Power users hub/zh-tw

General

The functionality of FreeCAD is separated in Modules which deal with special data types and applications. FreeCAD has built-in modules and Extension Modules (plug-ins). Once plugin modules are installed, they become availible to you as easily as the built-in modules. The modules described below are the default modules, includeed in every FreeCAD installation.

Working with Meshes

• Mesh Scripting: How to interact with the Mesh Workbench

Working with Parts

Accessing the Coin scenegraph

• The Coin/Inventor scenegraph: How the FreeCAD scene representation works
• Pivy: How to access and modify the scenegraph

Controlling the Qt interface

• Scripted objects: how to make 100% Python-scripted objects.
  • Scripted objects with attachment: how to make scripted objects attachable to other objects.
  • Scripted objects saving attributes: how to save and restore attributes of the proxy class with dumps and loads.
  • Scripted objects migration: how to migrate old scripted objects to a new class.

Examples

API Functions

The complete API documentation of FreeCAD is located at https://freecad.org/api/ . It contains both C++ and Python APIs, and is not totally well formatted yet, which can be confusing when looking for python-only code. An easier to browse version can be found here. Note that it can be incomplete, since it is updated manually. For more accurate information, browse the modules directly from FreeCAD's Python console.

Related: Exposing C++ to Python

Advanced modification

• Start up and Configuration: Startup and command line options
• Installing on Windows: Using the windows installer
• Compiling FreeCAD on Windows and Compiling FreeCAD on Linux
• Branding: Simple modifications you can do to the source code to change some aspects of FreeCAD
• Extra python modules : Extend the FreeCAD python interpreter with these powerful modules!

Python tutorials

These are good generic tutorials, not specific to FreeCAD, that might interest you if you are totally new to python.

Python

• Official python tutorial - A very complete tutorial for discovering python
• Non-programmer tutorial for python - an excellent wikibook
• Python for newbies - one big tutorial covering all the basics

PySide - How to create and manage FreeCAD's Qt UI interface from python

• PySide tutorial : A platform-agnostic tutorial showing the usage of PySide with examples
• PySide/PyQt tutorial : A easy to read tutorial that covers PySide and PyQt with examples
• PySide documentation : from the Qt Project (the people who wrote it all)
• Using QtCreator in PySide : also from the Qt Project
• PySide reference : endless detail on the minutiae of PySide and Qt, a reliable reference source
• PySide code snippets : a searchable database of PySide code snippets

The following two references are PyQt specific (not PySide) but may offer some information of use:

• Basic PyQt tutorial : A simple and short linux-based tutorial that will explain how to work with PyQt and Qt Designer
• Programming Qt applications in python : A more in-depth tutorial covering all the process of working with qt and python

Pivy - How to interact with FreeCAD's 3D scenes

• Pivy - Embedding a Dynamic Scripting Language into a Scene Graph Library : Thesis that explains Pivy in detail
• High Level 3D Graphics Programming in Python : Pivy example from Pycon 2004
• Introducing Pivy into studierstube (Mirror) : A paper that is not really a tutorial, but that illustrates well how Pivy works (requires an academic account)

Community projects

On the Community portal, you can find other FreeCAD-based projects run by the FreeCAD users community. If you are starting a new FreeCAD project, be sure to list it there! We also have a page with things you can do if you would like to Help FreeCAD.