FreeCAD News

FOSDEM, the finest open­source con­fer­ence in the world recent­ly took place and, aside from cheek­i­ly sav­ing the toi­let sys­tem, FreeCAD had a pres­ence in numer­ous ways.

We had a shared stand over in the K build­ing right by the entrance which was excel­lent in terms of foot­fall and peo­ple com­ing to chat and say hel­lo. We shared our stand with Ond­sel, the excel­lent open­source com­pa­ny build­ing on FreeCAD com­mer­cial­ly, and our wider open source fam­i­ly mem­bers like KiCad, and Open Tool­chain Foun­da­tion. We also shared the stand with FreeCAD spon­sors and pow­er users the Libre Space Foun­da­tion.

We were inun­dat­ed with vis­i­tors with most peo­ple hav­ing used or being reg­u­lar users of FreeCAD. A pop­u­lar con­ver­sa­tion was around peo­ple hav­ing his­tor­i­cal­ly tried FreeCAD and per­haps hav­ing some chal­lenges, so it was great to dis­cuss with peo­ple how far FreeCAD has devel­oped recent­ly and encour­age peo­ple to take anoth­er look. Oth­er com­mon top­ics at the stand were around dis­cussing the upcom­ing ver­sion 1.0 and beyond as well as some gen­er­al chat­ting around how to increase the uptake of FreeCAD users.

Libre Space were excel­lent part­ners to have on the stand. You could often hear one of the Libre Space team hold­ing their Qubik Pock­etcube (A 50mm cubed open­source satel­lite the design that has flown suc­cess­ful­ly on low earth orbit) and say­ing “This is an excel­lent exam­ple of what you can achieve with FreeCAD and KiCad com­bined”. It was a fan­tas­tic talk­ing point that showed off all our projects perfectly.

It was great to meet oth­er mem­bers of oth­er teams at the stand also. The crew from Blender were attend­ing FOSDEM and stopped by for numer­ous chats and it was also great to see Yorik and Inkscape core devel­op­er Mar­tin chat­ting by the stand.

As well as the stand there was a “State of the Union” address talk sched­uled for FreeCAD in the open hard­ware room on the sun­day. Yorik shared the stage with Dr Aik Siong Koh with Yorik pre­sent­ing an update on cur­rent progress in FreeCAD, the upcom­ing ver­sion 1.0, the solv­ing of topon­am­ing prob­lems and more. Yorik then hand­ed over to Dr Koh who pre­sent­ed a lit­tle on his work cre­at­ing an assem­bly solver for FreeCAD which will coa­lesce cur­rent assem­bly approach­es with a new work­bench to be includ­ed upstream. You can find the video record­ing and the slides from this talk here.