FreeCAD Jam Session for You & Me!

Welcome to our first ever Meetup at Arch Reactor where we'll dive right into FreeCAD and see what's up! This will also be the first of many in a series where we'll explore various apps on Vagon's (DaaS) platform. So, buckle-up for this crash course.

For those who have never been to Arch Reactor there will be pizza and drinks available in the kitchen. You can Venmo AR or drop cash in the donation box. Or you can bring your own. We'll be in the classroom and we'll have plenty of workbenches and multiple screens for a presentation.

Speaking of workbenches, FreeCAD has many for us to explore! Part Design, Sketcher, TechDraw, FEM, BIM, CAM, Assembly, etc. If you're familiar with parametric modeling, it shouldn't be too bad to follow along. It does take some time to get used to the icons and procedures. If you're an absolute beginner to CAD in general, then it may be worthwhile to checkout a training video like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jULWgMV9_TM . Depending on what everyone wants to do and how much time we have, we can also export our finished models to have them printed on one of the available 3D printers at the AR Lab, or in the future. Man, I'm excited to get started!

As always we're here to help lay the foundation for self-learning or future development. If you want to continue alone with any project from a prior week, then go for it, or let's build on it together. We'll also continue to introduce a fun project each Sunday using various CAD software. Let us know if you have any suggestions for future projects or wish to help co-host one.

We look forward to seeing you there or at the next one!

https://freecad.org
https://vagon.io

FreeCAD runs locally on Windows, Mac and Linux, but all of the apps on Vagon can run on any modern browser. FreeCAD is open source and completely free to use. Vagon currently has Windows and Mac desktop apps for boosted performance, but a Linux version is underway. There's a small fee to use Vagon ($1 for a 7-day trial, then starts at $8/mo subscription with 5GB storage and also a $0.25–$13.09/hr usage rate for general to high-end GPUs) for all of the apps we'll be test driving in the series.

I will have an extra laptop with pre-installed apps for someone to borrow for the event. I will be using my Chromebook at the rate of $1/hr to test out FreeCAD as well as future sculpting and animation apps like ZBrush & Blender – so stay tuned for those events!

Sample Vagon Event Series Apps

• Archicad
• Blender
• FreeCAD
• Houdini
• Rhino
• SketchUp
• Unity
• Unreal Engine
• ZBrush