FreeCAD News

Google announced the projects that will be part of the Sum­mer of Code 2026 project. Here is what our GSoC stu­dents will be work­ing on this year.

Aymi will be adding sup­port for ani­mat­ed multi­body dynam­ics visu­al­iza­tions. The project will be built on top of the 3^rd-par­ty Motion work­bench (by Jose Gabriel Egas Ortuño) and the native FEM work­bench. It’s an extreme­ly chal­leng­ing project to tack­le alone for any­one, but Aymi won’t be alone. Her men­tors are long-time FEM con­trib­u­tor marioalexis84 and mul­ti-body dynam­ics expert Aik-Siong Koh.

Morten Vajhøj will be chang­ing the way you anno­tate geom­e­try in Tech­Draw. Right now, you need to select an object and then pick the right tool, which is not how the rest of FreeCAD works for the most part. Morten will revamp this work­flow so that you select an anno­ta­tion tool and imme­di­ate­ly see the applic­a­ble geom­e­try to use it on.

Nishen­dra Singh’s project fol­lows a recent dis­cus­sion about reviv­ing the aban­doned Robot work­bench. Nishen­dra will be replac­ing CSV/DH file imports with URDF imports, adding the export­ing of the joint & tra­jec­to­ry data, and updat­ing the Oro­cos KDL kine­mat­ics library.

Parag Deb­nath will make it pos­si­ble to search and apply inter­na­tion­al clas­si­fi­ca­tion stan­dards to select­ed IFC enti­ties by inte­grat­ing the build­ingS­MART Data Dic­tio­nary into the BIM workbench.

YashSuthar983 will add 3D para­met­ric sketch­ing. This work will involve adding new prim­i­tives and spa­tial con­straints to the PlaneGCS solver. The plan right now is to cre­ate a tem­po­rary new work­bench as a test­bed and then merge it into the uni­fied Sketch­er workbench.

We also received mul­ti­ple appli­ca­tions for improv­ing the Mea­sure tool. This is a great indi­ca­tion of how impor­tant this func­tion­al­i­ty is and how much more work needs to hap­pen there. While nei­ther appli­ca­tion made the cut for GSoC this year, we encour­age con­trib­u­tors inter­est­ed in improv­ing the Mea­sure tool to sub­mit appli­ca­tions for an FPA grant.