KiCAD/FreeCAD mechanical collaboration

[maui]

@SebastianKulik

Im about 30 years in developer business and have a huge experience in collaboration as well.
As I wrote: I use FreeCAD privatly, but as developers from FreeCAD write themselfs “Please note that FreeCAD has still not reached a version 1.0 status in our view, and might not be ready for production use”.
I work for industy, so, they never will use CAD that not ready for production use. Most popular still SolidWorks, Inventor, SolidEdge etc for a lot of reasons (from air-liquid-thermal flow simulations etc etc etc), and , honestly, its not a point of discussion anyway.

STEP format support/compatibility is in many cases much better in FreeCAD than in other proprietary cad.
I use it since 2014 to exchange STEP data with many customers which are using commercial CADs without issues. You need to know what you do with the sw, commercial or not.
Moreover, if you send your 3D model as STEP to your mechanical department, you ALREADY are using FreeCAD.
You probably didn’t even noticed that ALL the 3D models of KiCAD library are designed in FreeCAD and are exported with StepUp… so you shouldn’t even send anything to your MCAD guys.
If you judge the sw only by the commercial branding, you should drop KiCAD too.

@SebastianKulik

FreeCAD is great, I often talk about with M-CAD developers, but mostly all of them means:

1. its not even ready for professional production

This is a conservative assumption that developers use to defend themselves from any liability.
FreeCAD is used within AirBus contractors as an alternative to Catia to produce STEP models for CAD interoperability.

@SebastianKulik

Very first what Ill do when FreeCAD V1.0 out: Ill speak with cheef of mechanical development to switch all to FreeCAD, really…

You miss the point in this ECAD/MCAD collaboration … you don’t need to give your MCAD department a FreeCAD file, you just send them the STEP file of all your board and when they give you the modified STEP file, with new placement, you can update/synchronize your board to their mechanical changes.

Anyway, my best regards
Maurice