On the 30^th Jan­u­ary 2026 we once again held our pre FOSDEM fringe meet up event FreeCAD Day. Once again we met at the fab­u­lous Les Ate­liers des Tan­neurs venue, where, fuelled with plen­ty of cof­fee and tea, we had an excel­lent day of talks and discussions.

We kicked of the morn­ing with talks from @kadet1090 on the FPA grant fund­ed activ­i­ty to cre­ate a design sys­tem for FreeCAD, more details of the work can be found here https://github.com/FreeCAD/FPA-grant-proposals/issues/58. Mov­ing for­ward we had an infor­mal talk and dis­cus­sion around approach­es around pro­mot­ing and devel­op­ing the use of FreeCAD in aca­d­e­m­ic envi­ron­ments led by @pamintended.

Sad­ly trav­el prob­lems stopped @reqrefusion from attend­ing the day but the fear­less and mighty @chennes stepped up to blast through @reqrefusion slide deck which looked at the struc­ture of FreeCAD/FPA finances look­ing at last year, 2025, as a case example.

An ever peren­ni­al favourite is the, mag­nif­i­cent­ly facil­i­tat­ed, FreeCAD Com­plaints Ses­sion. If you don’t know this is a ses­sion where any­one can raise any com­plaint about any aspect of FreeCAD. Kli­ment facil­i­tates and has an amaz­ing abil­i­ty to turn any com­plex mul­ti para­graph com­plaint dis­cus­sion into a sin­gle con­cise bul­let point. This ses­sion is audio record­ed, tran­scribed (by a human) and the result­ing com­plaints are fed into the issue sys­tem. It’s simul­ta­ne­ous­ly great fun as well as incred­i­bly use­ful! This year we were all impressed that the ses­sion was only just over 32 min­utes in length… either FreeCAD has improved, or we were all ready for lunch.

Lunch was a short walk to a fri­ets stand that we tend to head for every year and, whilst pret­ty cold, it was great car­ry on the con­ver­sa­tions over friets.

Back in the room we con­tin­ued with talks. This includ­ed @SargoDevel updat­ing on the amaz­ing Cables work­bench, @mwestphal speak­ing about F3D which has recent­ly been inte­grat­ed into FreeCAD and gen­er­ates project thumb­nails. The author of this post (@concretedog) gave a talk on some of the tan­gles and trips that can occur when teach­ing or writ­ing tuto­r­i­al con­tent for FreeCAD and we had a tan­ta­lis­ing update on the new web­site work by @marcuspollio. Mar­cel also gave a fas­ci­nat­ing thought pro­vok­ing talk on where in both his work an hob­bies FreeCAD is use­ful, but also high­light­ing where FreeCAD is not quite ready for com­mer­cial engi­neer­ing use. 

Of course we were over run­ning by this point and so the last two talks of the day were extreme­ly con­cise. @pieterhijma gave a very quick look at his soft­ware research project OSH Autodoc. This emer­gent FreeCAD work­bench allows for the auto­mat­ed cre­ation of project assem­bly instruc­tions. Inter­est­ing­ly the exam­ple Pieter had worked on was a set of build instruc­tions for a FreeCAD and KiCad designed project we fea­tured on the FOSDEM booth, the sub micron capa­ble Micro Manip­u­la­tors we have pre­vi­ous­ly high­light­ed on the blog.

Final­ly a super quick look at the cur­rent state of the Teleme­try addon from @chennes round­ed out an extreme­ly busy and pro­duc­tive day. Mas­sive thanks to every­one who came and gave up their time mak­ing for a great day.