FreeCAD News

What's going on at FreeCAD?

  • WIP Wednesday 6 March 2024

    WIP Wednesday 6 March 2024

    This week in FreeCAD development:

    • bgb­sww, Cal­li­garoV, and chennes made fur­ther progress towards mit­i­gat­ing the topon­am­ing issue.
    • Wan­der­erFan fix­es sev­er­al bugs in TechDraw.
    • HowThat­Works con­tributed a set of ISO 7200/ISO 5457 tem­plates for Tech­Draw, he also removed the non-con­­for­­mant ISO7200_Pep series and the ISO7200TD series of templates.
    • pavl­tom reim­ple­ment­ed Leader Line par­ent link­ing in Tech­Draw, this allows to trans­fer the Leader Line to any oth­er Part View present on the page, while keep­ing all its chil­dren, with­out the need to re-cre­ate them.
    • chennes updat­ed the Addon Man­ag­er to bring back some­thing akin to the orig­i­nal Addon Man­ag­er dis­play, with the side-by-side dis­play of the list and details views. He also fixed sev­er­al build and i18n issues. 
    • FEA-eng imple­ment­ed 2D mechan­i­cal analy­sis meth­ods using Cal­culiX: plane stress, plane strain, and axisym­met­ric. He also imple­ment­ed isotrop­ic and kine­mat­ic hard­en­ing as the next step towards sup­port for advanced mate­r­i­al mod­els offered by Cal­culiX. Apart from that, he fixed Elmer FEM 2D elec­tro­mag­net­ic exam­ples and remove the need to include geo­met­ri­cal non­lin­ear­i­ty when non­lin­ear mate­r­i­al is used in CalculiX.
    • marioalexis84 con­tributed a few fix­es to FEM.
    • 3x380V updat­ed the Python wrap­per code with Qt6 migra­tion in mind, he also intro­duced the use of std::chrono for time manipulation.
    • wwmay­er made var­i­ous fix­es and small enhance­ments, he also did some refac­tor­ing to reduce code duplication.
    • Roy-043 con­tributed small tech­ni­cal fix­es and improve­ments to Draft and Sketcher. 
    • davidg­ilka­uf­man and jffmichi fixed a few issues in Path.
    • djmd­jm added G43 tool height com­pen­sa­tion to cen­troid post-pro­cess­ing in Path, also fixed adap­tive glitch by remov­ing adja­cent coin­ci­dent and near­­ly-coin­­ci­­dent points.
    • Rexbas imple­ment­ed an opt-out option to use InOutCu­bic eas­ing func­tion in nav­i­ga­tion ani­ma­tions. He also fixed set­ting rota­tion cen­ter when enter­ing drag­ging in Tin­ker­CAD style.
    • Lemon­Boy patched the UI code to make the dock­bars show the same set of but­tons with and with­out the over­lay mode enabled.
    • FlachyJoe intro­duced object freez­ing, so that users could tog­gle para­met­ric behav­iour of doc­u­ment objects.
    • AjinkyaDa­hale improved the Join Curves com­mand in Sketch­er by mak­ing a C1 con­ti­nu­ity at joining.
    • bdi­eterm updat­ed the setEulerAn­gles API to update rota­tion axis vec­tor and rota­tion angle when set­ting a Rota­tion object.
    • maxwxyz made small improve­ments in Sketch­er and around.
    • jcoal­son fixed a bug in Part.
    • mosfet80 made minor fix­es in the build system.

    PR stats: In the week from Wednes­day, 28 Feb­ru­ary to Wednes­day, 6 March there were 58 pull requests merged, with a total code­base change of +4,975 / ‑1,227 (not count­ing trans­la­tion updates). We had an aver­age merged PR size of +86 / ‑21. 20 new pull requests were opened.

    Issue stats: we closed 30 issues, and 63 new issues were opened. Over­all, 1,311 issues are cur­rent­ly open.

