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CAD Software Suggestion
(lemm.ee)
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this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
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I like FreeCAD, but I've heard people complain about it.
I'm not an ME, so I certainly don't make use of all the CAD features needed, so maybe that's why I don't get the complaints. Still, it suits my needs which mostly involve modeling PCBs and building enclosures around them.
I think that FreeCAD and Blender are probably fine for this.
Example of something I've made and printed the enclosure for via FreeCAD: Fight Key Wide. It uses parameter-based design and includes some design touches like screw-holes and bezels which aren't purely simple geometry, so FreeCAD gets a pass in my book.
If you look at the GitHub linked on the project page, it has the enclosure files which you can check out in FreeCAD if that helps you get started.
Freecad has improved considerably in the last year, to a point where I've gone from saying I will wait to use it, to recommending it. It may actually have been designed for humans now.
Assuming you can figure out the UI
With about a half an hour of reading documentation it became very clear a couple versions ago what work benches were, which were useful to me, and how to use them. That's maybe longer than going from inventor to solidworks or visa versa, but hardly that bad. For a beginner it will be taking a long time anyway and there will be essentially no difference, except that you'll learn a much more robust understanding of how parametric modeling works.