FreeCAD News

Each year on the Fri­day before the FOSDEM event, FreeCAD held a “FreeCAD Day” where, after work­ing for a few days direct­ly on FreeCAD in a hackathon style, the day is set up as an Un-con­fer­ence mean­ing any pre­sen­ta­tion or activ­i­ty can be attached to the agen­da. It’s a love­ly for­mat that allows for real­ly inter­est­ing things to hap­pen. Again this year the pre FOSDEM FreeCAD Day took place in the Ate­liers Des Tan­neurs build­ing which we share with the KiCad team for a few days before FOSDEM.

Our col­leagues in KiCad use their Fri­day as a “Learn to Code for KiCad” day and as such a del­e­ga­tion of the FreeCAD team attend­ed the first intro­duc­to­ry ses­sion. One take­away from this is how enjoy­able, and use­ful it is, to inter­act with the KiCad crew a lit­tle more with val­ue in the fact that there are lots of FreeCAD user base using KiCad and vice versa.

Numer­ous activ­i­ties and pre­sen­ta­tions hap­pened over the course of the day. After reassem­bling in the FreeCAD room Yorik began the pre­sen­ta­tions with an overview of the annu­al report from the FPA detail­ing FPA activ­i­ty and look­ing at the themes for the next year. Anoth­er high­light of the FreeCAD Day is the near infa­mous “com­plaints session”.

The com­plaints ses­sion is expert­ly host­ed by Kli­ment and we don’t say that light­ly. The idea of the ses­sion is that any­one can say any­thing they don’t like about FreeCAD and the room doesn’t unpack it or respond. Rather, Kli­ment poten­tial­ly seeks quick clar­i­fi­ca­tions before sum­ming up the indi­vid­ual com­plaint in a sin­gle con­cise sen­tence. These “quick fire” com­plaints are all cap­tured in the room on audio recorders and then col­lat­ed and pub­lished after the event. They then can be checked to ascer­tain if they are known issues with a issue raised or if they need to have an issue assigned. It’s an incred­i­bly valu­able process and it’s also heart warm­ing to look at pre­vi­ous com­plaint ses­sions and see how many issues have been solved.

Over lunch the con­ver­sa­tions con­tin­ue, mak­ing sure to chat to peo­ple who only attend­ed the FreeCAD Day and not the oth­er hack days, one great con­ver­sa­tion was with Dan­ny. Dan­ny was only 4 weeks into his entire dis­cov­ery of CAD and FreeCAD. In that short time using FreeCAD 1.0 he had man­aged to make some rea­son­ably com­plex parts for 3D print­ing. It’s real­ly use­ful to have peo­ple like Dan­ny attend these events hav­ing so fresh­ly walked a begin­ners path to FreeCAD, it’s great to explore how Dan­ny has learnt and what resources they have used as well as what hur­dles they have faced.

Post lunch more pre­sen­ta­tions and dis­cus­sions are deliv­ered. Some high­lights include Kurt speak­ing about his Post­CAD con­cepts and Julian Todd speak­ing on a fas­ci­nat­ing project using the Godot engine to make mul­ti­play­er VR ses­sions for view­ing Par­aView CFD sim­u­la­tions. Real­ly inter­est­ing stuff. Ajinkya spoke about a project, OSDAG, which is an open source steel and graph­ics design envi­rone­ment allow­ing for H beam steel sec­tions designs to be quick­ly designed and assessed.

Roman gave an overview of their excel­lent cable design and man­age­ment addon work­bench. This work­bench allows for the para­met­ric design of wiring and also fea­tures push and pull type work­flows so that you can drag a elec­tri­cal con­nec­tor and con­duit in an archi­tec­tur­al fea­ture and the wiring will update and re route accord­ing­ly. It’s a work­bench with great inter­ac­tion with the BIM areas of FreeCAD, but also opened dis­cus­sion around cable and har­ness man­age­ment and oth­er crossover fea­tures between FreeCAD and KiCad. In a sim­i­lar vein. Michael pre­sent­ed a dis­cus­sion and overview of their process design­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing injec­tion mould­ed enclo­sures for elec­tron­ics. Of course this is an area where KiCad and FreeCAD users over­lap and became a dis­cus­sion explor­ing embold­en­ing crossover func­tion­al­i­ty, for exam­ple could FreeCAD have an enclo­sures work­bench that auto­mat­i­cal­ly can para­me­terise draft angles for injec­tion mould­ing or shrink­age para­me­ters for dif­fer­ent plas­tics for example.

Round­ing out the day Mar­cus spoke about his ongo­ing work build­ing a pro­to­type new web pres­ence for FreeCAD replac­ing and con­sol­i­dat­ing the var­i­ous web­sites and blogs into a more cohe­sive sys­tem. It’s great to see this work become more known in the com­mu­ni­ty and hope­ful­ly more fol­low up meet­ings and devel­op­ment will be sched­uled this year. Final­ly the fab­u­lous Chris Hennes round­ed out the day with a pre­sen­ta­tion on the FPA grant activ­i­ty cov­er­ing how the grant scheme had worked, what it had deliv­ered and what it will look like in the com­ing year.

And Final­ly.…

One thing we feel is miss­ing from our FreeCAD Day is live stream­ing. We are real­ly inter­est­ed to see if there is any­one who has some exper­tise in this area and may attend next years FreeCAD Day. The KiCad team have a live stream and so we know that the band­width for this in the build­ing is poten­tial­ly there. If this is some­thing that inter­ests you then feel free to reach out at fpa@freecad.org.