DraftSight Free?

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by Muzzer on 31/05/2016 13:57:25:

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Freecad was very buggy in my experience. Hardly surprising perhaps, given the very limited resources they have available. Onshape on the other hand has a vast and well-funded professional development team dedicated to its success – as has Fusion 360.

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My experience too but the latest versions are much better.

It's limited compared to a full blown commercial 3D CAD Pacckage but I find it meets my simple needs very well.

I wish it had an Assembly Workbench and that the Drawing Workbench did dimensions.

This took longer to upload than draw:

Sorry about the curious image size problem, assuming that you get what I see!

Cheers,

Dave

[AjohnwParticipant @ajohnw51620]

They will get there Dave, It just takes time and there can be surprisingly big improvements each time the next stable releases are produced. Things tend to come together rapidly eventually. It looks like they have 9 people working on it.

John

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[MuzzerParticipant @muzzer]

I heard the other day that Fusion have either 200 or 400 full time professional s/w engineers working on theirs. I forget which number. Onshape has raised over $140M to date, so probably very similar numbers of engineers. Both companies are working their way through features lists in planned phases. It's a different game…

[TomfileryParticipant @tomfilery]

Hi all,

Apologies for hijacking the thread, but does anyone know of any CAD software (apart from Draftsight) which will run on Ubuntu and which allows dxf files with multiple paper spaces to be viewed? All the free ones I've tried don't and either just ignore the multiple paper spaces, or deposit all the components therein into large pile on the model space. Other programs allow some (but not all) of the paper spaces to be viewed under blocks.

I've used model space for the complete drawing and have put the individual components and dimensions in separate sheets in paperspace, hence my reason for wanting to maintain those sheets.

I spend part of the year abroad and use a pc overseas which has the "lagging mouse" problem (which seems to be down to needing a faster pc to run DraftSight). My original files were created, over quite some time, in TurboCad, but my general disgust with Microsoft's approach to their customers means I'm using Windows less and less and Ubuntu more.

I'm a hobbyist and so don't want to spend hundreds of pounds on professional, commercial, products.

Grateful for any thoughts you might have.

Regards Tom

[AjohnwParticipant @ajohnw51620]

Posted by Muzzer on 01/06/2016 09:14:17:

I heard the other day that Fusion have either 200 or 400 full time professional s/w engineers working on theirs. I forget which number. Onshape has raised over $140M to date, so probably very similar numbers of engineers. Both companies are working their way through features lists in planned phases. It's a different game…

FreeCAD has it's roadmap too

**LINK**

Your very likely to be miles out if you think all of the people working on it are amateurs.

I suspect the main problem for the people working on FreeCAD is that it isn't based on a package that has existed before. LibreCAD for instance is what is usually called a fork from a package that eventually went commercial. Most software packages spring from much older ones that even predate windows. That way much of the underlying work has been done or at least thought out.

On the other hand FreeCAD may be based loosely around the other one OpenSCAD. Many other packages may be too. As that works in a different way to others it's a pretty extreme fork but lots of the nuts and bolts needed are in it. It's a fact that lots of the things people use every day originated in Unix. There is nothing that new about 3D cad either but the gear was extremely expensive even at today's prices not even accounting for inflation.

Looks like OpenSCAD is going to get help from Google over the summer. FreeCAD may not be in a suitable state to allow lots of people to work on it currently or maybe they just didn't apply.

John

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[MuzzerParticipant @muzzer]

In the org chart there seem to be the same half a dozen or so names, thinly spread across the actual writing and compiling activity and no mention of activities such as testing / validation for instance.

Some of them may be professional software engineers during the day but as it says, "As we are volunteers to FreeCAD we have only a certain amount of time". The OS / F360 teams are full time and fully funded, as well as significantly larger and more focused. Not knocking them or what they have achieved but as I said, it's in a whole different league, so I think you can expect different rates of progress!

[AjohnwParticipant @ajohnw51620]

Testing and validating is usually done by a group of users or very often by anyone who wants to do it. They just download and compile from what ever git style repository the project uses. While the word compile may sound pretty complicated it isn't. It's extremely easy and doesn't require any real software knowledge at all.

Documentation unfortunately can be a problem as they often find it hard to get enough people to keep it current.

I'd expect 200 software people who were working on a single project to contain a very significant number of people that bore a distinct relationship to typists.