  • Forged in FreeCAD: Thor, An Opensource Robotic Arm

    We imag­ine most vis­i­tors to this blog will already know that amaz­ing things can be achieved or designed using open­source tools like FreeCAD. The Thor open­source robot­ic arm is a great exam­ple of a com­plex open­source project built using a total­ly open­source tool chain.

    It’s a pri­mar­i­ly 3D print­ed 6 degrees of free­dom robot­ic arm which looks, and per­forms much like it’s indus­tri­al coun­ter­parts. Once print­ed and assem­bled the 625mm tall arm is able to han­dle around 750 grams which means it’s pret­ty capa­ble and could well be tasked with use­ful work.

    Of course, we fea­ture it here as it’s been mod­elled in FreeCAD, if noth­ing else it’s worth down­load­ing the FreeCAD files as an exam­ple of of excel­lent qual­i­ty com­put­er aid­ed design and it’s fun to look around the parts and assem­bly. Aside from FreeCAD the Thor project has lever­aged KiCad for the PCB com­po­nents and the open­source G‑code inter­preter and motor dri­ving plat­form GRBL. Once assem­bled there is an open­source piece of soft­ware “Asgard” which acts as a con­troller inter­face for the arm. In oth­er words, it’s open­source all the way!

    If you plan to make a Thor, there is around 200 hours of 3D print­ing and then a stack of assem­bly work. All the com­po­nents, step­per motors, dri­ver boards are all off the shelf items so although a com­plex design, it’s total­ly doable. So far there have been in excess of 30 Thor arms built and a vari­ety of them are shown on the project web­site. Whilst it might look a lit­tle com­plex for a begin­ners project for those new to hard­ware builds, it is very well doc­u­ment­ed. There is a bur­geon­ing forum where you can check out oth­er peo­ples builds and ask questions.

  • The annual grant program is live

    The FPA is launch­ing an annu­al grant pro­gram fol­low­ing last year’s research. The goal is to fos­ter rapid devel­op­ment of FreeCAD. To do that, the FPA will use the community’s dona­tions to pay devel­op­ers and non-pro­­gram­ming con­trib­u­tors. We reserved a fund of 50,000 EUR for this in 2024. We aso encour­age work on items from the gen­er­al roadmap, but are also inter­est­ed in grant appli­ca­tions explor­ing oth­er possibilities.

    The pro­gram has some sim­i­lar­i­ties to Google Sum­mer of Code, but it’s tar­get­ed at con­trib­u­tors who are more expe­ri­enced and don’t need much men­tor­ing (if any at all). We also rec­og­nize that projects will vary in com­plex­i­ty. Some projects will take two months to com­plete, some — half a year or more. So there will be no uni­ver­sal ‘pen­cils down’ dead­line. We will, how­ev­er, batch the review­ing of grant applications.

    If you are inter­est­ed in hack­ing on FreeCAD or its ecosys­tem projects such as OCCT and Coin3D, please sub­mit your appli­ca­tion by March 29, 2024. You can find more infor­ma­tion about the grant pro­gram here. For the full guide on the pro­gram and par­tic­i­pa­tion please refer to the rule­book.

    The FPA will con­tin­ue accept­ing and encour­ag­ing indi­vid­ual out-of-pro­­gram grant appli­ca­tions through­out the year.

    ,

  • Good bye GSoC 2023, hello GSoC 2024

    FreeCAD is a already long-term par­tic­i­pant to the Google Sum­mer of Code (GSoC) pro­gram, which is Google’s pro­gram to fund stu­dents to work on Free and Open-Source Soft­ware (FOSS) projects. Each year, stu­dents sub­mit pro­pos­als to work on their favorite FOSS project dur­ing the school hol­i­days, and Google awards them a grant.

    FreeCAD has been par­tic­i­pat­ing since 2016, togeth­er with some oth­er FOSS CAD projects like Open­SCAD, BRL-CAD or KiCAD under a same umbrel­la. Last year, we decid­ed we’re old enough to try, and par­tic­i­pat­ed on our own. It was a great expe­ri­ence, we got no less than four award­ed stu­dents work­ing on FreeCAD. All of them pro­duced good results, and got to know and inter­act with the FreeCAD family.

