FreeCAD News

This week in FreeCAD development:

Topon­am­ing: bgb­sww added some miss­ing code (there will be more to add, it seems) and start­ed per­for­mance test­ing. So far, things don’t look bad at all performance-wise.

Sketch­er:

• Pad­dle­Stroke: added arc length to the Dimen­sion tool and fixed the plac­ing of the on-view para­me­ter inputs.
• maxwxyz updat­ed the Sketch­er tool­bar to list and group all arc tools (incl. hyper­bo­la and parabola).
• FlachyJoe fixed a point where FreeCAD would ask for infor­ma­tion about a point of a curve which does­n’t exist.

Assem­bly: Pad­dle­Stroke merged the vast major­i­ty of new­er Ond­sel code: new joints types (Rack and Pin­ion, Screw, Gears, Belt), lim­its, Explod­ed View tool, spe­cial drag mode for the dis­tance joint, and var­i­ous fix­es. Some of the fea­tures (explo­sion, new joint types) are con­sid­ered exper­i­men­tal and require adding ‘Exper­i­men­talFea­tures’ boolean para­me­ter added via ‘Tools > Edit para­me­ters…’ (BaseApp > Pref­er­ences > Mod > Assembly).

Tech­Draw:

• Wan­der­erFan did a quick fix for the miss­ing fall­back default tem­plate issue. He also fixed a bug where auto­cor­rect was not han­dling scaled and rotat­ed ref­er­ence geom­e­try properly.
• pavl­tom imple­ment­ed the user-request­ed split­ting of “sheet” field in the “X / Y” form (X for page ordi­nal num­ber, Y for total count of pages) into two sep­a­rate values.
• HowThat­Works added page size to ISO 5457 tem­plate bor­ders, replaced page size data fields, and added blank own­er data fields.

CAM: 

• slip­ton­ic refac­tored san­i­ty reports to make the log­ic more mod­u­lar and fur­ther sep­a­rate it from GUI. He also sig­nif­i­cant­ly changed how post-pro­cess­ing is done: not any exist­ing post-pro­ces­­sors, but the way they are called; this sets the stage for refac­tor­ing the indi­vid­ual post­proces­sors to have less dupli­cat­ed code.
• Lar­ry­Woest­man added tests for A, B, and C para­me­ters to the lin­ux­c­nc post.

Mate­ri­als: dav­es­rock­et­shop updat­ed mate­r­i­al mod­els to sep­a­rate Hard­ness from Lin­earE­las­tic mod­el, added UUID def­i­n­i­tions for FEM-depen­­dent mod­els, and updat­ed unit tests. He also expand­ed the Python API to allow for mate­r­i­al creation.

Some of the oth­er changes:

• Pad­dle­Stroke intro­duced Quick­Mea­sure — a sta­tus bar area that dis­plays use­ful mea­sure­ments for select­ed geom­e­try fea­tures: length, radius, angles etc.
• maxwxyz changed default col­ors of the new Mea­sure tool for bet­ter contrast.
• furgo16 adapt­ed Arch mate­ri­als to the new Mate­ri­als path scheme.
• realthun­der back­port­ed sup­port for tool­bar drag-and-drop to sta­tus bar and menu bar.
• Roy-043 and paullee0 fixed a few bugs in Arch.
• wwmay­er fixed sev­er­al bugs.
• Wan­der­erFan added a pri­va­cy policy.

PR stats: In the week from Wednes­day, 1 May to Wednes­day, 8 May there were 56 pull requests merged. 26 new pull requests were opened.

Issue stats: we closed 73 issues, and 51 new issues were opened. Over­all, 1,559 issues are cur­rent­ly open.

This week in FreeCAD development:

Topon­am­ing: most work port­ing RT’s patch­es is now done except just one piece of code that was mys­te­ri­ous­ly over­looked. Both Cal­li­garoV, chennes, and bgb­sww con­tributed to the TNP effort last week. bgb­sww also start­ed look­ing into per­for­mance regres­sions due to topon­am­ing changes and found sur­pris­ing­ly few issues.

Draft: Roy-043 revert­ed some of the recent mate­r­i­al sys­tem changes relat­ed to Draft for a bet­ter imple­men­ta­tion in the future, and cjmayo fixed a bug relat­ed to QIm­age objects.

FEM: marioalexis84 added radi­a­tion heat trans­fer for Cal­culiX, and then he, Syres916, FlachyJoe, and wwmay­er fixed sev­er­al bugs in oth­er parts of the FEM workbench.

