There's your first hurdle right here: DesignSpark cannot produce technical drawings with projected 2D orthographic views. The next step may be to produce a drawing to send to a machine shop for a more precise/sturdy prototype or for a small pre-production run. You will start with a prototype made by 3D printing. Let's say for example that you have an idea and want to design some product to be mass produced. But for anything else DesignSpark will be mostly useless. It is fine if all you'll ever do is design parts for 3D printing. Many more functions have been removed as well, like (as far as I know) the ability to produce technical drawings.

You can mostly export to mesh formats, STL being one. When I say DesignSpark is crippled, it's because while it is a true solid modeler, the ability to export to real CAD formats (STEP, IGES) has been stripped from it. I believe you can import many components sold by RS in DesignSpark. DesignSpark is licensed to RS Components, an electronics component supplier. That being said, for years before adopting FreeCAD, CAD was an interest of mine, and I continue keeping track of what's out there, even if not as closely as before.ĭesignSpark Mechanical is a crippled version of SpaceClaim, a commercial CAD solid modeler. FreeCAD is open source, and it tends to attract a lot of people with this kind of mindset. Then some of us will not (or try very hard not to) use a commercial program, even if it's free, for philosophical reasons. I have Windows 7 on my home PC but do not use it, in fact I plan on removing it from my PC soon. You will find that for many of us here, a Windows-only software is a show stopper, because we use one of the many available Linux distributions (some others use Macs).

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