r/FreeCAD

Hi everyone, Have you ever used the clipping tool of freecad? I was a bit unsatisfied with the clipping section visualization, that s why I implemented a clipping view which should help better understand the segmantic of neighboring surfaces. [in this PR https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/pull/33186

I m looking for some people who are willing to test it ona windows or macos device.

I would love to hear your thoughts and to learn wheter this is interesting to further improve or whether its completly useless to you

SOLVED by r/bastl73. Thanks people!

Hello! 👋 TLDR: How would you make a cage for the balls? I need something that has a constant thickness for punched sheet metal fabrication like the second image.

Doing some practice - I want to make a cage to restrain my balls (that is the only reason I decided to make this part). However, a Part Design body that would do this job is cheating: I want to pretend I am the Big Cheese manufacturing this cage out of stamped sheet metal. I've included an image of what I mean (the second image); all of the things that look like corners actually aren't. Fillets don't achieve this because the centroids of them don't line up unless they are the same fillet. The normals both sides of the sheet must be parallel, and the thickness between them must be constant.

Hi, i´m new to freecad but been using Fusion360 quite a lot for my 3d printing projects.

I am trying to create a hole/Pocket through a hollow cylinder (all the way through). However, as soon as the hole reaches the inner or outer wall of the cylinder, the body disappears after the operation. What is the error here, and how do I fix it?

Thank you!

3dconnexion sells 3D mice of various kind. They all share one feature: they never break. My SpacePilot is from 2007 and it just keeps working. The rubber might get sticky, so some solvent and it's gone for good, and no stickyness anymore.

Being the market a niche one, the products cost a lot, and to force new purchases the company cut support for pre-2013 models (ok that's not yesterday, but keep reading).

Not only! to "bring the best user experience to the users" I found out 3dconnexion was active introducing suport for the latest drivers into various software, at the cost of dropping support for older devices!

See PR in FreeCAD

Yes supporting old devices costs money. How much? ALMOST NOTHING, because guess what? taking USB pakets from old devices and just changing the IDs here and minor things here and there makes very old and unsuported devices recognised as (less old but still) supported devices: this small bridge (5 Euro investment) converts old devices into a Spacemouse Wireless, still supported. Latest drivers are possible!

But why being dependent on them?

Someone reimplemented from scratch the Mac drivers for old devices, and now I ported their project to Windows (via Opus 5.5).

Enjoy telemetry-free, open source, working drivers on Windows for all the unsupported USB 3D mice.

These drivers have less predefined bindings for known packages. For example the official ones allow to bind a key to "show front, left, right" in Fusion, which has no keyboard shortcut for that. This kind of bindings are not yet offered, propose PRs if you want them.

There's always the option of remapping old devices into a Spacemouse Wireless to use official drivers, obviously.

Hello! Been trying to figure out FreeCAD to create this, but after watching many youtube videos, it's still beyond my reach. I'm working on a halloween costume and need to create a CAD file for a friend to 3D print to get this one piece done. It's very simple (or so I thought).

I need a square, trapezoidal block (think like a keyboard key). Flat on top and bottom.

Dims for bottom 11/16" square

Dims for top 9/16" square

Height of block 5/16"

The hard part is I need a cylindrical hole cut out from the bottom surface (centered), 1/4' deep and 1/2" in diameter.

Any way you gurus would be able to assist?

I work in construction and also build software for the industry. Lately I've been playing around with a problem that comes up all the time: opening a huge PDF plan set and trying to make sense of what's actually on the drawings.

So I built this little experiment.

You drop a PDF drawing into the browser and it crawls the sheet, picks up things like rooms, dimensions, notes, labels, doors, etc., and puts that information into a visual interface next to the drawing.

The funny part is that there's no AI doing the interpretation.

I wanted to see how far I could get by working with the actual structure and text that's already inside a CAD-exported PDF.

I'm thinking this could eventually be useful as a first step before giving a drawing to an AI model. Instead of asking AI to stare at a giant plan and figure everything out, give it a structured representation of the drawing first.

This is still very much an experiment. Here's a quick 30-second look at it.

Curious what people here think — does this kind of preprocessing make sense for AI working with technical drawings, or am I overcomplicating it?

I've been working on a project, trying to figure out linkages...

The motion performs as expected for part, but then the joints go crazy. And my "grounded object" keeps moving.

I've attached a video of the aberrant behavior. Any suggestions or explanations would be appreciated. I've been fighting with this for a day and a half now.