5 FREE CAD Programs to Design Any Project

Every great project starts off with a great design and while a pencil and paper are good enough for a lot of things, computer-aided design or CAD software can really take your projects to the next level. I'm going to show you five different options for CAD software that you can use completely free of charge for your own personal projects. The first four are traditional CAD software and the last one is an easy to use drawing program that I use all the time without all the hassle of traditional CAD so be sure to stick around for that one. Now this video is sponsored by FlexiSpot. They are the makers of these awesome desks that I have here set up in my office. More about them in a little bit. The first option we'll look at is Onshape and they have a bunch of different plans available for corporate accounts but their free plan has a couple limitations. One is that all of your documents have to be publicly available. The other one is for non-commercial use. This is a CNC router that I designed in Onshape. You can see how you can put a whole bunch of different parts together or something simple like this burner for a double rocket stove that I modeled up so that I could CNC cut the parts on a recent video and put that little stove together. So it's really useful to model things up. Also this is a welding cart that I built a few years ago. Now I will spend a little bit of time clicking around in each one to give a flavor of what you're going to be looking at but this is not a tutorial intended to teach you how to use them. There are plenty of those available online for each one of the packages that we'll look at. Now Onshape doesn't have any software to download. It runs completely in a web browser which is pretty remarkable and I think the interface in here is pretty nice and the most intuitive of all the packages because all of the icons and there aren't too many really illustrate and show what they do. So if you aren't familiar with 3d modeling often you'll do it by starting with a two-dimensional sketch and then you'll stretch that out to extrude it into a shape. And here I made that rectangular prism and I can modify it by putting a chamfer on here. And these are standard tools that are available in most CAD systems. You can actually make a lot with simple tools like that. So I can then add another feature here. I'm just modeling up a little block that is often used as a drafting exercise for a hand drawing. Believe it or not I actually took hand drafting classes back in school. I'll just make a little pin that can fit in here and I'm going to do this by making a sketch and revolving it around an axis rather than extruding it. And this is the other common operation that you'll do in any of these CAD systems. And while there's more advanced things you can do those will get you a long ways. Now here in assembly mode you can actually easily put things together and relate them and see how they move relatively one another which is a great feature of designing your projects in CAD. Or you can go ahead and create 2d drawings that you can use to send them to a machine shop or even patterns to laser cut here and you can do all this and export and print the drawings and everything right in the free version. You can also export the 3d geometry here to be able to CNC machine or 3d print which I went ahead and did while I was sitting here. Now these simple operations are all I use to create this whole belt grinder chassis and several other projects and there are some more advanced features pretty cool for something web-based. So out of all of the options that we are looking at here today I think Onshape is the most intuitive and user-friendly on the interface and it's convenient that you don't have to download anything and you can access your designs and work on them from any computer or mobile device as long as you have an internet connection. The next option we'll look at here is Autodesk's Fusion 360 for personal use. This is a pretty popular one they've sponsored a lot of online content and things really got their name out there. Now this is really capable they also have their paid version which I pay for and use for my own business here because I think it's a lot of capability for the money on that licensing fee so it's really good. But the personal use version is really powerful as well and I am actually using my paid subscription so hopefully I don't misspeak if I do let me know in the comments on what you're able to do in the personal version but I'm pretty sure I have a good understanding of it. Now once again I made a sketch here and this time I'm just going to draw up a simple flange because I want to show you a feature that as far as I know is only available in Autodesk's Fusion 360. So I'll just add some holes here to this sketch and notice there's still light blue in the center because I didn't fully define the position but it'll be okay for a demonstration. Now if I right click here on the sketch I can save it as a DXF file to use for laser or plasma cutting and this is awesome because just with that thing that I drew up right there in a couple minutes I can go ahead and upload it to SendCutSend. I don't know why every software doesn't allow you to do that but it is really nice to be able to easily make those 2D parts. That being said I can go ahead and extrude it to add some thickness to it which I could then use to 3D print or put together an assembly and see how things fit together. Now here is an export of a model to 3D print and as far as I understand this is available in the free version and you can also make technical drawings though I believe they are limited to one sheet on the personal version and I'm not sure if they're watermarked but there are a few limitations on what you can export. Something that's really unique in Fusion 360 is they've integrated computer-aided manufacturing or basically programming for machine tools here so what I'm doing on the screen is I'm actually creating a program to be able to CNC plasma cut this right in the same software. I can export the g-code right out of here and cut it out. Here is one of their example assemblies so you can see there are a lot of different components in there. The way that they handle assemblies is a little bit different in Fusion 360 than in most of the CAD packages I've used where each of the components goes into another component you have to create a hierarchy but it works. Now from a full workflow perspective I really think that Fusion 360 has it figured out. You know they have everything from design, drafting, manufacturing and what I think they really hit very well is the price point for early and small businesses when you do move beyond the free version into the paid tier which I do pay for it because I get a lot of value out of it. Let's take a minute and talk about our video sponsor and I'll show you these FlexiSpot E7 desks that I have in my office that go down below two feet and rise up above four feet. That's a big range. You simply press a button to change the height and you can lock in four different presets. These things are built strong and sturdy. It's made out of thick carbon steel and it has dual motors with a 350 pound capacity. Now my computer desk is fixed in place just on the feet but I put wheels they have some wheels available I put those on this desk for project stuff so I have my 3d printer there room to do some breadboarding or electronic prototyping and things like that right there and I can tuck it up tight if I want the rest of the room open or move it over. Now I have some modular accessories on here there are drawers on each one to hold some of my items power strips to plug everything in and USB charging as well as a cable management tray to keep everything neat and tidy and hold everything out of the way. Now I like just having