We are shutting down Ondsel

Every time I have a personal project and want to make a simple CAD drawing of a building or a simple model, as I would using AutoCAD at work, I go through the same song and dance. I look around at the options online, my jaw hangs open at the cost of any commercial CAD subscription/licence, then I get frustrated by a glaring lack of functionality or useability while trying some free/open source solution, and resort to a 30 day trial or MSPaint/paper.

Some of the comments already mention how blender's existence is predicated upon it filling a niche in certain senses, instead of trying to achieve feature parity with an entrenched giant. That makes sense, and it's unfortunate, as this space could use an open source option with Blender's polish. In my own industry, mining, I am certain some commercial interests would happily make their product an extension/plugin for a polished FreeCAD (or other), were it at that point.

Have you tried OnShape? It’s not open source but it is totally free for hobby use.

What's wrong with Solidworks for Makers?

50$ a year sound perfectly reasonable to me.

There's also Fusion 360 that's free for personal use. SolidWorks is better and worth $50 / year if you use it a few times, but for a one-off project, Fusion 360 is pretty good.

"GatorCAM for CNC" is currently priced very low, $12, with free upgrades even later after it goes to $400+.

I'm the author and I'm trying to get it into makers tool kit:

https://sites.google.com/view/gatorcam/home

Sure, I'm just slightly biased against Fusion since I was trained using Solidworks in high school and it became second nature for a while.

Give me a copy of SW 2012 and I can model anything technical I can imagine.

I have a similar problem, but for electrical diagrams. I want to draw out diagrams for each of the circuits in my house and none of the free options are good enough.

Note: This is a bit of a "secret menu item" (not really but not well advertised).

It's available to people making less than $2k/yr from projects.

If you make more than $2k/yr, you need to pay standard prices, which start at $2.8k/yr.

"If you make $1,999 you owe us $50, if you make $2,001 you owe us $2,800" seems so obviously ridiculous it has to be wrong. Right?

Well, it's a non-commercial license. The $2000 limit is already kind of generous, especially since it's a profit limit and not a revenue limit.

Without having read the fineprint you could make a lot of revenue as long as you keep reinvesting the money into stuff related to your solidworks side-hustle (buying 3D printers, material, CNC machines, workstations, whatever).

Alibre (1) seems pretty popular with makers (good cnc support?). Not OSS but its a one time $200 purchase - sorta surprising you can still buy software these days :-P Alibre is more of a professional tool like Fusion 360, so there is some learning curve.

1. https://www.alibre.com/

The issue I found with Fusion360 is that I don’t own my files. You used to be able to export locally but last I used it (a few years ago now) I was unable to export a file in a native fusion format with saving to the Autodesk cloud being my only option. This is hazardous as not only am I now at the mercy of Autodesk but they also expire files after just under a year so in need to ensure I’m logging into my account regularly just to keep some things that could happily live on a local disk.

What did you end up using?

I wanted to make diagrams for an embedded system circuit I made and ended up using PowerPoint. All of the free options seem to be focused exclusively on PCB design and not making nice graphics. Fritzing which is what a lot of people recommend is now a paid for application.

I hate it because it's a website. I want actual software. Free software ideally.

Their Workshop CAM module is a re-badged MeshCAM v9 as of current versions.

There is also a higher-end option I believe, but it's way out of my price range.

They are on your disk somewhere. Search for files with an f3d extension and you will should be able to find them.

You should also be able to export an f3d archive as long as it’s a standalone design (ie not linked to other designs).

You can export locally. I'm pretty sure you could a few years ago too. They really push you to the cloud, but I use Fusion360 completely locally.

Really wish there was a non-subscription Solidworks though.

I understand the gripes with web-based platforms, but its performance is pretty impressive. They've done a good job with it.

I haven't found anything ideal that's opensource. draw.io + some custom images for the electrical symbols lets me get good enough though

I posted and then deleted a comment as I was going to ask if you'd tried draw.io. Even when I worked in electrical design (infra+industrial), it was my go-to sketching tool to have open next to -CAD. What would you do to improve it for your use case, or are you lamenting that it isn't open source either?

It would be perfect if the symbols I wanted were already built in. There are some electrical symbols but they're very much circuit design focused whereas I'm looking for symbols such as these https://www.edrawmax.com/templates/1011842/

Additionally, https://github.com/jgraph/drawio/issues/1660 would be a nice to have.

Why not just us a vector drawing program such as Inkscape? (EDIT: rather than using MS Paint)

While I would never suggest it, in case of emergency, most professional CAD programs can be found online on torrent websites.

