FreeCAD News

The FreeCAD Project Asso­ci­a­tion gen­er­al assem­bly has vot­ed for Q2 grants based on rec­om­men­da­tions from the grant tech­ni­cal review committee.

Here are the projects we are allo­cat­ing avail­able mon­ey for (in order of submission):

Pat­tern tools refac­tor, uni­fi­ca­tion, and addi­tion­al func­tion­al­i­ty by Pierre-Louis Boy­er. Pierre intends to refac­tor, uni­fy, and enhance exist­ing linear/polar pat­tern tools in mul­ti­ple work­bench­es. He has been award­ed a grant of €2,000. The first pull request has already been sub­mit­ted.

Con­fig­u­ra­tion Space Visu­al­iza­tion for Com­put­er-Aid­ed Geo­met­ric Design by Brad Eric Hol­lis­ter. This method allows for the visu­al­iza­tion of con­tact curves between pairs of parts. For a gen­er­al intro­duc­tion to the con­cept, you can refer to the video below. Brad’s job is to imple­ment an exporter in Python that will trans­late parts and assem­blies designed in FreeCAD into the HIPAIR input lan­guage. The visu­al­iza­tion will be done out­side FreeCAD, at least as part of this grant work. Brad has been award­ed $500 USD (€430) for the project.

Web­sites improve­ments ini­tia­tive — Step 1 by Mar­cus Pol­lio. Mar­cus has been active­ly work­ing on the redesign and uni­fi­ca­tion of the web­site for almost a year now. This par­tic­u­lar project’s deliv­er­ables are fea­tures par­i­ty between the old and the new web­site and uni­fi­ca­tion of the Home­page, the News blog, and the Devel­op­ers Hand­book. Mar­cus has been award­ed a grant of €4,000 for this project. 

Part­De­sign: Extrude in two direc­tions by Pierre-Louis Boy­er. Pierre has already sub­mit­ted a pull request that imple­ments this fea­ture (which will fix two issues in the track­er, #20845 and #16175). He has been award­ed a grant of €500 for the project.

Main­te­nance, improve­ment, and devel­op­ment of new fea­tures on the Assem­bly work­bench by Pierre-Louis Boy­er. This project is sim­i­lar to past grants issued to Mario Pas­saglia (FEM work­bench) and is expect­ed to involve both bug­fix­ing and devel­op­ment of new fea­tures. FPA’s rec­om­men­da­tion for Pierre is to focus on fix­es. He has been award­ed a grant of €3,000 for work­ing 10 hours a week on this for the next 3 months.

Main­te­nance, improve­ment, and devel­op­ment of new fea­tures on the Sketch­er work­bench by Pierre-Louis Boy­er. This project is struc­tured exact­ly like the Assem­bly project above: fix­es and improve­ments in Sketch­er, 10 hours a week for the next 3 months, for €3,000 total.

CAM/BIM: 2D Nest­ing Tool for FreeCAD by Abhi­ram Mas­da. He will either improve the exist­ing nest­ing algo­rithm or inte­grate a more effi­cient open-source library to reduce mate­r­i­al waste and improve lay­out qual­i­ty. Abhi­ram was award­ed a grant of ₹150,000 INR (€1,650).

Research ISO GPS / GD&T for an over­all con­cept as imple­men­ta­tion in FreeCAD by Max Wil­fin­ger. Max reworked and nar­rowed down his orig­i­nal pro­pos­al from Q1 2025 to research­ing stan­dards and indus­try work­flows, devel­op­ing an over­all work­flow for FreeCAD, and struc­tur­ing the project for future imple­men­ta­tion. No cod­ing is expect­ed to be done as part of this grant work. Max was award­ed a grant of €3,000 for the project.

CAM improve­ments for machin­ing met­als by David Kauf­man. David aims to improve con­trol of feed rates, sub­mit LeadI­nOut dres­sup fix­es and improve­ments, and fix the Ram­p­En­try dres­sup per­for­mance. David has been award­ed a grant of USD $3,500 for the project. He has already sub­mit­ted his first pull request for review.

Assem­bly Solver Inter­face Abstrac­tion and Alter­na­tive Solver Imple­men­ta­tion by Jack­son Ours­land. Jack­son intends to abstract the use of solvers in the Assem­bly work­bench aim­ing to add sup­port for the MuJo­Co solver (work in progress). Oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties include sup­port for the Project Chrono solver. Jack­son was award­ed a grant of USD $2,000.

Update OSH Auto­mat­ed Doc­u­men­ta­tion for FreeCAD 1.0  by Pieter Hij­ma. Pieter will update his OSH Auto­mat­ed Doc­u­men­ta­tion (osh-autodoc) work­bench to sup­port FreeCAD 1.0+ (this assumes fix­ing sev­er­al issues), the cus­tom PDF com­pil­er, and the doc­u­men­ta­tion. He was award­ed a grant of €2,000 for the project.

Unlike Q1 2025 when we had a lot of com­pe­ti­tion for funds, the total amount of funds request­ed in Q2 (€24,310) almost matched the quarter’s bud­get allo­ca­tion (€20,000) + left­overs from Q1 (€3,160). There has been no strong and unan­i­mous objec­tion to grant pro­pos­als in Q2, thus, all grant appli­ca­tions that were sub­mit­ted have been approved. Should all projects be suc­cess­ful, we’ll be over the bud­get by approx. €1,000 for Q2 2025 (USD <> EUR exchange rates will like­ly fluctuate).