FreeCAD News

This week in FreeCAD devel­op­ment, the most active­ly worked-on parts of FreeCAD have been the topon­am­ing project, Sketch­er, FEM, and UI/UX.

Topon­am­ing:

• Cal­li­garoV import­ed and improved the Wire­Join­er class.
• bgb­sww fixed a few issues, made minor improve­ments, and added Python imple­men­ta­tions for Comp­Sol­id, Face, Shell, Sol­id, as well as miss­ing entries in TopoShape.

Sketch­er:

• Roy-043 renamed “Map sketch to face…” in the main menu to “Attach sketch…” for clarity.
• Pad­dle­Stroke imple­ment­ed a mid­point auto­con­straint, fixed a bug in Cham­fer tool code, as well as a bug with a B‑Spline icon in con­struc­tion line mode.
• FlachyJoe added an arc length constraint.

FEM:

• marioalexis84 improved post-pro­cess­ing object style.
• NewJok­er changed 2D ele­ment thick­ness from 20 to 1 by default.
• lyphrowny fixed and typo in FEM code and removed cal­culix from solvers tab in examples.
• dav­es­rock­et­shop added the prop­er­ty ‘Ther­mal Expan­sion Ref­er­ence Tem­per­a­ture’ to the Ther­mal prop­er­ties in the new mate­ri­als editor.

UI/UX:

• Roy-043 made “View Left” the last option in the “Indi­vid­ual views” toolbar.
• maxwxyz updat­ed FEM and Part Design icons for bet­ter con­sis­ten­cy and added a miss­ing “View Top” option. He also added miss­ing com­mands to the tree con­text menu.
• Pad­dle­Stroke added an opt-in Tab-Bar work­bench selec­tor (enabled in Pref­er­ences). He also fixed the tog­gling of objects’ trans­paren­cy in some sce­nar­ios and improved the dou­ble-click behav­ior for spread­sheet objects to switch to the Spread­sheet WB.
• NomAnor made it pos­si­ble to allow adding trans­for­ma­tions to Mul­ti­Trans­form if there is no active Body.

Among oth­er changes:

• wwmay­er fixed a lot of bugs and devel­oped a new func­tion to approx­i­mate B‑Spline from points.
• Roy-043 added a new Fuse prop­er­ty to pathar­ray and pathtwistedar­ray in Draft. This fix­es a prob­lem when apply­ing union/intersect to a point array and oth­er objects.
• tomate44 enabled mul­ti-thread­ing to dist­ToShape fol­low­ing a change in OCCT (start­ing with v7.6.0). This brings an ×3 to ×6 per­for­mance boost on a rather com­plex 20MB STEP file.
• adri­an­in­saval fixed build­ing new mate­r­i­al code on Win­dows with debug­ging enabled.
• NomAnor patched FreeCAD to ignore sup­pressed fea­tures in pat­terns (Part Design).
• furgo16 fixed WebGL exporting
• paullee0 made a few fix­es and improve­ments in Arch.
• jamwaf­fles added feed retract option to drilling op set­tings for reaming/boring heads in CAM.
• yorik­van­havre made it pos­si­ble to unset mod­i­fied state with Python code.
• chennes fixed some minor bugs.
• Wan­der­erFan fixed a fail­ure on cor­rupt dimen­sion ref­er­ence in TechDraw.

PR stats: In the week from Wednes­day, 27 March to Wednes­day, 3 April there were 70 pull requests merged, with a total code­base change of +9,316 / ‑1,737 (exclud­ing updat­ed trans­la­tions and icons). We had an aver­age merged PR size of +133 / ‑25. 17 new pull requests were opened.

Issue stats: we closed 47 issues, and 37 new issues were opened. Over­all, 1,392 issues are cur­rent­ly open.