Creating an STL from a FreeCAD part is about as simple as it can be. Highlight the part by clicking on it in the left hand Application window. Click File-Export Type in the filename, select the directory where you want it (defaults to the current location), and select STL from the list of many export options.
There are a few aspects of FreeCAD that still aren't intuitive. Engraved text is one. It's not too difficult, but it's not very intuitive. Like GIMP, now that I've used FreeCAD for some time and have figured out its quirks, I'm fairly productive. Not productive in the manner of a CAD draftsman, but pretty good for a maker who does CAD an hour or two a week on average. It's amazing how much can be accomplished by using geometric primitives (cube, cone, sphere, cylinder, torus) and using Boolean operations to add or subtract these components, then using chamfer or fillet on the edges. The YouTube FreeCAD tutorials are often out of date and the user interface improvements and new features make those out of date and useless (and frustrating), although the current 0.19 version seems to be stabilizing the basic features. Another issue that confuses people is the different navigation modes that determine the mouse functions. Allowing the user to switch to the mouse navigation that they already learned in a previous CAD program makes FreeCAD flexible, but unless you use the same navigation mode as the person making the tutorial, you'll be lost. Finally, way too many alleged tutorials on YouTube are actually demos. I can see that someone is able to do something, but the quick clicky demo without any narration to tell me what they're doing is closer to a magic trick than a tutorial. Slow down, and tell us what you're doing and why. The best way to learn FreeCAD would be to have someone who knows it walk you through a design. Figuring it out on your own is probably 1% as efficient so there's a high frustration factor. The lack of training materials is seriously holding back the growth of FreeCAD. On 9/20/20 1:25 AM, Gregg Eshelman via Emc-users wrote: > Ugh. Why can't it just do all that automatically to whatever is the currently > selected part of what's on the screen, or all of it if all of what's on > screen is one object?Save > Export > .STL > and the software does the rest behind the scenes. > > On Saturday, September 19, 2020, 12:03:07 PM MDT, grumpy--- via Emc-users > <emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > i have used freecad enough to be a middle'n noib > this is how i do it > save my .fcstd so i can come back and re-edit > in the top row select "Mesh design" in the drop down > in the left top panel select your design, "Cut" > in the top menu click "Meshes" > select "Create mesh from shape" > select "Standard" > select "OK" > in left top panel click on "Cut (Meshed)" > right click and select "Export mesh" > this creates a .stl > then use cura to slice > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users > _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
