Welcome to Ondsel Engineering Suite 2024.1, our integrated solution for collaboration on 3D CAD designs. See here for detailed imformation about the release: ondsel.com/blog/introducing-o...
@@sniperwolf50 Probably because the software is made by engineers rather than designers. Hopefully the two disciplines can learn to work together better in software, like they do in web-dev, architecture, and automotive.
A bit out of topic but I'd like to share my gripe about Linux. Despite having UX in its name, the Linux gatekeeper still insist on using command line to do basic stuff. UX is how you get new people to adopt the thing and I hope Ondsel proves it.
Please, PLEASE make sure any and all cloud features can be disabled (and managed by administrators, eg. via GPOs) for environments that require the security and protection from exfiltration, accidental or otherwise.
@@cfgosnell There's a difference between telemetry and a cloud option. If you don't use the cloud and the program doesn't collect sensitive information it's a nonissue.
Very excited about this. Freecad had lacked aui/UX focus forever. As soon as I'm at my desk I'm grabbing the app image. So pleased your playing so well with the oss world as well. So important to me. Hope you can make the commercial side a massive success!
This reminds me of Blender's 2.8 UI rework, or when KiCad fundamentally changed it's schematic editing paradigm in version 6. I bet this project will experience a similar boost in popularity. I am so excited to try this out!
Awesome! I’m a huge open source advocate and I love FreeCAD. It’s about time someone commercialized FreeCAD with a support model. This will put FreeCAD on the radar of many more companies, growing the open source community and bettering CAD for all. Thank you Ondsel ❤
Do you also love ironing your hands in the oven and other masochistic activities? Or do you have a neurodivergence that makes it more usable for you than the rest of us? Asking sincerely, not as an insult.
So excited for some sane UI defaults and the integrated assembly workbench. I tried FreeCAD about a year and a half ago and the part design tools were fine, but it took too long to set up the UI, and the assembly abilities were a joke compared to Solidworks or Fusion. Very excited to have my mind changed!
This is super exciting!! I have been on open-source software for years, and have specifically taught FreeCAD for CNC, 3D Print, and Laser at our community makerspace to hundreds of people. People go directly from design to producing their physical prototypes. I'm very happy to see this effort. Thank you.
Thanks for contributing!!! UX/UI improvements make total difference to new users and giving new and fresh air to those that already support open-source.
More than anything its just surprising to see them actually willing to upstream their UI changes given that that's normally the driving factor that keeps people using their product over the original open source project. I just hope it stays an amicable relationship and not a buyout/hostile takeover.
facinating. i never got into freecad since it seems unintuitive but i will certanly be trying this. who knows, mabe i've finally found my new CAD software.
Made a couple of simple multi-body assemblies, seems to be all clear and usable. Is there a tool for explosion of schemes planned in the future? I know there is a workbench for this, but it is not supported for a long time
Just found out that I do not have to install the software on a computer (on which I don't have permission to install a software) but I can still work on FreeCAD using the Ondsel package. Great! Need to find out what else is new on this package. I have high hopes for the assembly workbench.
Whoa! I love what you are doing. Surprised I've only heard of Ondsel now! Gotta be careful to ensure your business is sustainable and you are contributing back upstream. Tricky but totally doable. Good luck!
I hate people that kiss butt. Here I am though, trying to dodge kissing yours. Nice work and glad to see you're remaining witb the upstream and not going for a fork
Good stuffs. Thanks for the contribution. I think the Assembly needed a clearer tutorial, though. Thanks. For example, how do one link an external part to the assembly file.
Thank you! We didn't mean this video to be a tutorial for assemblies. There's an earlier post with the video that is a walk through the workbench: ondsel.com/blog/assembly-wb-prerelease/. It doesn't cover linking, but essentially you open FCStd file that you want to link, then from the document where you assembly is you click the Insert Link button on the toolbar, left click on parts you need, and click ok to finish linking.
