Using FreeCAD & openCascade for professional work

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Using FreeCAD & openCascade for professional work

Post by Guest »

I have a professional programming background and am an electronics engineer. My company is very small and is trying to expand into creating housings as well as PCB designs, I am evaluating the 3D CAD options. I have never used 3D CAD before but have now had a little bit of a play with both FreeCAD's GUI & scripting. I am extremely impressed, keep up the good work!

I have sometimes managed to 'break' the geometry, whilst playing with designs in the gui, I'm unsure if this is a bug in the display, boolean operations or a normal part of 3D CAD (I notice that the opencascade training contains a section called 'shape healing' perhaps I've broken the shape?).

Given that 3D cad is currently 0% of the business turnover, I can't justify the astronomical annual license fee & vendor lock-in that most commercial packages require! FreeCAD is a breath of fresh air in this sense. I do also feel that I will be able to puzzle out scripting the 3D geometries to create the kind of shapes that I'm looking for. Whatever CAD solution is used in the upcoming projects will likely be the CAD solution that we use for many years to come due to the implicit lock-in.

Having said the above, my interest in free software is not completely 'free as in beer'. It's not about the money, on the condition that we actually have something to deliver at the end of the project! So I would also like to enquire as to whether it would be possible to pay for some level of support from those who are skilled developers/users.

So, my question is to the developers. Is FreeCAD (and the underlying opencascade) up to the job of developing a housing for a commercial product development (given a little patience). Assuming that I am capable at Python & C, would it be possible to create a suitable housing? I just need to create three or so mouldable shapes, albeit the geometries might become quite complex, but I don't mind doing the scripting to create them. I will likely need to export some parts to meshes for FEM analysis - but this seems to be both possible through IGES+salome or possible in the bleeding edge versions of FreeCAD. How much more or less difficult would it be than learning a commercial package (given that I have never used a commercial parametric modeller either!). Finally, is there another solution, something like beginning by scripting in open cascade and using FreeCAD to view the designs so that in the future the transition to freecad is possible/easier?

Obviously, I'll make up my own mind, but it would be very interesting to hear your thoughts.
andywww
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Re: Using FreeCAD & openCascade for professional work

Post by andywww »

Erm... I'm the original poster of this link. I'm glad that I've asked a question that requires a bit of thought before it gets responded to. I'd like to reassure the admins that I wasn't trying to cause any trouble and didn't mean to do it anonymously. If it is more political, please send me a message: https://sourceforge.net/sendmessage.php?touser=3081159

It seems like all of the features that I'll need are covered, though I may end up dropping back to opencascade to get splines & using FreeCAD as a viewer for now.
wmayer
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Re: Using FreeCAD & openCascade for professional work

Post by wmayer »

I have sometimes managed to 'break' the geometry, whilst playing with designs in the gui, I'm unsure if this is a bug in the display, boolean operations or a normal part of 3D CAD (I notice that the opencascade training contains a section called 'shape healing' perhaps I've broken the shape?).
It seems that the boolean operations in OpenCascade has several problems with a bit more complicated shapes. In the OCC forum there are several postings concerning this issue where the shape healing algorithms are helpful but there doesn't seem to exist a way where you can be 100% sure to create valid results. For instance here is a nice example which I never was able to validate:

Code: Select all

import Part
helix1=Part.makeHelix(0.5,2,1.0).Edges[0]
helix2=Part.makeHelix(0.5,2,0.6).Edges[0]
worm=Part.makeRuledSurface(helix1,helix2)
worm=worm.extrude(App.Vector(0,0,0.1))
Part.show(worm)
cyl=Part.makeCylinder(0.8,2.1)
Part.show(cyl)
union=cyl.fuse(worm)
Part.show(union)
So, my question is to the developers. Is FreeCAD (and the underlying opencascade) up to the job of developing a housing for a commercial product development (given a little patience).
I think we have the very basic functionalities implemented but there are still problems e.g. with boolean operations where it's quite hard to workaround the limitations or bugs of the cad kernel. Several tools & algorithms are only accessible from script level where no GUI to them exists.

Since I actually don't have much practical experience with CAD applications I don't know what the requirements or functionalities for developing commercial products really are. But it should be easy to wire such functionalities to our script binding and GUI if the kernel already offers them.
I will likely need to export some parts to meshes for FEM analysis
Our Fem module is pretty empty at the moment. However, this is one topic which I'll work on with higher priority in the near future.
s there another solution, something like beginning by scripting in open cascade and using FreeCAD to view the designs so that in the future the transition to freecad is possible/easier?
I think you should have a look on our Wiki, especially the articles about Topological data scripting (https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/ ... _scripting)
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yorik
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Re: Using FreeCAD & openCascade for professional work

Post by yorik »

I already gave an answer to Andrew by mail, just to resume what I said, I told him I thought FreeCAD is half-way between "alpha stage" and "production level", that you can begin to use it for production if you are ready to cope with bugs, eventual crashes and possible loss of data from time to time, but there is now enough stuff (backup files, etc...) so you can protect yourself against serious problems.
I'm myself using freecad everyday a bit more for "real work". The good thing is that since there is no "30 days evaluation period", you are not forced to "switch" to freecad. You can just introduce it bit by bit, which to me is a much more natural way to adopt a new software.
I also said I didn't know much about the FEM module, and that I thought that at this time of development, the decision of if freecad is suitable has more to do with if you prefer an efficient, ready, polished application or if you are interested in trying the "opensource way", more buggy (at least at the moment), but also much more adaptable and fast-evolving.
Finally I encouraged him to post here, since I think it'll interest everybody.

Talking about backup files, one of these days we could think of an "auto-save" feature, which would save to a temp file every X minutes, what do you think? In all "easily crashable" applications (Autocad, MS Office ;) ) it's pretty useful...

*EDIT* Andrew, for more complex stuff like splines, etc, I'd recommend you to have a look at http://www.pythonocc.org/ ... It pretty much wraps ALL of opencascade in, python, and can be used inside freecad, and its geometry easily used in freecad ( http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/f ... =PythonOCC )
andresmp
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Re: Using FreeCAD & openCascade for professional work

Post by andresmp »

Hi hope this is in lines with the above conversation.

Has anybody had some experience in making simple technical drawings for other individuals?
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yorik
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Re: Using FreeCAD & openCascade for professional work

Post by yorik »

andresmp wrote:Has anybody had some experience in making simple technical drawings for other individuals?
Yes! But my field is architecture, it's probably a totally different domain than yours...
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