FreeCAD News

The FPA gen­er­al assem­bly approved the fund­ing of three more grants.

Pieter Hij­ma will be work­ing on research for vari­ant parts. There’s a num­ber of FreeCAD fea­tures that require insert­ing copy-on-change links, such as ref­er­enc­ing exter­nal geom­e­try in a body for which Sub­Shape­Binders are used in Part Design. The archi­tec­ture behind the cur­rent imple­men­ta­tion involves hid­den parts and tem­po­rary files and is frag­ile. The work­flow imposed by this archi­tec­ture isn’t great either. Anoth­er domain where a bet­ter imple­men­ta­tion is required are assem­blies where you might want insert­ing a vari­a­tion of a linked part.

Pieter will begin the project by elab­o­rat­ing on the cur­rent state of affairs in the forum for devel­op­ers, then pro­pose patch­es tar­get­ing three aspects of the cur­rent imple­men­ta­tion: how par­ent doc­u­ments refer to prop­er­ties of child doc­u­ments, how shapes are com­put­ed from a base part, and how vari­ants are cre­at­ed. Please see the pro­pos­al for more details. He was award­ed a grant of EUR 8,000 for the entire project. Work starts in Sep­tem­ber and is expect­ed to be done by the end of this year.

Brad McLean will write doc­u­ment­ed pro­ce­dures and/or code for sup­port­ing debug­ging FreeCAD C++ and Python from CLion and VSCode. The project is expect­ed to take approx­i­mate­ly 2 weeks. Brad was award­ed a grant of USD $1,500 for the project.

Chris Jones will con­tin­ue his work on home­brew builds of FreeCAD. This time, he will update the home­brew-freecad tap to link against Python v3.12 and Qt v6 when cre­at­ing the build. The project is expect­ed to take a few weeks to com­plete. Chris was award­ed a grant of USD $2,000 for the project.

If you are inter­est­ed in improv­ing FreeCAD one way or anoth­er, you can apply for an out-of-pro­gram grant any time.