This kind of software and business should be the future! I don't know why I just really like this form of software, provide extra function and support for business users for a price and in the meantime releases the source code of the software (I know FreeCAD is under GPL but still!!!) and releases the software for free!
excited to see a project that might end up being and alternate to fusion 360 but you guys need more tutorials on RU-vid as i am struggling to make the crossover (as a beginer), I cant even seem to google answers to basic questions like where can i save my measurements/parameters for quick future use in design?
I hope they follow the same path as Blender with corporate sponsors. Maybe even go for an Epic megagrant. I'm a product designer and we often translate for example our CAD models into something to view in Unreal (mostly twinmotion)
Edit: I tried it out and, besides UI improvements, its not any better. In fact, it feels much worse in terms of model stability. All of my drawings completely randomly teleport whenever I make any change, on a relatively simple part, mostly boxes and a single cylinder. The dimension tool is neat. Like seriously, I just change one dimension with a simple box, and another drawing somewhere else just turned 45 degrees! How is that even possible, I dont have anything at that angle on this part! Old unedited comment: Looking forward to better model stability. Two major issues I have with freeCAD are: 1. When my part randomly has features invert, change direction, etc. 2. Having to re-define every constraint every time I change a base feature's dimensions. For example, changing a cylinder's length forces me to re-define relations of the plane of drawings made at the end of thar cylinder. Hopefully your CAD won't have these issues / will have them to a lesses extent. And maybe, you could fix that in FreeCAD I looked at your website and the features seem cool! Good job.
Sounds cool. I tried to get fusion 360 to change text in a 3d print based on the version of the model. Couldn't get it to work but it seemed like it should be easy. Maybe the open file format would be conducive to that type of thing
Likewise, I jumped ship during the last Autodesk purge of hobbyists and I am pretty sure there are going be many more. Fusion 360 does not allow non-paying users to create more than one page in any file in the drawing environment which frankly is an insult, FreeCAD's Techdraw workbench is miles better that Fusion 360's drawing environment and plays fairly nicely with the ever improving Inkscape. Once you understand what you are working with, FreeCAD (particularly the dev builds like Ondsel's) are really productive.
Interesting. Glad to see new options come out. Currently using fusion 360 which I do enjoy quite a bit but wish their app was usable, especially for designing parts and not just a mediocre viewer. Any plans for an app?
@@Ondsel ya, kind of like shaper3d or I think you can somewhat do it with onshape. But I understand, this is still early and that would be probably not essential for a while. Definitely focus on the native software first
While FreeCAD is there but it isn't very user friendly. I am extremely glad to see a more promising alternative. As a civil engineering student, I would also really appreciate a version or features that can work as a full alternative to AutoCAD.
Im definitively testing it! But to really use it, I am one of the people who mainly work in catia shape design. If you could integrate a workbench that focuses on aerodynamics design, that would be great. The feature most CAD systems are missing is the option to build tangential supports for your surfaces.
@@Ondsel Well yes, but actually no... In catia shape design you create surfaces and thicken them afterwards. (Only outer shell is created with offset for thickening) I can do this in inventor, but it starts getting difficult when I want to place e.g.: A true 3D spline and create a surface with 4 of them (like a 2d surface fill but 3d). In catia I now have the option to create smooth transitions between multiple such "fills" through supports that dictate an exact orientation at a certain point. If you want I can make a video and send it to you.
It's worth asking how this is financed. It's a commercial company so they are looking to make money. Are they going to start charging for the app later? From what I can gather, they have pricing plans now that only monetize the cloud and collaborative features. I think that is a good approach. FreeCAD is promising but has really struggledto develop, it does takes time and money to develop this stuff. They state: "The source code of Ondsel ES is public and available under the same license as upstream FreeCAD, which is LGPLv2+. The same applies to the Lens addon." They also state that Ondsel files can be opened with FreeCAD. I'm cautiously optimistic. It seems similar to how MuseScore operates, which so far is a good model. The sheet music editing app is free and open source, while they charge a sub for full access to the online score sharing service. It works for me anyway, and my musician friends, many of whom subscribe. And MuseScore has developed into a very deep and capable tool. I would compare this to blender but I still don't know how they pay for that development! Blender is astounding. Go Ondsel and may the FOSS be with you!
