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 .