FreeCAD News

FOSDEM fell on the 31^st Jan­u­ary and the 1^st of Feb­ru­ary this year and, as ever, FreeCAD had a pres­ence at the excel­lent event in numer­ous ways.

Once again our main vis­i­ble pres­ence was on the joint FreeCAD and KiCad booth in the AW build­ing which, as ever, saw great foot­fall. Many peo­ple mov­ing through the AW build­ing stopped for a chat as they know FreeCAD or KiCad but also we met a lot of peo­ple not know­ing either project. It’s always fun when they ask “are we the same com­pa­ny” or “is it the same project” and we can explain, “no we are two sep­a­rate organ­i­sa­tions who just real­ly like each oth­er and co-oper­ate”! Some­thing those who are less used to open­source find quite amazing!

The booth was crewed excel­lent­ly both days by a range of FreeCAD and KiCad com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers and lot’s of bril­liant con­ver­sa­tions hap­pened. To nudge the con­ver­sa­tions along we had numer­ous bril­liant exam­ples of projects built with FreeCAD and KiCad on the table.

Once again we had some excel­lent exam­ples of tiny satel­lites and relat­ed elec­tron­ics on dis­play from our friends and col­leagues at the Libre Space Foun­da­tion. Peo­ple were amazed to see the diminu­tive Qubik pock­etcube satel­lite, a ful­ly oper­a­tional satel­lite that has flown on orbit that mea­sures only 50mm cubed.

We also had an excel­lent project from @cccpresser, a won­der­ful KiCad designed PCB mount­ed on a CNC brass base unit, which was milled using FreeCAD CAM WB. The PCB was an aston­ish­ing­ly accu­rate 1/1000 repli­ca of Stone­henge with the henge blocks being built out of a col­lec­tion of SMD com­po­nents includ­ing LED’s. An amaz­ing and beau­ti­ful exam­ple of what can be achieved with our projects.

A big draw item on the booth was the excel­lent dis­play of the open­source Micro Manip­u­la­tors from Dif­frac­tion Lim­it­ed. These micro manip­u­la­tors are capa­ble of sub micron res­o­lu­tion and have had pret­ty wide cov­er­age online, for exam­ple on Hackaday.com. It was fab­u­lous to have 2 of these machines set up and run­ning on the desk, with one being an excel­lent micro­scope set­up where you could move tiny salt crys­tals around on the stage. Mas­sive thanks to Manu for trav­el­ling over to FOSDEM and being extreme­ly busy on the booth show­ing off the project.

Pre­vi­ous­ly our friends an col­leagues at KiCad have vol­un­tar­i­ly been the dev­room man­agers for the Open Hard­ware CAD/CAM dev room talk track at FOSDEM. This year how­ev­er it was FreeCAD team­sters @chennes and @concretedog who took over the reigns aid­ed and abet­ted by Kli­ment and oth­ers. It’s a fair amount of work to col­late and review all the talk pro­pos­als (thanks vol­un­teer review team mem­bers) but we were pleased to have a real­ly nice range of excel­lent talks in the room. There are lots of favourites and we enjoyed them all, you can check out the FOSDEM site to view all the talks from all the rooms. Just as a flavour we enjoyed host­ing Ryan Walk­er speak­ing on “The Black­pants are Pants for your Black­hat” a sto­ry about the design and devel­op­ment of an enhanced Flip­per Zero style device. It was also great to hear Mor­gan speak­ing about his devel­op­ment of KiCon­nect, a FreeCAD work­bench that pow­er­ful­ly allows for push pull inter­ac­tion between FreeCAD and KiCad.

Of course we also had the main project updates for FreeCAD from Yorik, and KiCad from Wayne which were incred­i­bly packed talks with the queue for the Open Hard­ware dev­room stretch­ing to over 100 peo­ple deep. Thanks to every­one for their patience about access to the dev­room in this peri­od as we need to be mind­ful of fire reg­u­la­tions and our capac­i­ty caps. 

It was once again an excel­lent event for us and great to meet and min­gle with so many FreeCAD users, devel­op­ers and those curi­ous to try it out. It’s an intense week­end of activ­i­ty and we’d like to thank every­one who gave up their time to come and sup­port. We look for­ward to next year!