Use Blender for Mechanical Engneering CAD

Hi,

You might find something here:

I tried blender some time ago, and my impression was that it was more for graphics design than mechanical or CAD design. But it was a long time ago and they may have changed the program.

John

Interesting!

Id like to know the answer to this as well.

I just found more on

did you try freecad ? it uses opencascade, but you will have to compile it.

it seems that there is no activity on this project

No I have not tried freecad (askoh.com?). Please tell me if I am wrong but it looks like freecad is more for motion simulation whereas I am looking for a 3D mechanical part modeling with the ability to make 2D drawings from a 3D model.

Yes freecad is a mechanisms simulator.

I've been looking for an open source CAD program for a while and have found nothing that is not comfortably beaten by an 8 year old copy of TurboCAD.

Cheers

Greg Locock

This is quite amazing because there would be lots of users for such program, and the technical difficulty of writing it is still reasonable in comparison with current leading open source projects (bsd, OpenOffice,org, firefox...). Moreover there already are some librairies (OpenCascade) which could fill part of the job.

I don't want to be rude, but frankly the difficulty of writing a browser is nothing like writing a professional level 3D CAD system. Both Firefox and OpenOffice.org benefited to a large extent from previous, closed source, products.

As you say there would be many potential users. I'd guess that most of them worldwide are using pirate copies of Autocad, and most of the rest are using cheap or free educational versions of the grown-up packages. Therefore most of the potential userbase is already satisfied.

I guess the proof is in the pudding - there are several open source CAD projects on sourceforge - then look at how many have been updated in the last year.

Cheers

Greg Locock

Same as there exists some freely available libraries (eg open cascade). Only a good gui is really lacking. What also makes a difference is that many open sources are / have been backed by privates companies or foundations (Sun for OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Foundation for Firefox, FSF for Hurd, OSDN for Linux, etc).

Cheers