Wednesday, May 18, 2022

The Dirty Truth On Is Fusion 360 Still Free For Personal Use

The Fundamental Of Is Fusion 360 Still Free For Personal UseAutodesk still allows the basic milling that those machines use. Really ATC isnt even present on DIY machines under 7k. And as shown multiple times, the cloud is just a way to get users locked in. If I understand it properly, it’s the number of β€œactive” documents you can have at once. Don’t understand this one, but maybe a limit prevents someone from running a business needing to have many documents alive at once. I can make assemblies at home with more than 10 parts. Saw this coming, so when in January they offered a one year license of eagle and fusion 360 for $100 I didn’t thought too much about it. As far as I know I will have to keep paying the same amount every year. And my autocad from 15 years ago is doing fine in a virtual machine. I am doing only some simple 2D drawings but no complaints. Kicad is adopted by CERN, libreoffice is adopted by many governmental organizations. They pay enough in money. Developers time to keep them going on. As a hobbyist though I just can’t afford to pay hundreds of bucks a year for a subscription. I wish Prusa and other companies with solid hardware based revenue streams made the community/goodwill move of supporting FreeCAD. I also wish the community rips all of thingiverse and moves to a non profit run STL site that funnels microdonations/patron appeals to dev work efforts crucial for the community. Why aren’t their changes added back into the original Free cad project? Seems FreeCAD is too small to benefit from a split at this time. UI design needs to be intuitive to be useful, IMHO, otherwise the point of something being a usable program is in part lost to the ego of the developer in what might otherwise be a brilliant program. I used DesignSpark Mechanical a lot and really liked it. After a brutal learning curve, I switched to Fusion 360. I think that Alibre did to me just what Autodesk are doing now. Somewhere I have a bunch of models that I made in a β€œFree” CAD package that suddenly became an expensive CAD package. Not used them for a year as I use Altium for work, but want to get back to hobbyist stuff w/ eagle. I guess Solidworks. Mastercam are happy today too. Yet most users could never afford those seat licences in a small shop. I have used Inventor for decades, and full-time professionally for some of that time. I still prefer it to Fusion, but after a period of adjustment I got used to Fusion for modelling too. It’s a good quick tool for gcode simulation for modern cam. There are some optimized tricks that older machinists use that it doesn’t handle, but with the memory depth of modern controllers they’re probably not worth the development work to cover. I credit OpenSCAD as a unique style of modeling suited well to people who are naturally programmer logical thinking mindsets. I think it can be as good, but there is a bit of a learning curve. Which is why you charge for that version of the software. They are stuck with it until the next major version. Everyone had been doing it for years, and a majority of everyone was ok with that model. It really just seems like companies are trying to squeeze every dime they can out of people who historically bought software once and used that version for a number of years. Much as I never liked the business model when it was first free to use it was really the only good choice unless you like openscad for free access. All that work done by hobbyists, for free, helping Autodesk dominate the market in low-end CAD/CAM software. I think I am on the β€œstartup” one, but then I seem to have 2.1 million cloud credits. You can still import STEP files but will no longer have the ability to export STEP files with the free version. This goes into effect October 1, 2020 so make sure to export your STEP files before then if this is important to you. You actually have till January 19, 2021 as af

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