FreeCAD News

The FPA Gen­er­al Assem­bly has final­ized the list of approved grant appli­ca­tions for the first quar­ter of 2025.

Ajinkya Dahale (AjinkyaDa­hale) will devel­op two new types of curves in Sketch­er: restrict­ed and off­set curves. Restrict­ed curves are use­ful when we only need a por­tion of an exter­nal curve that can change. Off­set curves are depen­dent on a par­ent curve to allow off­set for a larg­er set of curves (inde­pen­dent off­set curves already exist in FreeCAD, this is dif­fer­ent). Ajinkya was award­ed a grant of EUR 2000 for the project.

Mario Pas­saglia (@marioalexis84) will con­tin­ue his work on the FEM work­bench. He will fix bugs, main­tain and reor­ga­nize the code, and take care of var­i­ous short­com­ings in the mesh object, such as the impos­si­bil­i­ty of han­dling mul­ti­ple mesh­es, time-con­sum­ing algo­rithms to search mesh ele­ments, and the lack of mesh qual­i­ty check­ing. Mario was award­ed a grant of USD 3000 for the project.

João Matos (@tritao) and Ben­jamin Nauck (@hyarion) will mod­ern­ize FreeCAD’s ren­der­ing and selec­tion sys­tems to fix var­i­ous per­for­mance issues on large projects. They will decou­ple the selec­tion pick­ing and selec­tion ren­der­ing sys­tem, abstract the raw lega­cy OpenGL calls into a ren­der­ing abstrac­tion lay­er, and add a mod­ern ren­der­er to Coin. João and Ben­jamin were award­ed a grant of EUR 4000.

João and Ben­jamin got anoth­er grant approved: mul­ti­thread­ing archi­tec­ture improve­ments in FreeCAD. They will focus on enhanc­ing the base infra­struc­ture to enable asyn­chro­nous oper­a­tions and deliv­er asyn­chro­nous recom­pu­ta­tion of the doc­u­ment and its objects, a mul­ti-thread­ed sig­nal sys­tem, Python async sup­port, and UI enhance­ments to man­age modal or back­ground tasks. They were award­ed a grant of EUR 2000 for this project.

Chris Jones (@ipatch) will fix build­ing FreeCAD on macOS with Home­brew. Chris was award­ed a grant of USD 1000 for the project.

Amrit­pal Singh (@amrit3701) will resume his work on Ond­sel Lens, a FreeCAD-cen­tered online PDM sys­tem devel­oped by Ond­sel. He will decou­ple it from Ama­zon S3 and Lamb­da to make it self-host­ed on any infra­struc­ture. Amrit­pal was award­ed a grant of USD 6500 out of the Ond­sel Onward fund con­tributed by an anony­mous sponsor.