    The aim of GSoC is not only to get peo­ple to work on FOSS projects, but also to give stu­dents a chance to dive in to a FOSS project and expe­ri­ence first-hand the dynam­ics of open-source devel­op­ment (which I think are total­ly awe­some, and def­i­nite­ly some­thing any com­put­er sci­ence stu­dent should know about). Final­ly, it also tries to cre­ate long-last­ing bounds between stu­dents and com­mu­ni­ties they work with, so they stick to the project after GSoC finishes.

    GSoC 2023

    This hap­pened last year:

    • hlorus worked (and is still work­ing!) on mea­sure­ments tools in FreeCAD. FreeCAD has a very diverse set of dif­fer­ent mea­sure­ment tools, none total­ly com­plete, none total­ly fin­ished. Hlorus, who already worked on oth­er FOSS projects like Blender, start­ed work­ing on a uni­fied sys­tem, that hope­ful­ly will pro­vide a good FreeCAD-wide mea­sure­ment solu­tion. Check the project details on GSoC 2023: Uni­fied Mea­sure­ment Facil­i­ty — FreeCAD Forum
    • Amulya worked and is also still work­ing on a mod­ern replace­ment for the FreeCAD library. The FreeCAD library has become this huge, unmain­tain­able, unus­able repos­i­to­ry of FreeCAD mod­els, pieces and parts pro­vid­ed by FreeCAD users. We need­ed a replace­ment which, while still rely­ing on Git and con­tent pro­vid­ed by users, allows a much eas­i­er man­age­ment both by admin­is­tra­tors and users, and has an eas­i­er inte­gra­tion in FreeCAD. Project details are on [GSoC 2023] UI tool for fetch­ing online con­tent — FreeCAD Forum
    • Gau­ri worked on a new doc­u­men­ta­tion sys­tem for FreeCAD. While the cur­rent doc­u­men­ta­tion host­ed on the FreeCAD wiki served and still serves us well so far, a series of grow­ing prob­lems made us think we need a bet­ter, more flex­i­ble and safer solu­tion where the con­tents are dis­so­ci­at­ed from the plat­form. Gau­ri set up a mark­­down-based docusaurus sys­tem, and some FreeCAD com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers have now picked up her work and are car­ry­ing it fur­ther. Check the details at [GSoC2023] Upgrade the doc­u­men­ta­tion sys­tem — FreeCAD Forum

    Every­thing that hap­pens with GSoC in FreeCAD is in its own sec­tion of the FreeCAD forum. Be sure to check what’s hap­pen­ing there!

    GSoC 2024

    This year again, FreeCAD has been accept­ed to the GSoC pro­gram. The store is now open, and stu­dents can start look­ing and ask­ing ques­tions and build­ing their pro­pos­als. Are you inter­est­ed in par­tic­i­pat­ing as a stu­dent? Be sure to check our GSoC 2024 page page with pro­pos­al ideas and every­thing there is to know about the pro­gram. Also look at the GSoC time­line to have an idea of where you would be going.

    See you there?

  • WIP Wednesday 28 February 2024

    WIP Wednesday 28 February 2024

    This week in FreeCAD development:

