FreeCAD is really intriguing to me. The bummer is that it’s designed around metric. My work place is inch based and most of my tools and stock at home are inch based also. I remember in heekscad they made an inch conversion keeping the underlying metric. I’m not sure that was the best approach. I’ve run into situations where converting toleranced dimension from metric to inch would do some weird things.
Anyway, It seems like there was quite a bit work done on trying have imperial units, but it doesn’t seem to be a focus at this point.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/free-cad/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2018&p=14233&hilit=INCH#p14233
I agree. I’m very excited to see where FreeCAD will go, but at this point the lack of English units is a showstopper for me.
The more I discover in freecad the more I like it. Inch would be nice…perhaps on day…
It isn’t for me. Conversion is pretty easy these days.
By the way, my post was from Jan 1, 2013 at 11:46 EST for the record.
Had to do a post somewhere on this day….Happy New Years.
I am looking to learn a 3d cad system. My preview of the various solutions led me to FreeCAD. However, reviewers of FreeCAD seem to be blind to this MAJOR issue.
I can’t do it. I can’t put out the energy to learn FreeCAD if I can’t work in inches.
I do have a suggestion, however, for a dirty mm to inch solution:
– Don’t work in feet at all, or work only in feet, not inches. (For large projects, working in feet may make sense.)
– Only work in inches and decimals of inches. .125 is dead on accurate as 1/8.
– Now, make no change to the software except to work with “units” rather than “feet”, “inches” or “mm”. Modify the way the software displays screens so that rather than displaying “mm” you display the value of the selected units: “mm”, “in” or “ft”.
– On output, such as to 3d printers, make sure you are outputting to the correct units. You could then use an unbelievably precise conversion from mm to inch such as: 0.0393701.
I don’t know if putting the comment here will ever get back to the FreeCAD designers, but hey.
Actually this is old news… Freecad now has inch support (Starting with version .14 anyway..)
I’ve just played with it a little bit through as odd as it sounds most of my projects seem to be trending metric lately…
There’s a little bit about it here: http://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5177
I haven’t been following freecad development that closely latey but wow… There seems to be major speed improvements between vers…13 and .14 I updated the other day and I can only say… Wow…
I’m hoping to be getting back in the freecad groove with a new printer project I’m starting to work on (life commitements permitting)