FreeCAD News

Between August the 15^th and 18^th Spring­field Illi­nois played host to a North Amer­i­can FreeCAD meet­up. This excel­lent event drew togeth­er a group of active FreeCAD con­trib­u­tors for a 4 day hackathon, incor­po­rat­ing var­i­ous meet­ings, pre­sen­ta­tions and, of course, social activities.

The event drew rep­re­sen­ta­tives from all 4 coasts of the US and was gra­cious­ly host­ed by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois Inno­va­tion Cen­ter . The Thurs­day saw peo­ple arriv­ing through­out the day and was kept as an infor­mal day for peo­ple to meet, chat and catch up. Spring­field proved a fan­tas­tic venue for this event with plen­ty of inter­est­ing places to vis­it around the area. Just south of the venue for exam­ple is the state­house where Abra­ham Lin­coln gave his famous “Divid­ed House” speech.

On to Fri­day and the day was pep­pered with a num­ber of pre­sen­ta­tions relat­ing to FreeCAD. These includ­ed FreeCAD for Robot­ics, a pre­sen­ta­tion on the work mit­i­gat­ing the topo­log­i­cal nam­ing prob­lem in FreeCAD and an inter­est­ing pre­sen­ta­tion on a con­cept called “Post­CAD” which is aim­ing to inte­grate CAD data man­age­ment and data­base sys­tems inspired by geospa­tial data man­age­ment ecosys­tems. The pre­sen­ta­tions have been cap­tured over on the Can­dL Work­shop youtube chan­nel linked above.

Fri­day evening saw atten­dees sam­pling the local bars and eater­ies. Explo­rations of the local del­i­ca­cy the “horse­shoe” sand­wich were under­tak­en, an open sand­wich with toast­ed bread, meat, cheese sauce and French fries!

Mov­ing to Sat­ur­day gen­er­al hack­ing on FreeCAD occurred and also the glob­al month­ly devel­op­ers meet­ing hap­pened allow­ing the Spring­field atten­dees to link to oth­er devel­op­ers. Some time was spent look­ing through the Ver­sion 1.0 check­lists and also a meet­ing was held to dis­cuss good prac­tice regard­ing man­age­ment of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in libraries. A group din­ner round­ed off Sat­ur­day and Sun­day was a gen­er­al day for peo­ple to either con­tin­ue hack­ing togeth­er or to start mak­ing their, in some cas­es extreme­ly long, jour­neys home.

We’d like to thank every­one who attend­ed and sup­port­ed this event. Many thanks to Kurt Kremitz­ki for all his hard work putting the event togeth­er and final thanks again to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois Inno­va­tion Cen­tre for host­ing us.