What's the best cad program

Alain De Vos

Alain De Vos

A few,
cad/leocad
cad/solvespace
cad/qcad
cad/brlcad
cad/openscad
cad/archimedes
cad/kicad
cad/librecad
cad/freecad
cad/openscad
 
Terry Thomas was the best cad

Terry-Thomas_in_Where_Were_You_When_the_Lights_Went_Out.jpg
 
My usage of CAD is very basic, basically just CSG subtract to create simple doorways. Apparently, CSG subtracting in level editors is an anti-pattern which they try to make awkward (For this reason I maintain a fork of GtkRadiant called OpenRadiant).

carve.png
 
In the past i used kicad to develop a "print board, it was an a.m. receiver". Then i let it made by a Chinese company.
Just sending over the gember file.
 
The OP list of CAD programs does not distinguish 2D vs 3D.
I use cad/freecad and have been able to develop and 3D resin print prototypes.
  • It has a substantial learning curve - I watched FreeCAD tutorials on youtube: MangoJelly FreeCAD youtube tutorials
  • It is fully open source, has a large community and, at the time of this post, a new release is in the works.
  • It has a number of "work benches" that enable you to assemble and animate the parts of your project.
  • If you have ideas that may be commercially viable, it is unlikely to compromise your Intellectual Property - important when applying for patents.
  • I used the TechDraw work bench, with some graphics/gimp filters, to generate 2D patent drawings.
  • There are an number of cloud based 3D CAD programs, Fusion360 is popular. You have no guarantees that your work will be held confidential.
  • After 5 or 6 tutorials, I could produce code and review the new tutorials as they come out.
To make prototypes, you have to generate g-code that your 3D printer understands. This is done with Slicers, The only opensource FDM slicers in FreeBSD are cad/cura and cad/prusaslicer. My resin printer uses a *.ctb format (Chitubox) and try's to link to Chitubox's servers in Mainland China. The link fails in Debian.

I never delved deep into 2D CAD programs. From an opensource perspective, cad/librecad is a fork of cad/qcad.
cad/qcad has some close source elements while librecad is fully opensource.
 
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shepper said:
and try's to link to Chitubox's servers in Mainland China.
Click to expand...
Yeah.. Right. That would be a reason against buying that brand.

We used KiCad for some things, it did fit the bill there. But that is from several years ago, so take it with a grain of salt.
 
Crivens said:
Yeah.. Right. That would be a reason against buying that brand.

We used KiCad for some things, it did fit the bill there. But that is from several years ago, so take it with a grain of salt.
Click to expand...
Prusa, an innovative Czech company who opensourced their slicer, does make a resin printer but it is LED based and roughly $2K before shipping:
Prusa SL1. If I were in the design business I would have bought a Prusa SL1 resin printer just for the privacy and security. My project was a one-off.

Chinese Resin printers are significantly cheaper and more technologically advanced. Same holds true for Bambulab's FDM printers.
Summary of U.S. available resin printers
It is a significant problem for small time inventors/creators in the U.S. to have secure, private access to the technology at an affordable price. There is another level of resin printers that are used by Dentists to make molds for crowns and implants - these run $3K to $10K.
If the printers have network capability, it is another path to Chinese servers. The default for BambuLab's to network print goes through Cloud Servers in Mainland China.

I've been looking at a work around that will convert Prusa's *sl1 and export to the myriads of file formats:
Resin printer file formats
uvtools.

I have not tested uvtools as I'm sure my local install of Chitubox is sandboxed off network in Debian and moving the project along is primary. The bulk of the code is based on the G-Code Arduino Library. I've not looked at the Chinese formats but I suspect they add additional features like networking, compression, magnification, resin tracking and collaboration/spyware. Conversion should be possible.
 
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3D-printing - I like OpenSCAD for quick prototypes, and FreeCAD for more complicated models.
for printed circuit boards (PCBs) - KiCad is the answer.
 
For PCBs, KiCad. Was paying for Altium for a few years, switched to KiCad in 2019 and never looked back. Have done a variety of PCBs with it. A really nice feature of KiCad is you can export the STEP file for your PCBs. It was very intuitive for me, but I made my 1st PCBs back in the 70's.
At least in the US, the Osh Park PCB Fab service is a big win. It used to be any size board started at $100. I do a lot of little test circuit boards where for $ 5 to 25 you can get 3 boards made with free shipping. I've done some tricky power supplies and RF pre-amps with their 4 layer service.

For the 3D design software, I'm using Fusion360. It really should be named ConFusion360 becuase the learning curve is very steep. Some of this is, as I have always suspected, mechanical engineers are a bit odd (said the EE). They have a free version, I'm paying for it because I want to learn to use some of the advanced features. What I like about it is I can import the step file from KiCad and then design the chassis around it. Gone are the days of making a lot of measurements on the PCB and then drawing up the 2D drawn chassis blueprints. The win is you can "project" the connectors, mounting holes, LED locations onto the chassis box so no measurements are needed. There are good tutorials out there for ConFusion360, look up "Making a chassis for a Raspberry Pi". Product Design Online has great videos. Once you've spent 60 hours screaming at the screen you're good to go. About the same "up to speed" time as any good software tool. I needed a little Opto isolator circuit. It was a 1 hour PCB, and 1 hour chassis. I could not have breadboarded it that fast and drilled a chassis. And for that time, I then had 3 of them (with about 30 minutes to solder them all up). This is a different world, and I hope this will bring back electronics as a hobby for people.

Once I have the .3mf for the chassis, I make the .code wit the Prusa slicer which I like a lot.I print on a Prusa MK3S+ printer with the stock nozzle, typical in PLA resin.
 
I have been using LibreCAD for 2D CAD. It is close enough to Draftsight (which is a cheaper work-alike to AutoCAD) that the switch was fairly easy. (This made me happy, since the price of Draftsight kept going up.)

One caveat: the scripting language for Draftsight and AutoCAD is a variant of LISP. For LibreCAD it is Lua. So if you are using AutoCAD or Draftsight and are a heavy-duty scripter, the transition will be harder.

BRL-CAD is a comprehensive 3D constructive solid modeling, originally from the U.S. Army Ballistics Research Lab. Sadly, it seems like they have spent all their time on the modeling and rendering, and not too much on the UI, and I find it almost impossible to use.
 
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