FreeCAD News

There are so many com­mu­ni­ty areas around FreeCAD. Apart from the excel­lent offi­cial FreeCAD forum almost every con­ceiv­able mes­sag­ing plat­form or social media camp has a FreeCAD pres­ence. From Face­book and X, through Dis­cord, Matrix and Fos­stodon there are lots of places with FreeCAD dis­cus­sion. Whilst we all might have our favoured places to chat FreeCAD it’s inter­est­ing to look across a few of these com­mu­ni­ty areas and see what unites them. On a dai­ly basis look­ing across a few of these sites will reveal that “How do I get start­ed in FreeCAD?” is pos­si­bly the most com­mon enquiry.

We prob­a­bly all have our stan­dard answer and our go to meth­ods, sign­post­ing to the tuto­r­i­al or resource that was most use­ful to us. We thought we might list some of these here as options for peo­ple to explore.

It can be real­ly use­ful to point begin­ners at the FreeCAD Forum. The FreeCAD forum is frankly amaz­ing in what it con­tains, it is an absolute trea­sure trove of infor­ma­tion and inspi­ra­tion. It’s def­i­nite­ly worth men­tion­ing search­ing there and read­ing results for a while before post­ing a ques­tion with many sub­jects hav­ing been dis­cussed wide­ly before. The oth­er note worth men­tion­ing to those new to FreeCAD and the forum is that if ask­ing for help it’s always worth click­ing the “about FreeCAD” tab in “Help” menu and copy past­ing your FreeCAD ver­sion and oper­at­ing sys­tem infor­ma­tion into the top of your post.

The sec­ond place that is def­i­nite­ly worth point­ing new­com­ers is the offi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion. Again the offi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion has heaps of infor­ma­tion and many pages of it actu­al­ly have small exam­ples and mini tuto­ri­als on par­tic­u­lar tools and their use. It is fair to say that some parts of the doc­u­men­ta­tion might not be 100% up to date with cur­rent FreeCAD releas­es but usu­al­ly dif­fer­ences are small and the prin­ci­ples of oper­a­tion are the same. If peo­ple are inter­est­ed in help­ing devel­op and main­tain the offi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion then check out this link to find out how to get involved. The offi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion sits on the FreeCAD wiki and the infor­ma­tion is pre­sent­ed in numer­ous dif­fer­ent ways. There are numer­ous “hubs” for Users, Pow­er Users and Devel­op­ers as well as a more lin­ear read­able man­u­al.

Out­side of the offi­cial FreeCAD resources there are lots of resources to learn FreeCAD from. Look­ing around all the dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ty areas rec­om­men­da­tions for online video tuto­ri­als are com­mon. There are lots of peo­ple cre­at­ing great video tuto­ri­als across a range of ser­vices. Whilst Youtube is by far the most com­mon, there are increas­ing amounts of FreeCAD video tuto­r­i­al con­tent on Peer­tube and oth­er non pro­pri­etary plat­forms. Search­ing Peer­tube we came across this Ger­man lan­guage video tuto­r­i­al which also has a sign lan­guage inter­pre­ta­tion, excel­lent work.

We’d be remis not to men­tion the two most com­mon­ly rec­comend­ed youtube chan­nels serv­ing excel­lent FreeCAD and gen­er­al CAD con­tent. Joko Engi­neer­ing and Man­go Jel­ly. Both these chan­nels have playlists specif­i­cal­ly for FreeCAD for those absolute­ly new to CAD as well as an aston­ish­ing array of more advanced tutorials.

Some­times peo­ple pre­fer a writ­ten guide to FreeCAD rather than video and a com­mon rec­om­men­da­tion is “FreeCAD for Mak­ers” which is a freely down­load­able 16 chap­ter book from the Rasp­ber­ry Pi Press. In full dis­clo­sure the author of this also is the author of this post and the book also has a fore­word writ­ten by Yorik. The book works from the premise that if you can work through and under­stand the first two tuto­ri­als ( a small project using the Part work­bench and a small project using Part Design) then you can skip to any oth­er sec­tion of the book and work through any of the oth­er tutorials.

A less com­mon rec­om­men­da­tion but one that some peo­ple find incred­i­bly use­ful when they have learnt a lit­tle FreeCAD is to look at oth­er peo­ples project files. A great source of this, again, can be the FreeCAD Forum, how­ev­er it’s hard to ignore the amount of FreeCAD projects shared on 3D print­ing relat­ed sites. Whilst there are many sites. Thin­gi­verse, Grab­cad and more, Print­a­bles is a pop­u­lar option. Using the search term “FreeCAD” returns page after page of results, and whilst we can’t claim to have checked them all, most of the result­ing projects include the FreeCAD project file as well as some export­ed 3D objects. Of course, these projects are all aimed at 3D print­ing tech­nol­o­gy but they are fas­ci­nat­ing and often use­ful to down­load, look at, and tweak, broad­en­ing the pool of FreeCAD approach­es you’ve seen.

Final­ly, thank you, if you are one of the many many peo­ple in our com­mu­ni­ty who answer the “how do I get start­ed?” ques­tion and help oth­ers start their jour­ney, we salute you.