    • bgb­sww, Cal­li­garoV, and chennes made a lot more progress towards mit­i­gat­ing the topon­am­ing issue.
    • chennes con­tributed more changes to the addon man­ag­er: fix­es and sup­port for sort­ing addons by sev­er­al cri­te­ria (alpha­bet­i­cal, last update time, cre­ation date, GitHub stars), as well as sup­port for cus­tom scores for addons.
    • pavl­tom added the Insert Rep­e­ti­tion Count com­mand to Tech­Draw and reim­ple­ment­ed Rich Anno­ta­tion par­ent linking.
    • wwmay­er improved the mate­ri­als edi­tor to use inte­gers for shini­ness and trans­paren­cy in a cer­tain val­ue range, sub­mit­ted a few fix­es to Sketcher.
    • edwilliams16 improved the cal­cu­la­tion of the ‘b’ para­me­ter of the hyper­bol­ic arc in Sketcher.
    • Roy-043 improved some word­ing in Sketch­er for bet­ter consistency.
    • Pad­dle­Stroke made it pos­si­ble to sort items in the project tree by drag­ging and drop­ping them. He also changed the behav­ior of line DSH length/width mode so that it behaves like the rec­tan­gle length/width DSH in Sketcher.
    • Lemon­Boy made datum points highlightable/selectable in the viewport.
    • NomAnor added an option­al vis­i­bil­i­ty tog­gle to the project tree with the “clas­sic” eye icon. He also refac­tored the task pan­el code for PartDesign’s patterns.
    • FlachyJoe improved Helix in Part­De­sign to use the wires of the com­put­ed face instead of the select­ed ones. He also made sup­pressed objects dis­tin­guish­able in the project tree.
    • adri­an­in­saval added a new tem­plate to the Start page to eas­i­ly cre­ate a new assembly.
    • FEA-eng added a new prop­er­ty, Beam­Re­duced­In­te­gra­tion, to the Cal­culiX solver in FEM. He also made sev­er­al minor improve­ments in the workbench.
    • marioalexis84 sub­mit­ted more fix­es to the FEM work­bench, includ­ing mesh gen­er­a­tion for check type analy­sis in CalculiX.
    • Rexbas fixed a regres­sion in the Blender, CAD, and Revit nav­i­ga­tion styles.
    • mosfet80 removed a dep­re­cat­ed func­tion in core and two workbenches.
    • 3x380V fixed a few bugs.

    PR stats: In the week from Wednes­day, 21 Feb­ru­ary to Wednes­day, 28 Feb there were 58 pull requests merged, with a total code­base change of +9,585 / ‑4,489 (not count­ing trans­la­tion updates). We had an aver­age merged PR size of +165 / ‑77. 22 new pull requests were opened.

    Issue stats: we closed 42 issues, and 48 new issues were opened. Over­all, 1,266 issues are cur­rent­ly open.

  • New grants: electromagnetic system simulations and bug triage

    The FreeCAD Project Asso­ci­a­tion issued two more grants.

    Mario Pas­saglia is now work­ing on bug­fix­ing and elec­tro­mag­net­ic sys­tem sim­u­la­tions using Cal­culiX in the FEM work­bench. Expect­ed new fea­tures will pro­vide the res­o­lu­tion of:

    1. Elec­tro­sta­t­ics prob­lems through an anal­o­gy with the heat equa­tion to derive the elec­tro­sta­t­ic poten­tial and field, employ­ing Neu­mann and Dirich­let bound­ary conditions.
    2. Mag­ne­to­sta­t­ics problems.
    3. Elec­tro­mag­net­ic prob­lems involv­ing the gen­er­a­tion of elec­tro­mag­net­ic fields due to time-depen­­dent cur­rents, in con­junc­tion with the analy­sis of heat trans­fer result­ing from induced cur­rents in conductors.

    Mar­i­o’s project is expect­ed to last 7 months. He has been award­ed a grant of $4,000.

    Max Wil­fin­ger is work­ing on bug triage: ver­i­fy­ing and pri­or­i­tiz­ing bug reports, assign­ing con­trib­u­tors to tasks etc. This is a dif­fer­ent kind of arrange­ment. His con­tract is for 1 year, with month­ly pay­outs of $500.

