On the 30th 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 and 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.
10 responses to “FreeCAD Day Europe 2026.”
Were these talks recorded at all?
Sadly not, however, we are discussing how this can happen next time and I’m determined to make it happen! /Jo
cool stuff 👍️
Could you share a planned target date for the next major release? I understand that setting an exact date can be difficult, and it’s completely fine if the final release ends up shifting. It would simply help a lot if people had a rough idea of when to expect the next big update. Even a tentative timeline — clearly marked as subject to change — would already be very helpful.
It’s really tricky to do this as the majority of FreeCAD development is via our amazing community of volunteer developers, it’s not fair to set deadlines when the developer community is putting in their own free time, you can of course watch the bug tracker and the release blocking bug statistics to get a sense of how close we are.
Why isn’t my comment showing up?
Hi Blaise, your comment is not showing as it has been deleted. You have repeatedly posted bug reports here and Aleks has repeatedly advised that this is not the correct place for those. The correct procedure is outlined on the forum and includes methods for checking your bug submission is not an already known issue. The deleted comment contained a very well known bug to do with fillets and the opencascade engine which is already in the bug tracker/issue system. Your comment would have taken significant screen area to publish and, as we say, is not the correct place for this information. Here is a link to the bug submission guidance. https://forum.freecad.org/viewtopic.php?t=5236&start=50
I previously reported a bug here that was successfully resolved (see: https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/issues/25008).
I have reported over five bugs on the LibreCAD forums which have all been fixed. Since I do not have a GitHub account yet, posting here is my only way to ensure project collaborators see this. Please note that each of my posts is unique; I have carefully reviewed this bug and refined its description to be as accurate as possible.
On a side note, in my nearly 30 years on the internet, this is the first time I’ve encountered the feedback that a message occupies “too much screen space” on a blog… My goal is simply to provide all the necessary details to improve the software.
Hi Blaise, it will be coincidence that a bug reported here has been fixed, the link you posted is someone else’s bug report/issue raise, which is why, in the more common bug submission approach, you often discover that others have reported the same bug, like the fillet issues.
I can’t comment on libreCAD as that’s a totally different organisation. You don’t need a github account, the link I sent is for the FreeCAD forum. You can check on there if bugs are known, suggest/raise a bug in a post there and if confirmed as a unique/new bug, you can ask someone in the thread to raise it as an issue on the github. Regarding the space… well it’s too much space when its a repeat bug report in the wrong place. It’s wasting your time posting these here, we love that you are finding bugs and are prepared to report them, but no action can be taken on bugs posted here it simply the wrong part of the system. We can’t expect our volunteer devs to keep an eye on every forum thread.
Hi Blaise. I feel we have explained that these need to go to the forum via the link, it is not appropriate to keep posting these here. Future correspondence here will have to be marked as spam. Dealing with your comments here is again taking time for volunteers and team members. PLEASE continue to use FreeCAD and find bugs, but submit them via the Forum link we provided like all other bug reporters.