future.

[@dr.ichduda5617]

View sketch: great tip, I looked for a tool like this desperately, not been aware, this is already in FreeCAD.👍

[@matwyder4187]

To get rid of the sketch reference in the group, there's no need to delete the group, you can drag and drop each item into the document root in the tree view. It works for all "stray" object references that you sometimes end up with after certain operations.

[@Karaon]

I love your take on freecad

[@milojenikolovski7522]

Regards from Serbia.

[@Rasspor]

Another excellent bit of information for us FreeCAD users. Keep up the videos. Hope your having an excellent day!

[@MangoJellySolutions]

Thank you so much, much appreciated. Yes been having a great day, been using freeCAD to help relocate and modify a old 50 year old wooden greenhouse in the garden. Never thought I would use of for that! Hope all's good with you :)

[@FPV777]

Thanks 👍👍👍

[@CraigLYoung]

Thanks for sharing 👍

[@Rembrant65]

Way beyond my noob skill but still very useful concepts.

[@mattspawn1975]

There needs to be a way to select the appropriate order at the time of making the loft in that final example. Being forced to delete your sketch and redraw is a terrible conclusion to the loft command. I would consider it an incomplete function at this point. At the very least, base it off of the order selected rather than the order sketched. My 2 cents... I am a month or so into FreeCAD and really appreciate your videos. I've used a lot of CAD packages in my 20 years of being a manufacturing designer, and this is by far the most painful and unintuitive despite being quite powerful. I realize software development is hard and it is free on the backs of the developers, so I really do get it and am grateful. It's just a painfully slow and frustrating road. Thanks again for all the vids you provide to the community as I can already tell that the user base absolutely would not be where it is if it wasn't for your efforts. I've watched a lot of your vids while on lunch break at work. :D Cheers!

[@martinsvensson6884]

There are a lot of stuff still that needs to be fixed for sure. Seems to be a lot of base functions that are not finished 100%. Just like the thread creator.. You can create a thread... but not specify length of it... Its like.. eeh.. what? Why? Of course its still fantastic with all the work put into this and its still free. Hard to complain. But for pure practicality I cant really find a reason to leave the pirate ship with Autodesk Inventor, yet.. :) But I'm following the development of FreeCAD for sure.

[@mattspawn1975]

​@@martinsvensson6884Well said. At some point, you have to polish what you have and focus on UI & UX. There is definitely some focus on this as they work through the implementation of LinkStage3 on their journey to V1.0. I really struggle with it being unintuitive and the feedback unhelpful in many cases. I'm really rooting for FreeCAD to have a Blender moment. I have my reservations when I see responses in forums about how FreeCAD wants input in an atypical workflow. A good software, any genre, is one that is intuitive, guides the user in some way, and interacts predictably. Just doing something different for the sake of doing differently is a bad practice unless it provides some real value in return. IMHO

[@splinetech]

Great, thanks a lot!

Thank you!

[@thomasneemann5618]

thank you

[@vincentchov5760]

Can you please add chapters so I can jump between tips and know which tip I'm looking at and what problem they're trying to solve?

[@guillaumevincent716]

Hi I have a question for you maybe for an upcoming video. I would like to know how would you design a electrical harness in freecad. For exemple, a harness with a simple connector at both end that connect a point a to b by passing to several supports.

[@alterratz665]

Thanks for this informational video. I have one Question: Can the order for lofting be fixed or is the only solution by redrawing the sketch?

[@the-mush]

good question, I would also like to know. If not, maybe something like the layer lists on lots of programs, with drag 'n drop functionality, could really help. Or at least some option to show the index of each vertex floating close to them.

[@mattspawn1975]

Agree. I just commented that it should be based off of selection order, not sketch order. Every other CAD package I've used allows you to modify this order at the time of making the loft. Redoing your sketch is absurd.

[@chrisBruner]

I've never noticed the unwrap tool. What is the use case of it?

[@bluebalute]

As a guess, it would be used if you are making sheet metal parts.

[@MangoJellySolutions]

It can be used for sheet metal, paper and card cut and also laser cut if you introduce a kerf pattern to allow it to bend (or the wood is thin enough)

[@dougaltolan3017]

Have you, or would you please show how to reattach a sketch to geometry after it's been broken by editing something created before the sketch.. Or how to avoid such breakages.

[@BrainDeadEngineering]

KINGCAD ! 😜 Should I install Ondsel now mate?

[@MangoJellySolutions]

:) It's up to you. Ondsel is just a layer on top of freeCAD. Version 1 is freeCAD is around the corner. If you like the interface flavor that Ondsel is offering along with lens then go for it. You can always switch back.

[@hanbanaroda]

Turning off autoconstraints is unpractical but on the other hand it often brakes your sketch by overconstraining something... This would be great for user experience if this got solved.

[@davidbisciotti7424]

it appears that your UI resembles the production version and not the new developer version (FreeCAD 0.22.0dev) - What am I missing? (Ex. your constraints tools are much different..??)

[@MangoJellySolutions]

Yes this is created on the production version.

[@RoamingAdhocrat]

Is there a video that will help me learn how to design a bracket? I have a small monitor, I have a shelf, I want to mount the monitor on the shelf edge. I can model the monitor and the shelf. I can model something to fit the VESA mountings on the monitor, and a thing to go over the shelf edge and screw in. I need to position the monitor where I want it relative to the shelf, and then design the part of the bracket that goes between the two, and it's here I get lost!

[@cs9260]

What happened to the February 2024 1.0 release? Any word or news?

[@MangoJellySolutions]

I was in the Developers meeting and It's being released mid July. The feature freeze is on the 6th June and it will be testing until then. :)

[@cs9260]

@@MangoJellySolutions Wonderful news! Much appreciated. I understand that good things take time, it's just that everything went quiet..... Can't wait to go all in!

[@roofoofighter]

@@MangoJellySolutions it’s August 8, so any ETA?

[@BrainDeadEngineering]

10:30 no wonder years of my work turned out to be shit ! 🤢😭

[@alexandr-spb]

я не понимаю, почему нельзя в дереве потом поменять порядок?

[@billmichaelson2055]

How might one resequence sketch elements that were created in the "wrong" order? Is it possible without deleting them?