Anyone have a recommendation for 2D drafting software? I’ve used LibreCAD a little bit and it’s fine. Any other options I should be aware of?
KiCAD for circuits obviously. Other than then you’re kinda out of luck. AutoCAD is one of those things that never really got a good FOSS alternative since Autodesk is crazy aggressive in the market.
The big thing is that they get governments and big companies to adopt it so you need to use their format to interact with those (which you usually do when drafting).
My company kicked it and switched from Civil to ArcGIS, but that one is also licensed and not really a great pure drafting software (we to utility design, so it’s a bit more suited to our specific style of drafting at least). ArcGIS also has a decent alternative in QGIS that we can switch to, but again it’s not as user friendly as the commercial stuff (which is kinda important when you’re creating workflows for 50+ people).
I have used Blender and FreeCAD as an alternative, but they don’t really come close to the polish that you’d expect from AutoCAD, which has like 50 years of being the industry standard behind it.
FreeCAD and OpenSCAD are the two that I see mentioned with any frequency. I only have experience with 3D CAD, so I can’t give a ton of advice on how 2D CAD works in any software.
If you’re doing simple stuff, FreeCAD’s sketcher is pretty useful. It’s just not the best when you need to do a bunch of prints and large scale plan layouts. Autolisp is also a really slick system (with a ton of faults and disgusting quirks).
Anyone who’s used AutoCAD for a while gets used to Autolisp since literally every command is just a function call in the REPL, and you can write out procedures by just typing a short lisp routine out (or copy, pasting it from a text file like I’ve seen many drafters do).
If you’re doing simple stuff, FreeCAD’s sketcher is pretty useful.
FreeCAD has a lot of separate workbenches for different stuff, so I don’t know what OP’s “2D CAD” actually relates to, could be drawing a house or sheet metal. However, it does have a generic “drafting” workbench (that I have never used) that seems more 2D CAD oriented.
I’ve used it, and I wouldn’t really call it a replacement for AutoCAD. It can handle basic drafting, but the whole reason people want AutoCAD is because of the REPL. Drafting in AutoCAD kinda feels like drafting in Emacs.
If we are including OpenSCAD, I would also suggest cadquery and build123d, where you have the capabilities of the entire Python interpreter. I’ve been also interested in a couple of CAD kernel projects written in Rust: Fornjot (it looks like this was archived recently) / Truck
FreeCAD’s recent updates seemed to have fixed a lot of issues I have had with it. When I have free time, I have been practicing FreeCAD so I can start creating a part to 3D print for my desktop so I can fit all of the high capacity hard drives and maybe add supports to some areas.
I saw a video a while back about FreeCAD that made me think it’s finally good enough for me to switch from Fusion360.
Of course every time I need to make a model I feel like I don’t have the time to relearn everything and just use fusion360.
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