Approx. how many Linux users do you and FreeCAD have? Any ideas as to the number of Linux downloads of Ondsel?
5 месяцев назад
This is apparently based on FreeCAD, right? I'm curious if we'll see features upstreamed back to FreeCAD, which would be incredible 👏 EDIT: Aah okay they were already mentioning that in the video...
It is what FreeCAD was missing all the time for me. While also beeing able to search for freecad tutorials and use them for Ondsel. Pretty good so far.
Not much in this release (better sanity reports, bugfixes), but there's ongoing work to improve the tool library's UX. There's vastly more things to do than that, of course. We'll get there :)
First I heard of this... I've been playing with 0.22.0 for the last week or so. How much of the latest improvements are incorporated into Ondsel ES right now?
Nope, not true. We are contributing heavily to core FreeCAD. We are leading the development of the new integrated assembly workbench. This release includes the workbench which has not been merged to upstream FreeCAD yet.
1:43 in the top menu I see a download link but this link isn't available when I browse to the website. On the homepage there is a big Download button but it brings to a Sign up page. This is confusing. How to download Ondsel ?
sketchup's format is proprietary so there's not much we can do. Step file import is very well supported. STL is a mesh format. They can be imported into ondsel/FreeCAD and conversion is possible but any time you try to convert from a mesh to a solid, the results will be less than satisfactory.
OpenDark theme, a custom preference pack. The new integrated workbench code which has not been merged to FreeCAD yet. Also a handful of sketcher improvements which have also been submitted to upstream FreeCAD but not yet merged.
Coming from Fusion 360 on my educational license, this seems great. However, the UI is kinda wonky. It feels like I keep running into walls trying to do things. I hope you folks keep improving this because it is looking good.
This makes me really happy. I am learning CAD right now, but hate that I am stuck with Fusion 360 to do the things I want to do. Please don't gather a substantial user base, then turn evil, okay?
Could someone please explain in simple terms how to install Ondsel? I downloaded the file and it is in a format I am not familiar with nor are there any instructions on the Ondsel site explaining what to do next. Thank you.
Assuming you're on windows, you'll unzip the file with a recent version of 7zip. The binary file is in the /bin directory and is called freecad.exe. The next version of Ondsel will have a proper installer and signed binaries but these things take time.
@@rony7751 Life in an early-stage startup. A million things to do and not enough people/money/time to do them all. We're doing the best we can and we'll get better! Thanks for bearing with us.
Only been installing software since 1977 for loads of people. this is not at all easy to install no clear instuctions. Do I have to install freecad first?
I was super excited about this until I saw that it's built off FreeCad. I'm no engineer or CAD designer, just a hobbyist and frankly, the fact that FreeCad can't even do an offset of a sketch is just insane to me. I've tried it so many times over the years and it's just WAY too difficult to learn lol.
Totally understand, the learning curve is steep. But that’s precisely the problem this project is trying to address, and they’ve made big changes to the sketcher, including adding offsets. ;)😊
It really isn't that bad, the problem is that the in the stable release the UI is unorganised and there is very little in the way of comprehensive instruction for use. Ondsel is an attempt to deal with this problem, in particular things like the sketcher offset which is now in both the Ondsel build and the FC dev builds. I think this was one of the things Ondsel were able to improve and share with the main branch, the next stable version of FreeCAD is going to be a huge improvement and it is likely to improve pretty steadily after.
@Ondsel you're making such a great changes. I'd like to support this work but 10/m for me, as a DIY user who uses it occasionally, is a bit too much. I wonder if it's possible to make a smaller patreon or similar donation/subscription without any additional `Peer` benefits.
