FreeCAD News

Every year there’s lot’s of FreeCAD activ­i­ty cen­tred around the fan­tas­tic FOSDEM event in Brus­sels. This year as well as the usu­al FreeCAD Day, Chris Hennes (@chennes) and Jo Hinch­liffe (@concretedog) are coor­di­nat­ing the Open Hard­ware and CAD/CAM dev­room. Chris has just post­ed the text below on the FreeCAD Forum, but we include it here to help spread the word. We hope to see lots of won­der­ful appli­ca­tions for the dev­room and also meet­ing up with friends in the FreeCAD com­mu­ni­ty on FreeCAD Day.

Chris’ text:

A group of FreeCAD devel­op­ers and users will once again be meet­ing in Brus­sels this January/February in con­junc­tion with FOSDEM’26. FreeCAD Day is sched­uled for 30 Jan­u­ary, 2026, and will fea­ture light­ning talks and dis­cus­sions about FreeCAD intend­ed for both devel­op­ers and users. And of course it will fea­ture the famous/infamous “com­plaint session”

Fol­low­ing FreeCAD Day, FOSDEM itself takes place that week­end, 31 Jan­u­ary and 1 Feb­ru­ary 2026. @concretedog and I are coor­di­nat­ing the Open Hard­ware and CAD/CAM dev­room, and we’d like to invite you all to sub­mit talks for con­sid­er­a­tion. We’re also look­ing for some vol­un­teers both to help run the dev­room on the day of the event, as well as to review talk sub­mis­sions. Please reach out to one of us if you are inter­est­ed! The Call for Papers for the FOSDEM ses­sion fol­lows (we’ll release a sep­a­rate CfP and reg­is­tra­tion link for FreeCAD Day short­ly)…

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We are pleased to announce the CfP for the Open Hard­ware and CAD/CAM dev­room at FOSDEM 2026, 31 January‑1 Feb­ru­ary 2026, Brus­sels, Bel­gium.

The dev­room will take place on Sun­day, 1 Feb­ru­ary 2026 at ULB (Cam­pus Sol­bosch).

We hope you’ll join us for a full day of talks, demos and inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions on design­ing, mod­el­ing and test­ing hard­ware using Open Source tools.

We wel­come any talk pro­pos­als about the design and cre­ation of phys­i­cal objects.

Top­ics of inter­est include, but are not lim­it­ed to:

- Open Hard­ware Projects
    * Open cir­cuits
    * Prod­uct design
    * The busi­ness of open hard­ware
- Cir­cuit Design
    * Print­ed cir­cuit board design tools
    * Cir­cuit sim­u­la­tion
- 3^d mod­el­ing and analy­sis
    * Sol­id mod­el­ing tools
    * Mesh­ing, mod­el­ing and trans­form­ing phys­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tions
    * Finite ele­ment analy­sis
- 3^d print­ing
    * 3^d slic­ing tools
    * Motor con­trol
- Machine design and inte­gra­tion
    * Open Hard­ware projects
    * ECAD/MCAD inte­gra­tion
    * Ther­mal analy­sis
    * Wire mod­el­ing
- Phys­i­cal Mod­el Data stor­age
    * Data rep­re­sen­ta­tion and opti­miza­tion
    * Ver­sion con­trol in hard­ware data stor­age
    * Col­lab­o­ra­tive and team-based hard­ware design tech­niques

Slots will be allo­cat­ed for short (20 min­utes) and long (40 min­utes) talks.

Speak­ers need to spec­i­fy their pre­ferred for­mat. Both include time for ques­tions and answers.

Depend­ing on the num­ber of sub­mis­sions, sub­mit­ters may be asked to uti­lize an alter­nate time for­mat.

Impor­tant Dates

Sub­mis­sion dead­line: 5 Decem­ber 2025
Accep­tance noti­fi­ca­tions: 10 Decem­ber 2025
Final sched­ule announce­ment: 15 Decem­ber 2025
Dev­room: 1 Feb­ru­ary 2026

The sub­mis­sion process
———————-
Please sub­mit your pro­pos­al at https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2026/cfp before 5 Dec 2025.

Select the “Open Hard­ware and CAD/CAM” ses­sion. Please note that the “Open Source Design” track, while a love­ly group of won­der­ful hack­ers, is not the same!

Please include the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion with your sub­mis­sion:

- Abstract
- Pre­ferred Ses­sion length
- Speak­er bio
- Link to any hard­ware / code /slides for the talk

Fill in at least a title and abstract for the pro­posed talk and a sug­gest­ed dura­tion.

Keep in mind that much of the val­ue in these meet­ings comes from the dis­cus­sions, so please allot at least 20% of the talk time for ques­tions and answers.

Ques­tions?
———-
If you have any ques­tions or need guid­ance on any aspect of sub­mit­ting, prepar­ing or pre­sent­ing, please e‑mail chennes at freecad.org.

Vol­un­teer­ing
———-
If you are inter­est­ed in help­ing the dev­room run smooth­ly, please reach out to Chris Hennes (@chennes) or Jo Hinch­liffe (@concretedog) and we’ll be very hap­py to have your assistance!