Parametric enclosure with FreeCAD

If you use the latest editions of Freecad, the appimage, it's really a nice program.
It took me a week to learn with the help of youtube instruction video's.

I designed my latest plasma machine with the help of Freecad.
The sheel metal module for press braking works perfect. I already produced a prototype machine designed in Freecad.

Freecad uses opencascade, a powerfull 3d cad kernel.
At the moment i am coding with opencascade to make a 3d viewer for a robot preview connencted to lcnc and ethercat and kdl kinematics. The kinematics code of lcnc is quite limited.

A sort of replacement for the lcnc TK window. The robot preview is so nice, and moves are so fast !
Also the current gremlin view can be replaced by opencascade, this for info.

raw.githubusercontent.com/grotius-cnc/mayo/develop/mayo.png

Remember Autodesk is a very rich company. They only think about the money.
Last year they suddenly deleted Draftsight for linux.

Yep that's what I'm using the 0.19 appimage.

Sometimes I find these things have a huge learning curve for myself. Unlike a lot of the guys here I don't come from a machining, other trade or "professional" background.

I can either wield a shovel or a traffic control bat, that's the limit my "qualifications" run to.

after looking into the CAM side of things it would appear to be pretty limited compared to the modeling side of the program. might be ok for some basic things but not 3D milling. this might be an option for me creating a solid model to import into something else for tool path generation but is far from what i am looking for.

"Remember Autodesk is a very rich company. They only think about the money.
Last year they suddenly deleted Draftsight for linux."

I suppose you work for free then and don't care about money? Companies charge for their products, development is not free, offices are not free, testing is not free. Take a look at the full range of what Autodesk produces, it is much broader than just F360. If ppl weren't in essence stealing the use of the free product for commercial use the license restrictions would not have happened.

And your facts are wrong, Draftsight is not Autodesk, it is Dassault. They dropped all of the free licenses at the end of 2019, not just Linux.

Good luck with FreeCad, it will be a while before it is generally useful. It will continue for quite some time to be hampered by poor documentation and training videos as is so too common with free software.

@Gerrit,

Oke i was wrong about the name. But they took it down completely for linux users. Even a non free licence is not possible for linux.

Freecad is a high level software product, free charge. The documentation is more then good.
There are instruction video's, forums etc. There is much documentation. Users can sniff into the source code.. Users can write
their own modules etc.

Your negative view to the free software developers is something to be aware off.

Good luck !!

I don't have a negative view of free sw developers, I have a realistic view of what the sw is and provides. While Freecad is free in $, it is not free in my time spent reaching dead ends for what I need. I am used to using professional level documentation and support in my 43+ year working life. Telling me to go look at the source code is a pathetic response. I don't want to write my own modules and in fact most users don't want to do that (and can't). I had to do that on many ocassions with pbx sw and it was a most distasteful task in reverse engineering uncommented code. Thankfully I no longer have to maintain that for my friends.
I am happy to pay for Fusion360, it is well worth it.
LinuxCNC has reached a level of good documentation, and plenty of support videos.
I will look at FreeCad again in a few years and see if it is worth switching to, at present it won't work for me. I'm happy that it is good enough for you.