FreeCAD News

Last week­end was FOSDEM where a huge cohort of the open­source com­mu­ni­ty descend on Brus­sels and take over the Sol­bosch cam­pus of the Uni­ver­sité Libre de Brux­elles. It’s a fan­tas­tic event and, of course, FreeCAD had a stand along­side our friends and col­leagues KiCad, as well a numer­ous FreeCAD relat­ed speak­ers and talks. 

FreeCAD and KiCad teams have often shared a stand at FOSDEM and this year was no excep­tion. In fact build­ing on pre­vi­ous suc­cess­es we opt­ed to have a joint brand­ed ban­ner as a back­drop to the KiCad/FreeCAD stand. With the proud tagline “Build your own Future” embla­zoned across the ban­ner it was excel­lent to see many many joint users and projects that used both open­source tools. 

This year the stand was placed in the AW build­ing and, like every­where in FOSDEM, it was busy with a con­stant flow of peo­ple pass­ing with many of them stop­ping for a chat with us. We had plen­ty of excel­lent vol­un­teers crew­ing the stand which is handy in terms of the vol­ume of con­ver­sa­tions that can hap­pen! It’s inter­est­ing to note how con­ver­sa­tions dif­fer in com­par­i­son to pre­vi­ous years. There is of course always a mix­ture of con­ver­sa­tions, but you can usu­al­ly pick out themes that re occur through­out the two days. 

This year a big theme was peo­ple say­ing how pleased they were to see ver­sion 1.0 and how it sig­nif­i­cant­ly set a marked improve­ment over pre­vi­ous iter­a­tions. This, of course, is very wel­come to hear, but it also seemed to link to quite a few peo­ple dis­cussing the V1.0 had con­vinced them to take anoth­er look at FreeCAD from hav­ing tried an ear­li­er version. 

Anoth­er sig­nif­i­cant set of con­ver­sa­tions report­ed from the FreeCAD stand team was per­haps led by the fact that the stand was clear­ly a linked KiCad and FreeCAD ven­ture. There were lots of con­ver­sa­tions about the step up to KiCad work­bench and a heap of con­ver­sa­tions around using FreeCAD to design KiCad enclo­sures. It’s real­ly clear from FOSDEM we have a rea­son­able over­lap in user­base and it led to some great conversations. 

The oth­er won­der­ful thing to hap­pen at the stand is that peo­ple arrive with hard­ware made in FreeCAD, KiCad or both. Some real­ly notable projects this year includ­ed the MNT Reform V2 lap­top mak­ing an appear­ance, on which won­der­ful­ly the own­er was going through FreeCAD tuto­ri­als! We also saw Arya with a Beepy vari­ant which became FreeCAD stick­ered! Also the very fab­u­lous Wee Noise Mak­ers PGB‑1, a very cool sequencer/synthesiser groove­box. We’d also like to take a moment to thank Libre SPace Foun­da­tion for loan­ing us a full scale mod­el of their Picobus V2, a satel­lite launch­ing sys­tem built entire­ly in FreeCAD and KiCad and a won­der­ful exam­ple of build­ing high end tech­nol­o­gy with these open­source tools. 

On the Sat­ur­day evening KiCad and FreeCAD host­ed a com­mu­ni­ty din­ner at the “Volle Gas” the teams were fed well and it’s a nice way to pro­mote some inter­ac­tion between the two com­mu­ni­ties. It was­n’t the lat­est night as many of us had more vol­un­teer­ing to do on the Sun­day with many present also involved in facil­i­tat­ing, or speak­ing in, the Open Hard­ware CAD and CAM room. 

The Open Hard­ware CAD and CAM room was excel­lent­ly put togeth­er and main­tained and we had numer­ous FreeCAD relat­ed speak­ers in the mix. This includ­ed Kurt Kremitzk­i’s “Post­CAD: Open­CAS­CADE in the Data­base”, Ajinkya Dahale’s “Refac­tor­ing Sketch­er in FreeCAD” as well as (this blog author) Jo Hinch­liffes “Open­source Rock­etry tools, FreeCAD and Beyond”. We’d like to take a moment to thank the team who ran this room so excel­lent­ly keep­ing every­thing on top­ic, on time and flow­ing well. 

Final­ly, a mas­sive thank you to every­one who stopped by the FreeCAD stand to say hel­lo. Your sto­ries and inter­ac­tions make the whole effort com­plete­ly worth­while. As we all return to our var­i­ous parts of the world we all have some love­ly new con­nec­tions and sto­ries in our ears. A per­son­al favourite was a French school teacher who teach­es their 11 year old stu­dents FreeCAD ask­ing if they could take a FreeCAD brand­ed pen­cil as a prize for their best stu­dent. Of course, they left with enough pen­cils and stick­ers for each stu­dent and and ear full of thanks for their support. 

We look for­ward to see­ing you and your FreeCAD project/product there next year!