Category: Announcement
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Tutorial, Getting Started With the Path Workbench. Part Two.
In the first part of this tutorial we looked at setting up the Tool Bit Library when running the Path WB for the first time and creating a custom 3mm endmill tool. As a reminder in these tutorials we will describe tool icons by the text description that is displayed when you rollover an icon.…
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Tutorial, Getting Started with the Path Workbench. Part One.
The Path workbench in FreeCAD can help you create tool paths for CAM for a wide variety of CNC machines and G‑code families. Let’s walk through how to begin using this workbench in this first part creating and curating custom tool bits. In part two we’ll continue setting up cutting operations and look at exporting…
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Forged in FreeCAD: Alexander’s PCB Holder
Spotted over on Mastodon, we thought Alexander’s (AKA @PistonPin) PCB holder design was an excellent tool and a great example of functional 3D printing and FreeCAD. Chatting with Alexander it’s clear he is an experienced CAD user with lots of previous projects under his belt. “I switched from Fusion 360 to FreeCAD a few years ago,…
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Forged In FreeCAD: Erika’s “Not a Moon”
Spotted online, FreeCAD user Erika Heidi was keen to explore sketching on round surfaces using the Curves WB. As a fan of Star Wars her learning project leaned into the idea of a desktop death star as a small desktop organiser box. It’s a lovely object and a great example of sketching onto near spherical…
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FOSDEM, FreeCAD day and hackathon 2024
FOSDEM is coming soon and the FPA is already planning to make our corresponding FreeCAD event bigger and better than last year. FOSDEM happens in Brussels on Saturday February 3rd and Sunday February 4th, 2024. We propose to, once again, realize a public FreeCAD day, open to all, unconference style, and a hackathon, also open…
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Bringing Stability to the FreeCAD Release Process
Since its inception, FreeCAD’s build and release process has been an entirely volunteer effort. As the project has grown, however, this has resulted in ever more work for the volunteers. Maintaining the various builds and releases is a mostly invisible, thankless process; but also one that is mission-critical. The FreeCAD Project Association is pleased to…
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Renaming development GIT branch from master to main
This is a small announcement for who is using Git to work with the FreeCAD source code. More and more of the Git world is switching to the new convention to use “main” as their main branch name, instead of “master”. We think it’s a good time for FreeCAD to rename its main branch too.…
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Revamping the FreeCAD Project Association’s grant program
TL;DR: the FreeCAD Project Association studied best practices of other organizations that have grant programs and is now working towards improving its own program. In 2022, the FreeCAD Project Association announced a grant program and issued several grants to people actively contributing to the well-being of FreeCAD and its ecosystem: to RealThunder for his work…
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Vancouver Hackathon Wrap-up
As I write this we are just wrapping up the FreeCAD Hackathon 2023 in Vancouver, BC. The coffee is gone, the laptop batteries are drained, and everyone present (physically and virtually) is winding up their weekend projects. The weekend featured a variety of different activities, ranging from presentations from Dr. Aik-Siong Koh about his recent work…
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FreeCAD 0.21 Released
The FreeCAD team is happy to announce the release of FreeCAD 0.21! This release contains thousands of bug fixes and hundreds of other improvements. New Sketcher tools, improved TechDraw features, and significant advances in the finite element method (FEM) workbench are just a few of the many areas developers worked on over the last year.…