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I still have no idea what I'm doing really. Just too determined to give up I guess, and it's been such fun. Anyway I made a guitar pedal light switch cover. Still a lot of work to do, and every time I look at FreeCAD the wrong way, the model breaks, but it's been a fun experience nonetheless.
On a side note, anybody have any idea why the face of the model is rough textured, while the foot switch on the lower half is flawless?
If you can get used to an open source tool like free cat, don't let anyone here dissuade you from it. Something to be aware of with the closed source tools is that at any moment they can take them away. CAD tools like that are super expensive if there isn't a free plan, and there's every reason to believe that someday the free plan will go away.
I haven't been able to wrap my head around freak out because just not that smart, but that doesn't mean I don't realize tinkercad can go away at any moment. It metaphorically keeps me up at night.
I think FreeCAD would win a lot more converts if it focused on usability. Fusion360 and Onshape are parametric modelers just like FreeCAD yet they're way simpler, taskcentric and more forgiving tools to use.
The worst thing about FreeCAD is that it's extremely unreliable. You click a wrong button and your work is gone.
Forgiving is the word for this - being able to undo mistakes and recover. I reckon FreeCAD would massively benefit from doing a complete feature freeze and focusing on usability for a couple of releases.
It's not about being forgiving or not, FreeCAD is just ridiculously buggy. They are trying to do too many things at once and none of the things actually work in the end.
That mostly comes from not understanding what best practices are when using ANY 3D CAD. They all fail repeatedly and a lot more often than you think. It's just that some fail more gracefully than others. And some will bite you for being sloppy with your procedures. FreeCAD will bite if you get careless.
But things are looking up. Since the formation of the non-profit Ondsel, there is now a coherent set of adults in the room mapping out a sensible pathway forward for FreeCAD. Their first order of business if fixing the topological naming issue that plagues FreeCAD. The changes have started and are expected to be completed in 3 releases. It's going to take some time to do because of the changes needed to a chunk of the base code of FreeCAD. There are already some nice new features that have been added to the .22Dev releases for improved quality of life. And the UI is expected to be slowly changed over time as well. Though I personally hope they don't turn it into the small child's cartoon clown car UI of Fusion 360.