This week in FreeCAD development:
Measurement: hlorus and AIRCAP fixed several issues including one release blocker, and PaddleStroke fixed Quick Measure to work on bodies in assemblies correctly.
Draft: Roy_043 fixed a minor issue, and Syres916 improved the color activation and added an ability to change the size of the snap text (in code).
Part Design:
- FlachyJoe fixed several issues where the padding operation would fail in some scenarios when applied with Up to Face and Up to Shape options (that’s another release blocker down).
- AIRCAP fixed additive loft for cases when the selected shape is not a vertex in the sketch.
- theosib fixed Part Design to no longer allow part planes and axes as options for Sweep and Loft.
DXF: kpemartin fixed two regressions related to the importing of layers and layer names, and increased the importing speed.
Among other changes:
- davesrocketshop fixed several issues in the new materials system, including one release blocker.
- WandererFan fixed 6 issues in TechDraw, including 2 crashes.
- Syres916, yorikvanhavre, and pinkavaj fixed several issues in BIM.
- marioalexis84 contributed several improvements and fixes to FEM.
- bgbsww fixed several toponaming issues including one blocker where FreeCAD would crash after accepting toponaming recompute dialog in a file with multiple links.
- Rexbas fixed a blocker issue in the align to selection tool.
- xtemp09 improved the Light Sources page of Preferences to move the zoom button to the left so that XYZ axes would be visible in the lower right corner.
- shaise fixed a minor occlusion in the Ambient Occlusion code in the new CAM simulator.
PR stats: since the previous report, 61 pull requests have been merged, 18 new pull requests have been opened.
Issue stats: overall, there are 2088 open issues in the tracker, up by 37 from last week. 6 of them are v1.0 release blockers, down by 5 from last week.
6 responses to “WIP Wednesday 25 September 2024”
This is already a great result. Keep up the good work! Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to get involved. But with 27 years of 3D CAD experience, I can already assess what a great result this is.
Your work is particularly important because the big software manufacturers are becoming increasingly customer-unfriendly. In the past, I have paid large sums for CAD licenses (Creo Parametric, SolidWorks) and can say that discussions with the providers are becoming increasingly unpleasant. In addition, the trend is unfortunately towards rental licenses.
A free 3D CAD system that is properly programmed in the basics could significantly change the market.
Agree, now I’m (semi) retired I can’t afford to keep up my solidworks license so I’ve been using FreeCAD for a couple of years, it’s great and I’ve produced lots with it but the constant rebuilding of parts during development was something of a pain. I’ve been using the V1.0RC releases for the last few days and I’m really impressed with the quality of the work … prime-time for FreeCAD beckons.… Thanks and congrats to all involved!
Dear Adrian:
Similar to my note to Martin who previously commented on this blog, I’m actually working on a feature for Digital Engineering magazine (digitalengineering247.com) on low-cost and free online or cloud-based CAD tools. Are you currently in the engineering space? If so, would you have any interest in responding to a few questions via email from an end user perspective?
Thank you in advance,
Stephanie Skernivitz
sskernivitz@digitialengineering.news
Hi Stephanie, as I say in the post, I’m now retired although doing some occasional work from time to time.
As far as cloud/online tools are concerned I would say that I have never, and would never, consider using them for anything related to my work. There are many reasons for this, for instance:
A/ Security — despite almost monthly examples of what happens when either by mistake or design (from ‘bad actors’) major systems fail, companies and governments still seem happy to put all their day-to-day operations and most of their IP out there where it can vanish or be corrupted in an instant. Sooner or later, they (or we) pay the price.
B/ Longevity — having run my own engineering companies since the early 1980s with customers in the industrial, aviation and defence sectors we had to offer ongoing support for perods of up to 25 years, that in itself is incompatible with on-line tools that could vanish overnight.
C/ User Interface — for some reason that I have never understood, the providers of many (most?) software tools — including operating systems — seem to think it is not only acceptable but desirable to change the user interface with every update. As a user of CAD one develops a ‘muscle memory’ for executing most tasks, the wasted time (= number of engineers x re-learning time) when the UI changes is expensive. At least with SolidWorks (for example) that was limited to about once a year, at a time of our choosing! However on-line tools could do it overnight, every night if they so choose.
.… and so on.…
Adrian
Hi Martin:
I’m actually working on a feature for Digital Engineering magazine (digitalengineering247.com) on low-cost and free online or cloud-based CAD tools. Are you currently in the engineering space? If so, would you have any interest in responding to a few questions via email from an end user perspective?
Thank you in advance,
Stephanie Skernivitz
sskernivitz@digitialengineering.news
“theosib fixed Part Design to no longer allow part planes and axes as options for Sweep and Loft”
Could this create a regression issue for some users? Just a nasty thought.