    ,

  • WIP Wednesday 21 February 2024

    WIP Wednesday 21 February 2024

    This week in FreeCAD development:

    • bgb­sww, Cal­li­garoV, and chennes made fur­ther progress towards mit­i­gat­ing the topon­am­ing issue.
    • pieter­hi­j­ma con­tributed the first code towards a new cus­tom data ele­ments (cus­tom prop­er­ties) sys­tem, see here for tech­ni­cal details.
    • maxwxyz adjust­ed the default mate­r­i­al appear­ance to bet­ter dis­play the objects shape (sur­faces and con­tours) with spec­u­lar high­lights and a low ambi­ent col­or. He also added the recent­ly merged com­mands for trans­lat­ing and scal­ing geome­tries to the con­text menu in Sketcher.
    • czine­hu­ba updat­ed icons for the com­mand that tog­gles con­truc­tion lines mode in Sketcher.
    • Rexbas fixed dis­ap­pear­ing ele­ment han­dles in Sketcher.
    • Roy-043 made sev­er­al improve­ments in Draft.
    • yorik­van­havre fixed an old sub­op­ti­mal design solu­tion relat­ed to IFC.
    • Wan­der­erFan fixed a few issues in TechDraw.
    • marioalexis84 fixed sev­er­al bugs in FEM.
    • FEA-eng added new matrix solver types (PaStiX and Par­diso) to FEM.
    • mosfet80 did some refac­tor­ing in the UI code
    • 3x380V cleaned up Python­Wrap­per (more like­ly to follow).
    • Andrei-Pozolotin fixed a bug in the expres­sion engine.
    • Lemon­Boy fixed a bug that pre­vent­ed FreeCAD from pre­serv­ing objects order when mov­ing them in the project tree.

    PR stats: In the week from Wednes­day, 14 Feb­ru­ary to Wednes­day, 21 Feb there were 57 pull requests merged, with a total code­base change of +24,587 / ‑4,685 (not count­ing trans­la­tion updates). We had an aver­age merged PR size of +431 / ‑82. 28 new pull requests were opened.

    Issue stats: we closed 34 issues, and 59 new issues were opened. Over­all, 1,247 issues are cur­rent­ly open.

  • FOSDEM and FreeCAD 2024

    FOSDEM, the finest open­source con­fer­ence in the world recent­ly took place and, aside from cheek­i­ly sav­ing the toi­let sys­tem, FreeCAD had a pres­ence in numer­ous ways.

    We had a shared stand over in the K build­ing right by the entrance which was excel­lent in terms of foot­fall and peo­ple com­ing to chat and say hel­lo. We shared our stand with Ond­sel, the excel­lent open­source com­pa­ny build­ing on FreeCAD com­mer­cial­ly, and our wider open source fam­i­ly mem­bers like KiCad, and Open Tool­chain Foun­da­tion. We also shared the stand with FreeCAD spon­sors and pow­er users the Libre Space Foun­da­tion.

    We were inun­dat­ed with vis­i­tors with most peo­ple hav­ing used or being reg­u­lar users of FreeCAD. A pop­u­lar con­ver­sa­tion was around peo­ple hav­ing his­tor­i­cal­ly tried FreeCAD and per­haps hav­ing some chal­lenges, so it was great to dis­cuss with peo­ple how far FreeCAD has devel­oped recent­ly and encour­age peo­ple to take anoth­er look. Oth­er com­mon top­ics at the stand were around dis­cussing the upcom­ing ver­sion 1.0 and beyond as well as some gen­er­al chat­ting around how to increase the uptake of FreeCAD users.

    Libre Space were excel­lent part­ners to have on the stand. You could often hear one of the Libre Space team hold­ing their Qubik Pock­etcube (A 50mm cubed open­source satel­lite the design that has flown suc­cess­ful­ly on low earth orbit) and say­ing “This is an excel­lent exam­ple of what you can achieve with FreeCAD and KiCad com­bined”. It was a fan­tas­tic talk­ing point that showed off all our projects perfectly.

    It was great to meet oth­er mem­bers of oth­er teams at the stand also. The crew from Blender were attend­ing FOSDEM and stopped by for numer­ous chats and it was also great to see Yorik and Inkscape core devel­op­er Mar­tin chat­ting by the stand.

