FreeCAD News

The cho­sen projects of Google Sum­mer of Code have just been announced, and we are excit­ed to announce that, although it is the first time FreeCAD is par­tic­i­pat­ing on its own to the pro­gram, we have been award­ed no less than 4 slots this year!

The four projects that will hap­pen this sum­mer are:

• UI tool for fetch­ing online con­tent, by Amulya Par­i­tosh: A library man­age­ment add-on for man­ag­ing Dif­fer­ent online-offline FreeCAD com­po­nents is a util­i­ty appli­ca­tion for FreeCAD which allows an easy and struc­tured man­age­ment of components/models avail­able online or offline and to eas­i­ly be insert­ed into the FreeCAD document.
• Upgrade the doc­u­men­ta­tion sys­tem, by Gau­ri Mahesh­wari: The project aims to migrate the FreeCAD doc­u­men­ta­tion sys­tem to a file-based, ver­sioned sys­tem based on Git and Mark­down so that it sup­ports mul­ti­ple lan­guages for users glob­al­ly and allows switch­ing between offline and online ver­sions. The cur­rent sys­tem is at con­stant risk of los­ing data due to the Medi­aWi­ki soft­ware used to sup­port it. The project involves com­mu­ni­ty inter­ac­tion to research solu­tions and then upgrade the entire sys­tem to new software.
• Uni­fied Mea­sure­ment Facil­i­ty, by hlorus: FreeCAD cur­rent­ly has sev­er­al ways of mea­sur­ing objects, caus­ing con­fu­sion for users and mak­ing the learn­ing curve steep­er. The pro­posed project aims to imple­ment a gener­ic mea­sure­ment com­mand that can be extend­ed by work­bench­es, refac­tor and port exist­ing com­mands to use the new sys­tem, and pol­ish exist­ing mea­sur­ing com­mands for a con­sis­tent user experience.
• On-machine Inspec­tion for FreeCAD by Tanausú Hernán­dez Yanes: On-machine Inspec­tion (OMI) is a valu­able tool used in CNC com­mer­cial man­u­fac­tur­ing to ensure prop­er tol­er­ances of the man­u­fac­tured piece. This is done by attach­ing a probe to the tool head of the machine and scan­ning the sur­face of the finalised prod­uct to see if there are dis­crep­an­cies between the expect­ed result and actu­al mea­sure­ments. Includ­ing such a tool on FreeCAD, which already has a ded­i­cat­ed set of tools for CNC milling in the Path Work­bench, will not only bring it clos­er to pro­pri­etary solu­tions but even sur­pass some of them that don’t have this feature.

These are four awe­some projects, and we are look­ing for­ward to see what will come out of it!

Stu­dents will be able to count on at least two men­tors each, who can ori­ent them and help find­ing the info and the feed­back they need. Stu­dents will also be encour­aged to inter­act and post updates as much as pos­si­ble on the FreeCAD forum.

Be sure to fol­low the GSoC 2023 forum thread for more info and the indi­vid­ual project threads!