FreeCAD News

The FreeCAD Project Asso­ci­a­tion is excit­ed to announce the launch of lens.freecad.org, a test serv­er for col­lab­o­rat­ing on FreeCAD projects.

The under­ly­ing tech­nol­o­gy, Ond­sel Lens, is a prod­uct data man­age­ment (PDM) sys­tem devel­oped in 2023–2024 by Ond­sel, a US-based start­up. It sup­ports cre­at­ing orga­ni­za­tions, adding new mem­bers, ver­sion­ing FreeCAD projects, shar­ing them with option­al pass­word pro­tec­tion, and more. It also sup­ports gen­er­at­ing the code for embed­ding it into posts on the FreeCAD forum.

There is also a Lens Addon you can use to inter­act with the Lens serv­er direct­ly with­in FreeCAD.

Please give it a try! You can file bug reports and fea­ture ideas for the serv­er (and web­site) at https://github.com/FreeCAD/Ondsel-Server. For the addon, please file them at https://github.com/FreeCAD/Ondsel-Lens-Addon/.

Online doc­u­men­ta­tion is avail­able at https://freecad.github.io/lens-docs/.

Work on Ond­sel Lens has­n’t stopped after Ond­sel fold­ed in late 2024. An anony­mous spon­sor con­tact­ed the FPA to offer a 5‑figure dona­tion towards fur­ther devel­op­ment of the ser­vice for the FreeCAD com­mu­ni­ty. This has been known as Ond­sel Onwards Fund ever since. 

Thanks to that dona­tion, Ond­sel gained impor­tant new fea­tures such as on-prem deploy­ment sup­port, a Tru­e­NAS app, sup­port for OAuth and OIDC authen­ti­ca­tion, and run­ning cus­tom Python scripts on your mod­els in the browser.