    As well as the stand there was a “State of the Union” address talk sched­uled for FreeCAD in the open hard­ware room on the sun­day. Yorik shared the stage with Dr Aik Siong Koh with Yorik pre­sent­ing an update on cur­rent progress in FreeCAD, the upcom­ing ver­sion 1.0, the solv­ing of topon­am­ing prob­lems and more. Yorik then hand­ed over to Dr Koh who pre­sent­ed a lit­tle on his work cre­at­ing an assem­bly solver for FreeCAD which will coa­lesce cur­rent assem­bly approach­es with a new work­bench to be includ­ed upstream. You can find the video record­ing and the slides from this talk here.

  • WIP Wednesday 14 February 2024

    WIP Wednesday 14 February 2024

    This week in FreeCAD development:

    • bgb­sww, Cal­li­garoV, and chennes made more progress with mit­i­gat­ing the topon­am­ing issue.
    • The lat­est work by pad­dle on inte­grat­ed assem­bly work­bench has been merged: link­ing and ground­ing parts, func­tion­al joints (Fixed, Rev­o­lute, Cylin­dri­cal, Slid­er, Ball, Dis­tance), drag­ging sup­port for Slid­er and Rev­o­lute joints.
    • pad­dle patched the par­al­lel con­straint code to ignore points and non-line geome­tries. He also added Trans­late tool that also works as a replace­ment for Rec­tan­gu­lar Array / Move / Copy / Clone.
    • AjinkyaDa­hale imple­ment­ed gen­er­al tan­gency with B‑splines in Sketcher.
    • Rexbas con­tributed a patch fix­ing rota­tion for some nav­i­ga­tion styles in Sketcher.
    • maxwxyz fur­ther improved con­tex­tu­al right-click menu in Sketch­er: pre­s­e­lec­tion and exter­nal geom­e­try are now tak­en into con­sid­er­a­tion, Fil­let and Trim com­mands have been removed (they can’t work with a selec­tion), Cut/Copy/Paste com­mands have been added.
    • FlachyJoe added a “Passthrough” boolean prop­er­ty in Part­De­sign so that it would be pos­si­ble to dis­able a fea­ture with­out remov­ing it. He also made it pos­si­ble to use equal radii in Part and Part­De­sign cones and imple­ment­ed 1D inter­sec­tion for attachments.
    • Lemon­Boy added an option to dim the nav­i­ga­tion cube when it’s not in the focus. He also fixed the extru­sion behav­ior when the height is zero.
    • Zolko-123 improved the LCS rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the 3D win­dow to make it eas­i­er to select the point/vertex on which the LCS is attached.
    • marioalexis84 made fur­ther improve­ments in the FEM work­bench: added sup­port for cyclic sym­me­try and fixed sev­er­al issues.
    • chennes and ros­t­ska­dat made var­i­ous improve­ments in the Addon Man­ag­er code.
    • Roy-043 made sev­er­al fix­es and small improve­ments in Draft and Arch, he also fixed the path for off-line documentation.
    • mark-dev added sub­vol­ume prop­er­ty for roofs based on a sol­id shape in Arch.
    • pavl­tom imple­ment­ed adding “Own­er” prop­er­ty to all Sym­bols in TechDraw.
    • kadet1090 made axis label col­or con­fig­urable for bet­ter them­ing capabilities.
    • wwmay­er fixed 3MF export­ing with clones, con­tributed to the Python 3.12 port, improved the port to Open­Cas­cade 7.8.0, and con­tributed more fixes.

    PR stats: In the week from Wednes­day, 7 Feb­ru­ary to Wednes­day, 14 Feb there were 66 pull requests merged, with a total code­base change of +15,543 / ‑3,626 (not count­ing trans­la­tion updates). We had an aver­age merged PR size of +235 / ‑55. 36 new pull requests were opened. 

    Issue stats: we closed 52 issues, and 47 new issues were opened. Over­all, 1,216 issues are cur­rent­ly open.

  • The FreeCAD day 2024

    This year again, the FPA orga­nized a FreeCAD day and a hackathon (and much more!) togeth­er with FOSDEM, in Brus­sels. We had an incred­i­ble, epic week of events (which you’ll know all about lat­er on this blog). I’ll describe here briefly what hap­pened dur­ing the hackathon and the FreeCAD day.

