Just started watching this:
Seems to be done well, and the first episode includes some history/backstory which I appreciate.
5 Likes
This is great - very clear, interesting to watch, and he drops a lot of useful knowledge, keyboard shortcuts, etc throughout the video (I’ve watched 2 so far). Personally, I would love a tutorial format like THIS quality for a “Hello world” CNC router flow - specifically working with the CAM workbench.
With Darren Stone (“MangoJelly”) announcing today that he was laid off / made redundant and is going to focus on his youtube channel and FreeCAD commissions, and that he’s thinking about including his laser cutter and CNC machine (in the video description, not the video itself), maybe he’ll be a likely someone doing the FreeCAD CAM hello world tutorials? You might consider dropping into the comments there?
I found Shawn’s stuff released significantly after FreeCAD 1.0 was released, yet full of forward references to what might be in FreeCAD 1.0, somewhat awkwardly timed. Mostly because I’m one of those who builds FreeCAD from source (in fact, halfway through a build right now) and am aware of that schedule, though… 
2 Likes
When I switched from Fusion360 on Linux to FreeCAD it was after I PM’ed a few people asking about their migrations and was told to get the beta instead of the stable since it had key improvements which made it easier to use. IIRC it as 0.91 or something like that. It was pretty stable and only once in a while did it crash and even then it has auto-recovery so nothing lost.
While it is often difficult to find the daily build versions, that’s generally where I get my FreeCAD. Again, it can be difficult to find though and most will not find the beta’s or daily build versions.
I’m thinking the Digikey guys isn’t aware of this and as a commercial CAD user, he likely stays away from or has no access to pre-released versions so is not familiar enough to know better.
I don’t think that’s what it was. I just think Shawn spent a lot of time in post but didn’t re-shoot after the release. He talked about this while he was shooting the series, I was following what he was saying.
1.0 is reasonably stable.
Building from source (basically like daily or weekly builds, but running natively on Fedora), I run into and report problems from time to time, including crashing FreeCAD, things temporarily not working, etc.
I now recommend folks starting on on FreeCAD to start with 1.0, not development builds. It was different before 1.0 came out. There are enough changes in the development build that following guides for 1.0 and using daily/weekly builds will be frustrating. For example, importing external geometry changed from construction to normal geometry by default.
Here’s the release history.
3 Likes