r/CNC • u/trcastle • 2d ago

SOFTWARE Limo CAD: Opensource, Always Free CAD Software

We've been building Limo CAD (formerly noBS CAD), a free, open-source parametric CAD for mechanical parts, assemblies and drawings. It runs entirely on your machine: no account, no cloud, LGPL-2.1+ opensource license. Being open source means you can check the source code yourself, modify it to your taste and make your own version of it. And it is free for ever.

It's pre-alpha. Builds exist for Windows 11 (x64/ARM64), Apple- silicon macOS and Ubuntu 26.04. We'd like feedback on the experience, and we'd like people to try to break it.

What it does:

- Constrained sketches drive editable solid features (extrude, revolve, sweep, loft, fillet, shell, holes, etc.). Change a dimension and everything downstream rebuilds.

- Parts, assemblies with joints and motion/interference checks, and 2D drawings (DXF, PDF) live together in one project file.

- Exports STEP, STL and 3MF.

- A built-in MCP server (stdio) lets an agent build and edit models. What it makes is the same editable feature history you'd make by hand. The repo has three designs built from a blank document that way (a garden bench, a vise, a vertical-axis turbine), with build recordings and sources so you can see exactly what was generated.

- Experimental CAM function (Not production safe, I run program it created on my own machine, but I always run a 6% feed dry cycle first)

Repo: https://github.com/limo-cad/Limo-CAD

Demos and recipes: https://limo-cad.github.io/Limo-CAD/

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u/fortyonethirty2 2d ago

How does it compare to freecad? What are the differences?

1

u/MysticalDork_1066 2d ago

One big one for me is that it runs on Linux. I'm sick of windows but fusion is windows and mac only.

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u/TheSerialHobbyist 2d ago

They asked about a comparison to FreeCAD, not Fusion.

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u/MysticalDork_1066 2d ago

D'oh! I was already so excited to see an alternative to Fusion that it was on my mind.

The difference between this and Freecad is that it has an editable timeline. You can scrub back through your editing history, which you can't with Freecad (and it's one of the things I really miss from Fusion).

2

u/TheSerialHobbyist 2d ago

Yeah, FreeCAD has a lot of issues and quirks that make it annoying to me, too.