    The hackathon

    The hackathon took place dur­ing 3 days at the Brus­sels hack­er­space which tra­di­tion­al­ly offers the space to projects dur­ing the week before FOSDEM (and also orga­nizes a kick-ass par­ty dur­ing FOSDEM, which many FreeCADers less old and aso­cial than me attended 😉 ).

    Vis­it­ing the Brus­sels hack­er­space is in itself a near-video-game expe­ri­ence, involv­ing find­ing your way in a derelict build­ing with long, sim­i­lar cor­ri­dors every­where, codes on doors and dan­ger­ous mis­sions, like help­ing the hack­er­space peo­ple to car­ry dozens of crates of Club Mate through pitch-black base­ment mazes, fail­ing lifts, and rooms pro­tect­ed by smoke machines. Luck­i­ly no zom­bie horde came.

    After a cold start (lit­er­al­ly, as we had a hard time kick-start­ing the wood stove) the first day, more and more peo­ple began to arrive, many com­ing there direct­ly from their train/plane. Soon we reached our full capac­i­ty (about 20 peo­ple). The hackathon is a won­der­ful time to look at what every­body else is doing, final­ly stop­ping to dis­cuss that par­tic­u­lar idea with that spe­cif­ic per­son, chat with peo­ple you only knew online, launch wild ideas and imme­di­ate­ly find inter­est­ed peo­ple to work on it with you.

    Some FreeCAD heroes like @chennes, @adrianinsaval or @paddle even man­aged to actu­al­ly code and get an impres­sive amount of work done 😉

    All in all, we had a lot of fun and, above all, there was there a team who shares a same pas­sion for FreeCAD mak­ing it hap­pen togeth­er. For me, this is also a kind of guar­an­tee that what hap­pens online, which can some­times be unclear or veiled, is true and alive. We all share a sim­i­lar vision over the project, we all want it to become bet­ter, more pow­er­ful, more universal.

    The FreeCAD day

    The FreeCAD day is a day open to every­one, where peo­ple can come, present an idea or a project they’re work­ing on, dis­cuss ideas or sim­ply watch what’s being pre­sent­ed. This year, we shared the space with KiCAD who also main­tained a room on their own. We also had a com­mon space for peo­ple from both projects to meet and inter­act (many peo­ple are in fact mem­bers of both communities).

    Around 30 peo­ple attend­ed. The day unrolled smooth and nice­ly fol­low­ing the uncon­fer­ence idea: You want to talk about some­thing? You write it on a post-it note, and place it some­where on the sched­ule. Notes then get rearranged as the day unfolds.

    Some of these took 5 min­utes, oth­er could last as long as 2 hours, like the com­plaints ses­sion, which was cer­tain­ly the epic moment of the day. Kli­ment from KiCAD orga­nized it mas­ter­ful­ly like last year (say your com­plaint in one sin­gle sen­tence, no com­ments or dis­cus­sions allowed), and we gained a wealth of good ideas, some easy to imple­ment, some com­plex, some new, some well-known, but this was in any case a tremen­dous­ly inter­est­ing and use­ful con­nec­tion moment with FreeCAD users (some­times our­selves, as many devel­op­ers put their user hats and also start­ed “com­plain­ing” 😉 ). All in all, I felt we were all on the same page there: FreeCAD is awe­some, but there is no rea­son why it can’t become more awesome!

    Sev­er­al oth­er (often well-known) FreeCAD com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers pre­sent­ed the projects they’re work­ing on, and that also is an incred­i­ble oppor­tu­ni­ty to see some of the inter­est­ing things FreeCAD is used for.

    Thanks to all of you who came and par­tic­i­pat­ed. This day was an incred­i­ble and unique con­ver­gence around FreeCAD, and I believe each of us came out of it full of ideas and renewed enthusiasm.

    See you next year?

    ,
    , ,