We suggest donating to the FreeCAD Project Association - FreeCAD's own non-profit. The money goes into things like the grant program where developers make useful changes and get paid for doing that.
I really want to adopt the use of 3D software, I love sketchUp and how I can give freedom to my ideas, what I hate about sketchUp and the monthly fee with all software companies are doing.... could you implement some tool in this I don't know any software that works exactly like sketchUp, I'll see if I can install it, it could be a plugin.... What's fascinating about sketchUp is the direct and simple way to do 3D... I'm making a CNC Router myself and all 3D It's done using Corel and sketchUp, I do the 2D in Corel, I export it to DXF and I do the 3D in sketchUp.... I'm trying to learn Blender, but it's very different, Blender is very focused on organic drawing, I can even do drawing Geometric but not thinking about it like sketchUp. SketchUp should be a free and universal tool that Google should have sold to Timble.
Rarely heard of serious open-source concept in the world mechanical engineering, I switched to software engineering for the lack of opportunity to contribute/use CAD software.
Assuming you are running Windows, download the Windows build, unpack the archive, go to the 'bin' folder and double-click 'freecad.exe'. We'll have a regular installer when we get a USB token to sign installers, this takes a long time.
I'm not trying to do anything fancy - just model parts for 3d printing but the vanilla Freecad experience sucks. You can tell there is a decent cad software lurking under the surface, but the profusion of buttons, lack of context sensitivity, lack of forgiving controls, lack of intuitiveness just kills the experience. I *want* to use it, but the experience of OnShape or Fusion360 is so much better because they declutter the screen and use labels on buttons and meaningful icons to make things as simple as possible. e.g. when sketching I can't get over how many constraints Freecad slaps in my face vs those other tools and how all the icons are the same. Hide some of the constaints, label the common ones. It's little things like that which add up. So I'll be definitely be giving Ondsel a go, but it definitely needs to beat that usability into shape.
Tried it, not for me. I use solidworks in my professional life as well as clients and industries I am involved in. this software feels too "my first cad" rather and an industry powerfull cad tool - I just wanted to create a square, then a refernce line between opposite corners and center the guide line to the datum. wasnt able to do it.
FreeCAD UI/UX still has a ways to go but is remarkably complete feature-wise. FEM, CAM, and many other features. Thanks for trying it out and check back. You'll see it continue to improve and will always be much less expensive than solidworks.
I have been a user/manager of CAD and manager of software development projects for about 40years. I currently use at least 4 CAD products. Just recently started learning/using FreeCAD. All of that previous CAD experience leads only to frustration with FreeCAD. I know what I want to do and how to do it, but knowing the commands in FreeCAD is not that helpful. It is necessary to know the work flow. I have already completely wrecked drawings by deviating slightly from the undefined workflow. Overall UI/UX in FreeCAD is poor and would explain why so many who try it give up. FreeCAD really needs a dedicated UI/UX development team. Hard to do with all volunteers. If the only thing that Ondsel does is fix the UI/UX, it will be a winner.
We're focusing on the three big problems in FreeCAD right now. Toponaming mitigation, assembly, and UI/UX. UI/UX isn't a 'one and done' problem. It's going to take a long time to make the workflow smooth and consistent but that shouldn't stop real users from getting value from it immediately.
Out of those 3 priorities, the one that affects all users and does not have a workaround is the UI/UX. The other two are important, but less so.@@Ondsel
Looks like a free version, a $10/mo version and a (business) $200+$20/mo version. Something called "compute minutes" is included; not immediately clear what that is, does, or is used for.
The web service provides PDM like service. It has a FreeCAD instance behind it that can recompute models in the cloud. We cap the disk space and compute time used to avoid abuse
It is only at the beginning. You later will do like any other company does it looks. Because, you can't download it like other open source or home usage applications. The bureaucratic problems already started.
