FreeCAD News

This week in FreeCAD development:

Sketcher

• Bojan9597 fixed pre­ci­sion loss in the Dimen­sion tool (PR#30157).
• Pad­dle­Stroke fixed a con­fus­ing behav­ior when enter­ing angle val­ues in the Polyline’s on-view para­me­ter box­es (PR#30479).
• matthi­as­dan­ner added on-view para­me­ter reset­ting on click­ing in the Poly­line and BSpline tools when cre­at­ing a new seg­ment (PR#31209).
• maxwxyz fixed a bug that would inter­rupt cre­at­ing a sequence of tan­gen­tial­ly con­nect­ed arcs with the Poly­line tool in cer­tain sce­nar­ios (PR#31139).
• Loke­strom fixed a bug where minor and major radius would get swapped when sketch­ing ellipse arcs (PR#31343). 

Part and PartDesign

• Pad­dle­Stroke fixed a bug that made all sub­trac­tive tools use the same icon and name in the task pan­el (PR#31045). He also par­tial­ly fixed per­for­mance issues with pat­tern tools by remov­ing an extra recom­pute of mul­ti­trans­forms (PR#30872).
• drwho495 fixed a topon­am­ing-relat­ed issue where FreeCAD would often remove per­fect­ly valid geom­e­try when an ele­ment los­es ref­er­ence in a fil­let or cham­fer oper­a­tion (PR#31411).

CAM

tarman3 patched Probe to use the bound­ing box rather than the vol­ume of the select­ed shape to define probe area (PR#30609), fixed cycle time for dress-ups (PR#31110). He also con­tributed the first step towards mak­ing helix ramp an option in Pro­file and Pock­et to make this fea­ture more dis­cov­er­able (PR#26957).

TechDraw

• Wan­der­erFan fixed using a cus­tom sec­tion line col­or (PR#31386) and bal­loon posi­tion­ing (PR#30895).
• wwmay­er fixed a crash that occurred when open­ing a draw­ing cre­at­ed in 0.21 (PR#31186, cher­ry-picked by maxwxyz).

BIM

Roy-043 fixed deac­ti­va­tion of spa­tial objects like lev­els and build­ings (PR#31064) and the cloning of stairs (PR#30960). He also added sup­port for dif­fer­ent pipe diam­e­ter val­ues in the T‑connector (PR#29504).

Other changes

• marioalexis84 added options to reverse mas­ter and slave ref­er­ences for Con­tact and Tie con­straints in FEM (PR#31055).
• tri­tao con­tributed a patch that pre­pares the code­base for the new ren­der­er (PR#31187). Scene con­struc­tion, screen-space geom­e­try, mesh ren­der data, frame­buffer cap­ture, and tear­down are made more explic­it, deter­min­is­tic, and reusable while pre­serv­ing the exist­ing ren­der­ing path.
• Ele­men­tW boost­ed the load­ing of work­bench resources mul­ti­fold (PR#29904).

Addi­tion­al improve­ments and fix­es were con­tributed by adri­an­in­saval, chennes, greg19, ItSaul­Go­od­Man, j‑hewett, KKTHEGREAT07, Lgt2x, maxwxyz, Roy-043, Trav­isThomp, tri­tao, and wwmayer.

If you are inter­est­ed in test­ing the lat­est week­ly build, you can grab it here.

Activity stats

PR stats: since the pre­vi­ous report, 67 pull requests have been merged, and 35 new pull requests have been opened.

Issue stats: over­all, there are 3508 open issues in the track­er, up by 4 from last week.

Elsewhere in the community

KiCad devel­op­ers recent­ly announced they will be using FreeCAD’s PlaneGCS con­straint solver in v11. The fea­ture is already avail­able in night­ly builds.