What CAD software do you use?

On Sunday, I went down to the Ann Arbor District Library to attend their open 3D printing lab. I was kind of amazed. they had at least a dozen 3D printers.

I took with me an STL file that I’d downloaded from Thingiverse for an antenna end insulator. (They call it a dipole wire insulator.) I plugged in my USB drive, and about five minutes later, I had an end insulator. There were a lot of people there who wanted to print things, so they were telling people that they could only print one thing. Since mine was so small, though, they let me print another.

So, now I have to end insulators for my POTA antenna. Pretty cool.

I asked them what program they would suggest that I use to actually design something, and they gave me a link to TinkerCAD. I played around with TinkerCAD for a bit, and it seems capable enough for simple things. It was pretty simple to learn, but perhaps a bit too simple.

So, I started looking around for other free CAD software. One package I came across was FreeCAD. I downloaded it and played around with it a little. FreeCAD is certainly more full-featured, but a lot more capable, but a lot more complicated as well.

So, I asked my club’s members what they use. Here’s what they had to say:

• Alibre
  • “That is what I used for the design of the antenna center that I printed for you.”
  • “I’ve used Alibre in the past and liked it.”
• Autodesk Fusion 360
  • “There’s a free version of Autodesk Fusion 360 for personal use. “
  • “I think Fusion 360 is probably the most feature rich hobby level software. The value for the company here is that they want to hook you and convince you (or your employer) to start paying for server time to do stuff like generative modeling or CFD. They have tons of paid integration with industry level tools.”
• FreeCAD
  • “I have worked a bit with an older version of FreeCAD.  A rather steep learning curve, with buggy behavior at times, but very powerful and of course, free.  I’m curious to see how well the new version 1.0.0 works.”
  • “I bounced around through a few apps before I landed on FreeCAD. There’s a few good tutorials on YouTube that help with the operation, and also the thought process behind designing parts.”
  • “I found FreeCAD so hard to use I set it down almost immediately.”
• Onshape CAD
  • “Onshape is my daily driver. The full feature version is free as long as you don’t mind your designs being publicly visible and copy-able. Effectively you are paying for use by adding to their model catalog. Its in browser, so you never have to worry about losing your files.”
• OpenSCAD
  • “If you want something with a 5-10 minute learning curve, try OpenSCAD.”
• TinkerCAD
  • “I’ve heard TinkerCAD is great for simple things, but starts lacking when you get to complex geometry.”

As you can see there’s really no consensus. I guess that I’m just going to have to try them all and see which one I like best. What do you guys use?