Which CAD program to choose?

[jeffkash]

Although I have not used it yet, FreeCAD comes with CAM. Pretty sure there are members who have used it Path workbench which is the CAM tool. How well it works, or how easy it is to use? Don't have any personal experience.

Just because something is free, doesn't inherently mean it is bad. The same goes for more expensive stuff. I remember getting suckered into buying a DSP (digital signal processing) toolbox at work and soon finding out it was worthless.

Didn't mean to imply that free was bad.

All CAD (and CAM) programs have learning curves and limitations.

I meant to convey that features should be checked against needs regardless of cost.

 

[verbotenwhisky]

I just checked out Alibre myself a short time ago. It will exports of SVG, DXF, IGES etc. but it does not seem to have CAM capability as far as I could tell.

I have used BOB CAD / CAM for years, doing quite a bit of 2.5D CAD/CAM work with it. It is pretty easy to use. It has been OK enough to keep me from moving on but I can't say I really love it. The CAM part is good for my purposes. They have many post-processors to generate the G-Code and will help with customization of them. I don't get along well with the CAD part. It just doesn't jibe with how I think.

Most of the mill work I do is 2.5 D, not too much with 3D curved surfaces. (Just holes, countersinks, threads, pockets, slots, profiles, corner radiuses etc.) Much of the CAD work can therefore be done in 2D. The tool paths are added to the geometry of the 2D CAD drawings and then the G-Code is generated within the program. BOBCAD also has a CAM simulator built in.

If I were starting over, I might start with Fusion 360 but not the free one. The one-tool limitation discussed above would be a deal-breaker for me. If money were no object, it would be Solidworks for sure!

I do not know about best but it ain't no slouch...

 

[Reddinr]

I just found this with regard to CAM: MeshCAM is $250 or $500 depending on features at the moment. (I've never used it but it looks like it can take almost any CAD output and make G-Code for milling. This makes Alibre look pretty good to me too!

From their website:
MeshCAM works with your CAD
MeshCAM works with almost every 3D CAD program by opening the two most common 3D file formats, STL and DXF.
If you just want to make 2D parts without using a 3D CAD program, you can load 2D DXF files (in R12 format) and extrude them to a 3D part.
We’ve got lots of users of:

• Alibre
• Shapr3D
• Solidworks
• Autodesk Inventor
• OnShape
• Rhino 3D
• SketchUp
• Viacad
• Autocad
• Freecad
• OpenSCAD
• Blender
• ZBrush
  • And many more... If your CAD program can generate an STL or STEP file, it’ll work with MeshCAM.

 

[GeneT45]

Try anything that's free. Make sure you set aside an appreciable amount of time to work with free trials - 30 days can go by without really learning much. Ultimately I think you're going to want a paid CAD, for various reasons, but trying all the free and free-trial stuff now will give you a good idea of what features and capabilities might be worth paying for.

GsT

 

[WobblyHand]

Try anything that's free. Make sure you set aside an appreciable amount of time to work with free trials - 30 days can go by without really learning much. Ultimately I think you're going to want a paid CAD, for various reasons, but trying all the free and free-trial stuff now will give you a good idea of what features and capabilities might be worth paying for.

GsT

Good advice. Pick something, and use it awhile. Only way to know if you and CAD are compatible. If it's good enough for you, great. If not, try something else. Key thing is to spend enough time on it in the beginning - before the evaluation time runs out. Stinks to pay for something and have it be useless.

I found FreeCAD was good enough for my use, so I stuck with it. Others like different offerings. But do check things out. I do believe Joko Engineering has a couple videos where he shows two CAD apps and compares making a model on both. I found that interesting.

 

[heli_av8tor]

I was looking for a CAD program a couple years ago when I started 3d printing. I had tried Solidworks a few years ago but found the learning curve too steep for my needs. And it took me awhile to get the concept of drawing a 2d sketch then extruding to make it 3d. If I had grasped that sooner I may not have given up on Solidworks.

I settled into OnShape free and found it to meet my needs. I still struggle at times but there is tons of YouTube help. At first I was a little apprehensive about it being 100% cloud based. I've come to appreciate this as a good feature. It's always the latest version and always available to me no matter which computer I'm on or even a phone or tablet. It doesn't bother me that my files are "public".
I've only tried generating working drawings a couple times and need to get better at that.

 

[Investigator]

Thanks to everyone for the help and suggestions. I'm leaning toward Fusion 360. All I need is something to design fairly simple prototype type parts that I can use to send to a CNC lathe or mill for manufacture in my hobby shop.

I'm leaning toward Fusion based on a slight majority of folks suggesting it both here and online. Also there seems to be quite a bit of online support and resources, both from Autodesk as well as public.

 

[dbb-the-bruce]

Things you need to know / understand about Fusion:

Parametric
Timeline
Components

Really understanding these greatly improved my experience.
Learn to use components for most/all designs from the get go. You can do a design as one big design (actually a single top level component in Fusion speak) but you will be much better off breaking it down to components from the start. The most natural way to think of components is as individual parts or collections of parts but they are much more useful than that.

Activate each component as you work on it, it's a little sand box when activated. You can reference other parts of the design but you can't move or modify the parts you aren't trying to work on. This goes for everything. Took me forever to be disciplined enough to keep the sketches and parts grouped together.

I will often make a component for stock bodies and multi-part layout stuff - stuff that is only there to assist when doing the CAM tool paths.

Because it's parametric you can go back anywhere in the time line of your design process and make changes and the changes will ripple forward this is a great feature but you have to keep your time line clean. You can change stuff that breaks things further on. Using components will limit the amount of time line you need to consider or work with. If you activate the top level component the time line includes everything and can get quite huge. If you break something in your timeline, you need to fix it before proceeding much further, if not you end up with a broken design that's impossible to work on.

A classic case is getting into a component and realizing that it would be better to add a feature to the initial sketch. You just go back and edit the sketch. However, the sketch can only reference what existed when the sketch was created. This drove me nuts until I realized that editing a sketch was traveling back in time.

At the end of the day, what you are really doing is creating a big long list of features and and actions that can be played from the start to build your final design. You must learn and understand this or it will drive you nuts!

The other thing that I find extremely useful is user parameters. Pretty much anything you enter as a number can made into a modifiable parameter - you just created it and use the name instead of a number. So for instance, you could model a Lego block and then just punch in x-studs and y-studs to create new ones of different sizes.


I found it really good practice to pick something in my shop (like a vise or dividing head) and model it. You will learn a lot.

 

[Shotgun]

The thing to keep in mind about the free-as-in-beer offerings is that they like to change the definition of "free". I have found drawings being held hostage unless I paid a lot more than I initially bargained for. In the case of ProE, support was pulled completely.

The free-as-in-beer-recipe offerings have their own problems*, but at leas being abandoned isn't one of them.

*FreeCAD's Path workbench doesn't have a way to generate chain drilling gcode. My option was to start looking through the code to see if I could add it. Haven't been able to get much past the "this is where I'd put new code" part.

 

[Paul Fithian]

Great info here, I am looking to learn 3D design to make .STL files for our 3D printer.

I've narrowed my focus to Fusion 360 and SketchUp. Any advice on which one to choose?