FreeCAD on Raspberry Pi 3

[pj1977]

Hey all,
1st off, love FreeCAD. Been using it for a while on various at home projects. I recently got a Raspberry Pi 3 and am trying to get FreeCAD to work on it. Tried Raspbian + Pixel and was super slow. Tried Raspbian lite and can't get the program to bring up the FreeCAD GUI. Any suggestions on OS, settings, etc? Thanks.

[DeepSOIC]

Hi!
I've installed FreeCAD v0.14 on RPi 3 Raspbian, and it was extremely slow. Then I somehow managed to enable hardware accelerated OpenGL instead of the default software one, and it made rendering speed reasonable. However, overall FreeCAD was still way too slow to be useful, so I didn't bother trying to compile some more current one, because I would need to compile dependencies first, and I didn't know how to do it... Too much effort for something not very useful.

[luvres]

For Raspbian PIXEL Desktop in Raspberry Pi 3 (32 Bits)

Depedences:

sudo apt-get install -y \
git build-essential cmake python python-matplotlib libtool libcoin80-dev libsoqt4-dev libxerces-c-dev libboost-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-regex-dev libboost-program-options-dev libboost-signals-dev libboost-thread-dev libboost-python-dev libqt4-dev libqt4-opengl-dev qt4-dev-tools python-dev python-pyside pyside-tools liboce-modeling-dev liboce-visualization-dev liboce-foundation-dev liboce-ocaf-lite-dev liboce-ocaf-dev oce-draw libeigen3-dev libqtwebkit-dev libshiboken-dev libpyside-dev libode-dev swig libzipios++-dev libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev netgen-headers libmedc-dev libvtk6-dev libproj-dev

Source FreeCAD:

git clone https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD.git FreeCAD
mkdir freecad-build
cd freecad-build

Building:
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DBUILD_FEM_NETGEN=ON ../FreeCAD
time make

[triplus]

How long does it take to finish?

[luvres]

severous hours. twelve, maybe..

[triplus]

Thanks for the info. Well twelve is good. I thought it took longer.

[jmaustpc]

severous hours. twelve, maybe..

How slow/fast does FreeCAD run once compiled? Have you got OpenGL, not ES, support? If so, is it hardware accelerated?

I would have expected it to be impractically slow, like DeepSOIC said, but I am interested to hear how it went and I would like to be wrong!

[luvres]

Construction on Raspberry pi is slow and sometimes fails to complete larger builds. So I have worked and used docker with Qemu on amd64 machines to build armhf and aarch64.
For those interested, the project is at: https://hub.docker.com/r/izone/freecad/

[Kunda1]

Sorry to necrobump but thought this was relevant:
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ra ... os-update/
Maybe we can get FC on said store?

[chrisb]

We could at least provide a Raspberry version of the latest stable on our Download page.