Open-Source CAD Tools?

curtS asks: "Oregon, though with a significant technology industry, continues to use pencil and drawing board in most high school drafting classes. This does little to assist students in career preparation, whether they're interested in drawing PCBs or kitchen cabinets. Not surprisingly, a central issue is cost. High-performance hardware is, thanks to AMD, becoming more available, but what about software? Are there open-source tools out there that can help? Any experiences in other locales?" Would anyone familiar with any Open Source CAD packages care to comment on their experiences? In what area do the open source packages need to improve (if any) to bring them up to par with the functionality of their commercial counterparts?

Comments

QCad, BRL-CAD and more.

[The_Dougster]

QCad, for Qt, is a passable 2D drafting program which is totally free and is similar to TurboCAD. It would work fine for basic 2D mechanical drawings.

LinuxCAD is worthless. Don't waste your money on that piece of crap.

BRL-CAD, courtesy of the US Army Ballistics Research Lab, will work on Linux and can do raytracing, and has 3D solid modeling capabilities. Your school could probably get a free license from the US Army if you ask nicely and promise not to export the program to Iraq. It doesn't have dimensioning capabilities; however if you have a Top Secret government clearance, you can get optional plug-in modules so that if you draft a tank, you can hit it with a simulated laser beam an analyse the damage. I just have the basic package myself, and its pretty cool for being free. The coffee mug from the tutorial looks very nice in raytraced mode.

And thats it. Take your pick.

a quick search

[JediTrainer]

I performed a quick search on Freshmeat for you. Here's the results (filtered for stuff that's actually relevant, I think). In no particular order:

CYCAS - not sure if it's open-source, but will run on Linux and BSD and looks pretty powerful

Jcad - written in Java, this is an open-sourced CAD which works with DXF file formats. Not the most powerful of tools out there, but it's a start

iCADis - can't tell much from the site, but it might be worth a try. Uses GTK and is covered by the GPL

OCTree - looks like it has a really innovative interface. Not sure about the license though.

Varicad - for mechanical engineering. Looks good, but unsure if it's open.

QCad - seems to be one of the better ones, and it's open.

That's all I can find. You can judge yourself if you need it to be 100% open-source, if you need it to be free, and if you need it to run on a particular platform. Perhaps you might settle on a combination of these, since it doesn't look likely that you'll find something that meets all 3 conditions (assuming you were looking for it).

If you're a programmer, then by all means help out with one of the open-source projects out of the ones mentioned above. Lots of them could use things like improved rendering (speed, effects etc), and the ability to load lots of different file formats.