May be a bit of Help to know this… Very few FreeCAD users know and speaking only for myself:
When FreeCAD is stuck on doing something that can take a bit of time, FreeCAD will go into ‘Sleep mode’. On a Mac (I don’t know about Windows/Linux) if you get Info on the App, you’ll see a Checkbox to prevent it from Napping (when it thinks it’s not in Use)…
A 97MB STEP file auto generated to include every last 0402 resistor and cap, internals of connectors etc, on the board, is useful how?
For mechanical integration, a bare board with connectors and large parts are only needed, if you are making an enclosure for it.
3D madness
Gap pads, heatsinks and other thermal interfaces between components, zones and traces?
But yes most people abuse STEP files for 3d rendering.
Yes, large parts, as I stated.
Not connector internals, or microscopic SMT parts, BGA’s, only what is necessary.
I have spent days pruning ridiculous STEP files.
Thank you
I looked properties of Desktop Icon and some Menu items, but couldn’t find anything similar in Win10.
Well, this is for my enjoyment now. But I have got nice looking 3d images of our (mine) old boards, and want them from new boards too.
It may help that this board is not very large, a Raspberry pi Compute module 5 IO board. And our board is not much bigger
It depends of what type of mechanical integration one is doing . . . if I’m making a fixture (ATE bed of nails) to hold a PCBA and a clamping arm to hold it in place I need to know where I can push on a PCB without knocking components off.
Well good job Kicad now (v9) can selectively output 
If the option is all or nothing when what is really needed is “some”, you gotta output all
Connectors , large components, heavy components and BGA are normally all you need and that is dependant on what the CAD is to be used for (IE modal analysis )
I’m also having issues with slowness of FreeCAD. Part of the reason is that the underlying Open Cascade library is single threaded. If that could be made re-entrant, then I guess, several objects can be “computed” in parallel, one for each available core. At the moment FreeCAD rarely uses more then 8% of my processor capacity.
Another reason FreeCAD is slow, is because of the “fix” of the “topological naming” issue. this is known to slow FreeCAD down at the moment (I guess it can be 6x to 10x). This is supposed to be improved over time.
A third thing I’ve noticed is that if the FreeCAD drawing becomes more complicated (several hundred objects) fixing constraints in the sketcher also becomes slower, even in a simple sketch. Each mouse click takes one to two seconds for FreeCAD to respond, and that’s a real bore. But overall, don’t take these comments too negatively. FreeCAD is still a quite nice (but a bit cumbersome to use) drawing program, and I’m not aware of a “better” open source 3D CAD program.
Apparently it depends on the platform? For example, on Windows, when loading the step, all cores are used, in my case, 4
By the way, what happened with FreeCad. It was years at version 0.021 and then it was suddenly ver 1.
You’re a bit behind on the news. Mind you, it’s been 20+ years.
I think I started experimenting with FreeCAD when it was 0.12 or 0.14. Back then it was barely usable, but I could see some potential. For the last few years this crept up approximately every year and a half. For the last few years I’ve been updating every 2 to 5 months or so, with an appimage. In the last few years, I’ve also heard comments from people who thought FreeCAD was good enough to be called V1.0, and I guess that when (mostly) real thunder’s branch with the topological naming fix was merged in (and some other smaller things) enough of the developers found it good enough to call it V1.0.
My oldest files are from 2012. According to: FreeCAD - Wikipedia it started in 2002.
I also use stepreduce for KiCad exported and other 3D model before use FreeCad, having propose to include this logic for compile the actual KiCad 3D library and to use in the STEP export.
When FreeCAD opens a project that contains a Drawing, it will choke untill the Drawing is fully loaded. Speed-up FreeCAD by Closing/Quitting the Techdraw-Workbench (and/or other Drawing) then saving the project.
Closing/Quitting the Drawing and saving the project in that ‘state’ stops the Drawing from auto-loading when you open the project again.
In other-words, FreCAD opens in the last saved ‘state’ and Drawings can choke a horse, depending on the specifics of the Models.
First part of This Video demo’s opening the project takes 20-Seconds and opening the Drawing take 57-seconds. Total of 77-Seconds.
Then, I closed all (without specifically Quitting the drawing) then, with no project open, I reopened the project (thusly, the Drawing will open, too) and it took 90-Seconds to fully-load/open (sans about 7-sec’s for my clicking; thus = 83-Seconds).
Thus, 20-Seconds to Open only the Full-Model Versus 83-Seconds for the full Enchilada. Many times I need only the Model to work on and later will update the Drawing…