UI:

• The uni­fied mea­sure­ment tool by hlorus (GSoC2023 stu­dent) was final­ly merged. There is more work to be done in the future: 20 bug reports and fea­tures requests have already been sub­mit­ted against the new tool.
• chennes con­tin­ued work­ing on the new Start page: he imple­ment­ed a first start sec­tion and fixed card size calculation.
• maxwxyz updat­ed the con­text menu with a tog­gle for sup­press and updat­ed the icon for assem­bly’s recom­pute command.
• Pad­dle­Stroke did a small reor­ga­ni­za­tion of tool­bars in Sketch­er, fixed an issue with the Tab­Bar work­space switch­er, and removed “Project Shape”” from Tech­Draw’s toolbar.
• Mis­ter­Mak­erNL con­tributed an over­lay fix for default win­dows style and var­i­ous light themes.
• kadet1090 fixed issues with wrong col­or for pref­er­ence page tooltips.

DXF sup­port: Roy-043 fixed a bug with poly­lines import­ing in the new­er importer, as well as a cou­ple of bugs in the lega­cy DXF importer.

Some of the oth­er changes:

• Nexus­nui fixed a scal­ing para­me­ter bug in importC­SG (Open­SCAD).
• wwmay­er made the Val­i­date Sketch fea­ture script­able and fixed sev­er­al bugs in var­i­ous parts of FreeCAD’s code.
• 0penBrain and ours­land fixed bugs in the build sys­tem and CI.

PR stats: In the week from Wednes­day, 24 April to Wednes­day, 1 May there were 51 pull requests merged. 29 new pull requests were opened.

Issue stats: we closed 28 issues, and 62 new issues were opened. Over­all, 1,566 issues are cur­rent­ly open.

This week in FreeCAD development:

Tech­Draw:

• Pad­dle­Stroke uni­fied Insert View tools (View, Pro­j­Group, Sheet, Arch, SVG, Image). He also made App::Links of views work in Tech­Draw, this also removes ‘Share Views’ from the toolbar.
• Wan­der­erFan fixed sev­er­al bugs and added two new Python meth­ods, for get­ting vis­i­ble and hid­den vertices.
• far­leyrunk­el refac­tored a minor part of Tech­Draw code.

Sketch­er:

• Roy-043 made con­straints and geom­e­try menu texts more con­sis­tent and improved GUI texts in Sketch­er settings.
• Pad­dle­Stroke joined Line and Poly­line in a com­mand group in the tool­bar and fixed the mid­point auto­con­straint to work with polylines.

FEM:

• NewJok­er fixed sev­er­al bugs.
• marioalexis84 extend­ed the ABAQUS writer to select the ele­ment types avail­able in Cal­culiX. He also fixed a bug where the size of the FEM fea­ture sym­bols could­n’t be changed.
• chennes fixed the com­pi­la­tion of FEM on MSVC.

Mate­ri­als:

• dav­es­rock­et­shop brought major improve­ments to the mate­r­i­al tree widget: 
  • Fil­ters are now lsist and allow a vari­ety of fil­ter­ing options.
  • User pref­er­ences allow the inclusion/exclusion of favorites and recents.
  • Wid­get state such as expan­sion, tree expan­sions, etc. are saved and restored.
  • The cur­rent appear­ance mate­r­i­al is now dis­played whehn editing.
  • There’s now a Python interface.
• wwmay­er added sup­port for cus­tomiz­ing all mate­r­i­al col­ors and fixed fur­ther mate­r­i­al issues.

Draft:

• Roy-043 fixed sev­er­al bugs in the workbench.
• yorik­van­havre removed hard­cod­ed axis col­ors (red, green, blue) and made the work­bench use FreeCAD-wide axis colors.

Start:

• chennes recre­at­ed the Start workbench/page as a QtWid­gets-based app.
• Sev­er­al more peo­ple con­tributed fur­ther fix­es and improve­ments: Rexbas fixed the migra­tion script, wwmay­er made the new Start page look more like the old one, and cjmayo made it pos­si­ble to use Microsoft GSL on the Start page.