I've had multiples of my students get into legal trouble over the years from using these. Just understand that almost all of these professional level software packages phone home even after being cracked, so you basically have to airgap your computer if you use them. It's a major reason why I steer them towards open source CAD packages, and towards the pro level CAD packages with usable free hobby licensing.

Definitely having built-in symbols for it would be nice. Regarding a titleblock, I found that custom data attributes on symbols and page backgrounds can accomplish as much as I would even need.

Create a page in your document called "Titleblock", format it and place dummy content if desired. For each "sheet", just select it from Page Background (you can set an image, URL, or another page in the diagram). For filling out information which varies, just have one titleblock symbol and add Placeholders for the custom data attributes which you add to it as well. (See: https://www.drawio.com/blog/placeholders) This is a common workflow in CAD as well just with different terms; i.e. a linked titleblock layout used for all sheets and a block inserted into the actual drawing with the attributes filled out.

The real functionality of a software firewall is to stop your own software from phoning home.

It is sad, that this has become a normal occurrence. Sometimes they phone home for good reasons, very often they do not.

Although I doubt it can get you into legal trouble if you use cracked software.

You can get into trouble if you have been found torrenting them however.

I did the free trial and it seemed ok - but I had too many bad habits from fusion...one thing that always tripped me up was the limit of 1 sketch per 'part'(?). It seemed to enforce 'best practices' much more then Fusion does, and I just tinker with hobby projects. They were very attentive though, and even called a few times to see how I was doing...

Also, I really liked the 1 time purchase vs. subscription

same here. if I want to slap together a quick model or sketch, it takes seconds in onshape vs minutes in f360.

I've even loaded projects into my phone's browser while out to view sketches or assemblies.

You are basically also pushing people into malware/malicious files with such a statement.

I second Alibre, I am using the pro version. I bought it in 2012, and I can't remember if I've paid for upgrades to keep it current since then.

I used it to design an injection mold and I am still using it for 3d printing projects. It's a capable program and on-par with SolidWorks or Inventor for basic modeling.

I haven't tried OnShape yet, but if I didn't have Alibre I'd probably look into that or another web-based program for new hobby projects. I like the idea of perpetual licenses but it's only perpetual for as long as it runs on your operating system.

I just can't get into the web based ones...I don't know why but they all seem slow and clunky to me. One thing I didn't like about alibre is the lack of Linux (or Mac) version, as I plan on ditching MS once my win10 box is unusable - I have no interest in that new AI crap MS is adding.

And Siemens SolidEdge is totally free for hobbyist use.

It would seem so, but no, that is "correct."

Oh god, please don't use Fritzing. I absolutely despise those useless diagrams. Actually, less than useless because they're often outright misleading.

Learn to draw actual electronic schematics. It's a bit of a learning curve, but not very steep.

Use KiCad for schematics; you don't have to use the PCB design tool.

However true that might be, I’d rather try to avoid wrestling with software for my data. If that’s really the case then even if it’s free I’m pretty sure you’re not getting your money’s worth.

I actually agree. If having copies of your files is important, subscribe to SolidWorks. It's inexpensive and better than Fusion 360. Most of what I use Fusion 360 for is ephemeral stuff that I print once and never need the design again.

Blender is often used as an example of open source polish, but I think too many people focus on how it exists today and not how it evolved. Blender got its start as a commercial tool that a pool of people raised €100,000 to pay to make it open source. And for years Blender's UI was criticized as being too difficult and too different from tools like Maya. It's a marvelous tool today because a dedicated group of people donated their time to improving it or were sponsored by others willing to contribute monetarily.

FreeCAD isn't as refined as Blender, but it also hasn't had the same level of support. I've found the maker community particularly critical, often in uncostructive ways, around OSS CAD tools like FreeCAD or SolveSpace. It's hard to compete with commercial offerings that have full time designers working on them. To get there we need volunteers to work on the project and/or folks willing to fund development. Ondsel demonstrated how well that could work for FreeCAD. But, the maker community has largely been unwilling to contribute either in terms of cash or time. And many take to publicly bashing the tools, which doesn't exactly entice those volunteering to go out of their way to help.

We could have the Blender equivalent of an OSS CAD package, but people are going to need to step up and contribute. I appreciate that you often have a time sensitive task and going with a commercial tool is more expedient. That's fine, of course, but that also isn't going to help advance any of these OSS tools. Just also be aware that you're at risk of losing your design as well since commercial licensing can change on a whim (e.g., Fusion 360 preventing STEP export for free accounts -- this decision ended up being reversed, but should be concerning).