FreeCAD Learning Series for Makers

[SWBAH]

Hi Everyone.

I recently started using FreeCAD on some of my projects and realized that many of the tutorials out there, while great in content, weren't what I needed to get up and running to use it on my DIY and woodworking projects.

I decided to make a video series to help that average maker with little to no CAD experience get up and running and making things on FreeCAD as fast a possible. Each lesson is supposed to be about 10 minutes and I believe the series will run about 6 lessons at this point.

So far I have created Lesson 1, which takes you from installation to creating your first part. I'm currently working on lesson 2, which will be on how to use Parametric modeling. Before releasing lesson 2, I wanted to see what kind of feedback I can gather.

Here is the link to the first video.

https://youtu.be/I7nT3vk1GRQ

phpBB [video]

I'm curious what you experts think and if you have any feedback on it and ways I can make future videos better. One thing to note is I am currently learning FreeCAD myself and am not an expert. I created this video for other casual users like myself and to help promote what I think is a great Freeware project. Please excuse any mistakes, but let me know so I can make corrections as needed.

Also this is my first post, I read through the sticky and hopefully am posting the right content in the right place.

Thanks,
Ken

[Shalmeneser]

For your rectangle : use Sketcher_ConstrainSymmetric or even better Sketcher_CreateRectangle_Center

[SWBAH]

Thanks Shalmenesar.

In the next video, I need to sketch the drawer side before showing how parameters can be used to change the size of both simultaneously, I will use this method to create the sketch.

Ken

[jimb]

I found it hard to see the drawing even with the browser window at full screen.

[SWBAH]

Hi JimB.

Was it hard to see because of the the overall size or was it because of the thickness of the lines on the drawing itself? Do you mind if I ask what size monitor you were using?

I'm doing this video series as a hobby project, but I have access to a variety of computer and video setups, so I will try to mimic what you are seeing and see if I can improve on it.

Thanks,
Ken

[jimb]

I have a 2 24" monitors with a resolution of 1920x1200 each. Putting the video in full screen on 1 monitor I can see the rectangle and the dimension lines (both rather thin) in the sketch, but cannot read any of the dimensions in the sketch. More complicate constraint indicators would likely be hard to see. The text on the left is generally ok, but the text in the navigation cube in impossible to read.

With a smaller window for the video (a bit more the half monitor width wide), it gets a lot worse: icons get hard to differentiate, smaller text is hard to read (when you zoomed in to parts of the window, that was easy to read).

Hope that helps.

[SWBAH]

Thanks Jim.
I edit on a 30" full screen and I noticed some of the things you mentioned which is why I used the zoom. I'm going to play with some of the setting before recording the next video to see if I can make the text bigger. I will enlarge the the interface as well. I recorded what I was doing on a laptop and I think I made the interface too small so I could have a bigger work area.

I'll work on finding a better balance. Thank you so much for the feedback.

Ken

[chrisb]

You should consider to show the full FreeCAD infos at the beginning of each video ("About FreeCAD"). It shows a bit more than just the version number.

[SWBAH]

Thanks Chris - Good suggestion. I will add it to the description in the video and look into adding that piece in future videos.