one cord coming down off the desks and they have a whole ton of other accessories available on their website you can find anything you'd want. They also have some less expensive options like their E5 coming in around $200 and their E2 which can be completely set up for under $200. These desks have a 30-day hassle-free return policy as well as a 15-year warranty. The next package we'll look at is Solid Edge for makers and hobbyists. Now this is their personal edition and I didn't even know that this existed but it is really powerful and capable but it's not for commercial use and there are some limitations on some of the features. But once again in here I can open it up and perform all my simple modeling tasks. Notice at the top just how many commands there are available to you all the time. I think that makes it a little bit less user-friendly honestly and this is the only package that lagged a little bit on my computer. It's not a brand new computer but it has pretty decent horsepower so I was kind of surprised. Now there is a dialogue box that walks you through creating each feature here. I won't spend a lot of time on that but it does give a lot of control however it does take a little bit longer to actually perform each operation. The part files you create can't move between the community edition and a paid edition of Solid Edge so you're not able to send them off for anything there and drawings are watermarked. So something I want to show you that I was pretty impressed with is the amount of analysis and simulation capability here in the free version. Now it is somewhat limited but you can run some structural analysis and that's pretty cool. So I defined a force here on the front face as though something is pushing on this and it is held in place with a pin to be able to analyze this structurally and we can get an idea of how it performs. It will solve right here in the computer. Now this is a small model and it's relatively simple and keep in mind there's a lot of nuance to running an analysis like this and so you want to be a bit careful if you are new to structural analysis. But to be able to start and play around with it in a free version is pretty cool. So you can see right here based on the load applied that is the stress that I'd expect to see right there around the front face but you can see how it will deform. Of course that's exaggerated there for visualization purposes as well as how the stress is distributed. So I thought that was pretty neat and that could be pretty useful to start getting your feet wet with some analysis and get an idea of your designs. But again proceed with caution here. Now this is a thermal simulation showing what happens when the block is cool. That's what it means when it's blue and you put it on a hot plate you can see how that heat progresses through the block over time. So this could be pretty useful if you wanted to look at a heat sink or something else like that. Also it can run some generative design. Basically it will tell you where material should be to be able to handle the loads that you define. So I used the same situation that I did in the first case with that force on the front and it ran through to show me where I should have material if I want to have a more efficient part. So I ended up with something like this to be able to handle that load. So this is a very simple example but you can see how this can be really useful on something more complicated to be able to potentially design a better structure. I don't have a lot of experience with Solid Edge. I just downloaded it to try out because I didn't even know they had this community edition until I was working on this video and I happened across it. But I think it's really powerful. You know they have some of the simulation and generative design features built in there. That was really cool to see that even though it's limited there is some of that capability in the free version. So if you want to get into some of that more advanced engineering and look at some of the other features I think it's really powerful. Next we'll take a look at FreeCAD and this is the only traditional CAD package we're looking at here today that is completely full version no restrictions freely available. Here in the interface you can see it does just look a little bit more dated and there is a little bit more going on. So it takes some more cognitive load to actually draw and model things up than the other packages that we use. So I'm drawing up that similar block that we made a couple of times here and as I put dimensions on here watch if I just go around and use that same dimension tool like I did in all the others. Bam! There's a bunch of yellow and red text in my face a bunch of computer code and that's because you actually have to select different dimension tools for each type of dimension to be able to do it right. Now this is actually a pretty robust way to do things but it is less intuitive and so it just takes a little bit more thought as you go. And I'll tell you if you're doing much modeling all those extra little clicks and also the extra thought that you have to put into it and the energy that that draws from you it just if you don't have to do that I don't see why do it. That being said it still works and to be able to have this much capability available completely free also you can create your drawings just like before. When you go to put in views and dimensions and things it's similar you have to put a little bit more thought into how you're actually running the commands. But I think if I used it for a while I'd get pretty accustomed to doing that. Now FreeCAD is quite powerful but I just think it's so clunky and that's typical of a lot of free and open source type softwares is they just aren't quite as intuitive and user-friendly. So I think that if you want a free CAD package with no strings attached you can use for commercial use for your business and you're willing to go through that learning curve it could be a great option for that or if you're a programmer and you want to put in the time to code some extra features then you can totally modify it more so than some of the other packages. That being said for most of us I don't think it's worth the extra hassle to use compared to some of these other commercially supported options. Now the final option I'm going to show you is a drawing software and if all this CAD has you overwhelmed this might be a breath of fresh air. So this is Inkscape and it is a completely free drawing software similar to like the old CorelDRAW or others out there and you can actually use it to design mechanical parts because I can type in dimensions and positions for everything like this and then use it to export things. It's also great for artistic signage and whatnot but you can see just that fast I can go ahead and order up a base plate like this. You can take files that you export out of any of these CAD software packages and put them in there and you can add in lettering or things like that to make them more decorative or signage or if you just need to draw up something really fast to have it cut out I use it all the time for that so it's just handy to have around. So thanks a ton for tuning in a special thank you to our sponsor Flexispot for supporting this video. They are the place to go if you're looking for some high quality motorized sit and stand desks or ergonomic chairs without breaking the bank. Right now you can save a ton with their Black Friday sale and on top of that use the discount code here to be able to save an extra 30 bucks off your order for the E7 desks that I have, the E7 Pro, or the C7 chairs. That's their top of the line stuff and you could also win a free order when you jump on and do that. Thanks again. If you enjoyed this or learned something let me know by hitting that thumbs up below. We'll see you next time.