Some of the oth­er changes are:

• wwmay­er fixed sev­er­al oth­er bugs.
• mosfet80 removed more dead and unused code.
• dzid26 fixed a bug where a Save win­dow would remain in the back­ground if FreeCAD is closed by the oper­at­ing system.
• tomate44 fixed shape pro­jec­tion of com­plex BSpline curves.
• jwueller fixed a bug in Open­SCAD where CSG com­pu­ta­tions would start too early.
• far­leyrunk­el fixed a bug where search­ing a mod­el tree would­n’t work for numbers.
• Pad­dle­Stroke moved the ‘+” tab of the Tab­Bar work­bench selec­tor to the left so that it would­n’t be hid­den by default with many work­bench­es enabled.
• realthun­der fixed a prob­lem with incor­rect ref­er­enc­ing of App::Part child objec­t’s CopyOnChangeGroup.
• cjmayo fixed sev­er­al bugs in the code.

PR stats: In the week from Wednes­day, 17 April to Wednes­day, 24 April there were 54 pull requests merged. 23 new pull requests were opened.

Issue stats: we closed 32 issues, and 60 new issues were opened. Over­all, 1,517 issues are cur­rent­ly open.

In the topon­am­ing project, bgb­sww and chennes are get­ting real­ly close to final­iz­ing the port of RealThun­der’s patch­es to upstream FreeCAD. There is prob­a­bly a week more of work, then the planned per­for­mance eval­u­a­tion and improve­ments can begin.

Tech­Draw:

• Wan­der­erFan fixed sev­er­al issues, such as bro­ken zigzag lines ori­en­ta­tion with rotat­ed 3D view, as well as incor­rect dimen­sions in the new Bro­ken View feature.
• wwmay­er fixed hatch clip­ping in SVG export­ing code.
• dplanel­la orga­nized Tech­Draw tem­plate trans­la­tions into locale fold­ers so that they would­n’t mix up with orig­i­nal Eng­lish templates.

Arch:

• Roy-043 fixed sev­er­al issues with Arch_Panel, Arch_Structure, and Arch_Wall.
• mar­cus­pol­lio updat­ed the tooltip of Arch­Space Text to men­tion recent­ly imple­ment­ed $long­name and $descrip­tion support.

There are three more notable changes that are user-visible:

• pskowron­skiT­Dx con­tributed code to bet­ter sup­port 3Dconnexion devices such as Space­Mouse on Win­dows using Navlib.
• Pad­dle­Stroke updat­ed the Trim tool in Sketch­er to sup­port con­tin­u­ous mode. Now you can select the tool, press and hold the mouse but­ton and then drag the point­er over seg­ments you want to delete. The tool will delete all seg­ments you hover.
• dav­es­rock­et­shop imple­ment­ed sup­port for old­er FCMat files in the new mate­ri­als sys­tem (and wwmay­er fixed some issue in that system).

Addi­tion­al fix­es, new tests, and minor improve­ments came from wwmay­er, luz­paz, cjmayo, bgb­sww, ours­land, and Roy-043.

PR stats: In the week from Wednes­day, 10 April to Wednes­day, 17 April there were 40 pull requests merged, with a total code­base change of +16,750 / ‑1,535, the vast major­i­ty of changes com­ing in the new 3DConnexion sup­port code. 24 new pull requests were opened.

Issue stats: we closed 21 issues, and 49 new issues were opened. Over­all, 1,480 issues are cur­rent­ly open.

In the topon­am­ing project, bgb­sww added more tests and updat­ed exist­ing ones, and Cal­li­garoV fixed two bugs.

In Arch, yorik­van­havre upgrad­ed the ref­er­ence tool, so that it could work with DXF and IFC files (NativeIFC is required for the lat­ter), and paullee0 fixed a regres­sion that occured when mak­ing a block from a DraftWire.

In Sketch­er, Pad­dle­Stroke changed the ren­der­ing of points’ col­ors (after a dis­cus­sion with the design work­ing group) and fixed a bug in the Trans­late tool (hor­i­zon­tal and ver­ti­cal con­straints dis­ap­peared after translating).

In Tech­Draw, Wan­der­erFan imple­ment­ed the so-called bro­ken view — a way to ren­der very large objects on a page by cut­ting a seg­ment from the mid­dle and jux­ta­pos­ing them. He also fixed a prob­lem with tem­plate aut­ofill­ing where the total num­ber of sheets in a doc­u­ment would always be equal to 1.

In FEM, FlachyJoe imple­ment­ed a way to sup­press the con­straints: a sup­pressed con­straint is no more writ­ten in the solver’s input file and thus not tak­en into account for analy­sis. Mean­while lyphrowny migrat­ed cal­culix tests to ccx­tools tests and attempt­ed to resolve two issues by imple­ment­ing float com­par­i­son for FEM tests.

