After only 20+ years in the making, FreeCAD hit the 1.0 mark today. The latest development cycle wasn’t easy, a lot of things happened along the way. Let’s talk about major changes in this release and then discuss how the community has been evolving.
FreeCAD used to have a whole bunch of topological naming issues that are mostly gone now. So if you reference geometry in a part, then delete that geometry, your model shouldn’t break anymore. It’s still possible to run into issues, but it’s true for any parametric CAD software to some extent. In that respect, FreeCAD is more like any other CAD program now.
FreeCAD now has an integrated Assembly workbench written by the Ondsel team. It currently supports a bottom-up design approach, so the preferred workflow is to create a new assembly, insert parts as links, ground one part, connect parts with joints, set offsets and limits, and then you can test the motion of the assembly.
After that, you can create exploded views — as many as you like — and place them on TechDraw pages. You can also generate bills of materials — as many as you like too. Both exploded views and bills of materials are parametric, you can reopen and adjust their settings.