FreeCAD is a general purpose Open Source 3D CAD/MCAD/CAx/CAE/PLM modeler, aimed directly at mechanical engineering and product design but also fits in a wider range of uses around engineering, such as architecture or other engineering specialties. It is a feature-based parametric modeler with a modular software architecture which makes it easy to provide additional functionality without modifying the core system.
FreeCAD is based on OpenCasCade, a powerful geometry kernel, features an Open Inventor-compliant 3D scene representation model provided by the Coin 3D library, and a broad python API. The interface is built with Qt. FreeCAD runs exactly the same way on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux platforms.
A complete OpenCasCade-based geometry kernel allowing complex 3D operations on complex shape types, and supports natively concepts like brep, nurbs, booleans operations or fillets
File:Feature6.jpg A modular architecture that allow plugins (modules) to add functionality to the core application. Those extensions can be as complex as whole new applications or as simple as python scripts or self-recorded macros
A full parametric model allowing any type of parameter-driven custom objects, that can even be fully programmed in python
The FreeCAD manual is a work-in-progress community effort to provide state-of-the-art documentation about using FreeCAD, and is already available in a couple of languages. It still lacks much information, so feel free to join and contribute!
Check the Development roadmap for news about what is being planned, the Changelog and Roadmap mantis pages to see the progresses towards next release, or the Project statistics for even more information about the FreeCAD codebase.
FreeCAD would benefit greatly from your help with testing and reporting bugs! Another problem we have, is lack of people to build and test FreeCAD on Mac OSX. If you have a mac, please help us! You are also welcome to help translating FreeCAD in your language.