Thanks to dav­es­rock­et­shop, FreeCAD now uses the new mate­r­i­al sys­tem for body appear­ance. A new wid­get is now avail­able to allow the user to select mate­ri­als in a con­sis­tent fash­ion. It can also launch the mate­r­i­al edi­tor with its more advanced capa­bil­i­ties. Quick­ly after that, wwmay­er fixed some of the regres­sions that were intro­duced with this patch.

Sev­er­al more gen­er­al fix­es were con­tributed by mosfet80.

PR stats: In the week from Wednes­day, 3 April to Wednes­day, 10 April there were 28 pull requests merged, with a total code­base change of +9,853 / ‑2,310 (exclud­ing updat­ed trans­la­tions and icons). We had an aver­age merged PR size of +352 / ‑83. 20 new pull requests were opened.

Issue stats: we closed 23 issues, and 65 new issues were opened. Over­all, 1,439 issues are cur­rent­ly open.

This week in FreeCAD devel­op­ment, the most active­ly worked-on parts of FreeCAD have been the topon­am­ing project, Sketch­er, FEM, and UI/UX.

Topon­am­ing:

• Cal­li­garoV import­ed and improved the Wire­Join­er class.
• bgb­sww fixed a few issues, made minor improve­ments, and added Python imple­men­ta­tions for Comp­Sol­id, Face, Shell, Sol­id, as well as miss­ing entries in TopoShape.

Sketch­er:

• Roy-043 renamed “Map sketch to face…” in the main menu to “Attach sketch…” for clarity.
• Pad­dle­Stroke imple­ment­ed a mid­point auto­con­straint, fixed a bug in Cham­fer tool code, as well as a bug with a B‑Spline icon in con­struc­tion line mode.
• FlachyJoe added an arc length constraint.

FEM:

• marioalexis84 improved post-pro­cess­ing object style.
• NewJok­er changed 2D ele­ment thick­ness from 20 to 1 by default.
• lyphrowny fixed and typo in FEM code and removed cal­culix from solvers tab in examples.
• dav­es­rock­et­shop added the prop­er­ty ‘Ther­mal Expan­sion Ref­er­ence Tem­per­a­ture’ to the Ther­mal prop­er­ties in the new mate­ri­als editor.

UI/UX:

• Roy-043 made “View Left” the last option in the “Indi­vid­ual views” toolbar.
• maxwxyz updat­ed FEM and Part Design icons for bet­ter con­sis­ten­cy and added a miss­ing “View Top” option. He also added miss­ing com­mands to the tree con­text menu.
• Pad­dle­Stroke added an opt-in Tab-Bar work­bench selec­tor (enabled in Pref­er­ences). He also fixed the tog­gling of objects’ trans­paren­cy in some sce­nar­ios and improved the dou­ble-click behav­ior for spread­sheet objects to switch to the Spread­sheet WB.
• NomAnor made it pos­si­ble to allow adding trans­for­ma­tions to Mul­ti­Trans­form if there is no active Body.

Among oth­er changes:

• wwmay­er fixed a lot of bugs and devel­oped a new func­tion to approx­i­mate B‑Spline from points.
• Roy-043 added a new Fuse prop­er­ty to pathar­ray and pathtwistedar­ray in Draft. This fix­es a prob­lem when apply­ing union/intersect to a point array and oth­er objects.
• tomate44 enabled mul­ti-thread­­ing to dist­ToShape fol­low­ing a change in OCCT (start­ing with v7.6.0). This brings an ×3 to ×6 per­for­mance boost on a rather com­plex 20MB STEP file.
• adri­an­in­saval fixed build­ing new mate­r­i­al code on Win­dows with debug­ging enabled.
• NomAnor patched FreeCAD to ignore sup­pressed fea­tures in pat­terns (Part Design).
• furgo16 fixed WebGL exporting
• paullee0 made a few fix­es and improve­ments in Arch.
• jamwaf­fles added feed retract option to drilling op set­tings for reaming/boring heads in CAM.
• yorik­van­havre made it pos­si­ble to unset mod­i­fied state with Python code.
• chennes fixed some minor bugs.
• Wan­der­erFan fixed a fail­ure on cor­rupt dimen­sion ref­er­ence in TechDraw.

PR stats: In the week from Wednes­day, 27 March to Wednes­day, 3 April there were 70 pull requests merged, with a total code­base change of +9,316 / ‑1,737 (exclud­ing updat­ed trans­la­tions and icons). We had an aver­age merged PR size of +133 / ‑25. 17 new pull requests were opened.

Issue stats: we closed 47 issues, and 37 new issues were opened. Over­all, 1,392 issues are cur­rent­ly open.