John

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[Russell EberhardtParticipant @russelleberhardt48058]

Posted by Tomfilery on 01/06/2016 09:59:23:

I spend part of the year abroad and use a pc overseas which has the "lagging mouse" problem (which seems to be down to needing a faster pc to run DraftSight).

That problem has been fixed in the latest version: **LINK**

Russell.

[MuzzerParticipant @muzzer]

The ones that worked for me at my last place didn't look or behave anything like typists. No social graces or self awareness, addicted to pizza, muffins, soft drinks and gaming, talking to themselves. I know, I know – they were engineers….

Any software that is used for safety critical applications like automotive and many industrial applications has to be properly validated as part of the development "V cycle". Although you might argue that many uses of modern CAD are not safety critical, you won't have much luck selling it to mainstream users unless you can show them your CAD product has been properly tested. Having said that, companies like Dassault (Solidworks) seem to have reverted to using their customers to do the testing and then charging them top dollar for the fixes.

[TomfileryParticipant @tomfilery]

Russell,

Many thanks – although SP1 doesn't make specific mention of having fixed that particular mouse problem – I'll give it a go in a couple of weeks when I'm back out there.

Regards Tom

[AjohnwParticipant @ajohnw51620]

Posted by Muzzer on 01/06/2016 19:24:59:

The ones that worked for me at my last place didn't look or behave anything like typists. No social graces or self awareness, addicted to pizza, muffins, soft drinks and gaming, talking to themselves. I know, I know – they were engineers….

Any software that is used for safety critical applications like automotive and many industrial applications has to be properly validated as part of the development "V cycle". Although you might argue that many uses of modern CAD are not safety critical, you won't have much luck selling it to mainstream users unless you can show them your CAD product has been properly tested. Having said that, companies like Dassault (Solidworks) seem to have reverted to using their customers to do the testing and then charging them top dollar for the fixes.

I worked on very safety critical software Muzzer. It even had to pass legislation and be tested independently. I even had to convince TUV that it was ok once. That way if I failed to they could blame me. This is how I know some software engineers are more akin to typists, checkers and all sorts who do what they are told to do. This is more true the more people there are.

A side effect of my time doing it causes me some grief from my wife. Sit at a PC and if some one talks to me it goes in one ear and out of the other hardly registering. If they hang around quietly I may answer them when I have finished what I am doing. My wife has walked away muttering by then, Unlike her though I don't talk to myself.

John

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[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by Muzzer on 01/06/2016 09:14:17:

I heard the other day that Fusion have either 200 or 400 full time professional s/w engineers working on theirs. I forget which number. Onshape has raised over $140M to date, so probably very similar numbers of engineers. Both companies are working their way through features lists in planned phases. It's a different game…

Certainly true that God usually favours the big battalions but there are lots of counter examples in IT. The classic reference is "The Mythical Man Month", often quoted and usually ignored.

Messrs Gates, Wozniak and Jobs all started very small. After their initial growth spurts both Apple and Microsoft had serious problems with big projects, as do many other enterprises. For example, despite or perhaps because of a large team, Microsoft lost about $8bn on mobile/smart phone software. It's not because they employed stupid people!

Small software projects are much easier to manage and can benefit hugely from good leadership, high morale and a tight vision. The architecture of FreeCAD is worth understanding too: it's not being developed from scratch. What we think of as "FreeCAD" is actually an interface to a number of powerful underlying libraries, each of which also have development teams.

The underlying CAD engine is OpenCascade, which was a commercial product until the owners decided to move into services rather than software development. OpenCascade has not been exploited in full yet by the FreeCAD developers.

I'm not banging the drum for any of the alternatives. Choosing software is very much horses for courses. We're lucky to have so much choice.

[SandgrounderParticipant @sandgrounder]

Posted by Russell Eberhardt on 31/05/2016 13:54:05:

Posted by Sandgrounder on 31/05/2016 11:23:03:

I'm running Linux Mint 13 Maya at the moment and DraftSight won't launch, however a friend is sending me a disc with the latest Ubuntu so I'll see how that works out.

John

Did you get any error messages when installing Draftsight? It could be that there is a dependency issue.

Even though v.13 is still supported it's probably worth upgrading to the latest version of Linux Mint. You can download all the latest versions here. I'm using the 64 bit Cinnamon version with no problems.

Russell.

My friend has just upgraded my PC to the 64 bit Cinnamon rather than the Ubuntu I mentioned, and it's all working fine now.

Thanks

John

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