Last weekend was FOSDEM where a huge cohort of the opensource community descend on Brussels and take over the Solbosch campus of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. It’s a fantastic event and, of course, FreeCAD had a stand alongside our friends and colleagues KiCad , as well a numerous FreeCAD related speakers and talks.
FreeCAD and KiCad teams have often shared a stand at FOSDEM and this year was no exception. In fact building on previous successes we opted to have a joint branded banner as a backdrop to the KiCad/FreeCAD stand. With the proud tagline “Build your own Future” emblazoned across the banner it was excellent to see many many joint users and projects that used both opensource tools.
This year the stand was placed in the AW building and, like everywhere in FOSDEM, it was busy with a constant flow of people passing with many of them stopping for a chat with us. We had plenty of excellent volunteers crewing the stand which is handy in terms of the volume of conversations that can happen! It’s interesting to note how conversations differ in comparison to previous years. There is of course always a mixture of conversations, but you can usually pick out themes that re occur throughout the two days.
This year a big theme was people saying how pleased they were to see version 1.0 and how it significantly set a marked improvement over previous iterations. This, of course, is very welcome to hear, but it also seemed to link to quite a few people discussing the V1.0 had convinced them to take another look at FreeCAD from having tried an earlier version.
Another significant set of conversations reported from the FreeCAD stand team was perhaps led by the fact that the stand was clearly a linked KiCad and FreeCAD venture. There were lots of conversations about the step up to KiCad workbench and a heap of conversations around using FreeCAD to design KiCad enclosures. It’s really clear from FOSDEM we have a reasonable overlap in userbase and it led to some great conversations.
The other wonderful thing to happen at the stand is that people arrive with hardware made in FreeCAD, KiCad or both. Some really notable projects this year included the MNT Reform V2 laptop making an appearance, on which wonderfully the owner was going through FreeCAD tutorials! We also saw Arya with a Beepy variant which became FreeCAD stickered! Also the very fabulous Wee Noise Makers PGB-1, a very cool sequencer/synthesiser groovebox. We’d also like to take a moment to thank Libre SPace Foundation for loaning us a full scale model of their Picobus V2, a satellite launching system built entirely in FreeCAD and KiCad and a wonderful example of building high end technology with these opensource tools.
On the Saturday evening KiCad and FreeCAD hosted a community dinner at the “Volle Gas” the teams were fed well and it’s a nice way to promote some interaction between the two communities. It wasn’t the latest night as many of us had more volunteering to do on the Sunday with many present also involved in facilitating, or speaking in, the Open Hardware CAD and CAM room.
The Open Hardware CAD and CAM room was excellently put together and maintained and we had numerous FreeCAD related speakers in the mix. This included Kurt Kremitzki’s “PostCAD: OpenCASCADE in the Database” , Ajinkya Dahale’s “Refactoring Sketcher in FreeCAD” as well as (this blog author) Jo Hinchliffes “Opensource Rocketry tools, FreeCAD and Beyond” . We’d like to take a moment to thank the team who ran this room so excellently keeping everything on topic, on time and flowing well.
Finally, a massive thank you to everyone who stopped by the FreeCAD stand to say hello. Your stories and interactions make the whole effort completely worthwhile. As we all return to our various parts of the world we all have some lovely new connections and stories in our ears. A personal favourite was a French school teacher who teaches their 11 year old students FreeCAD asking if they could take a FreeCAD branded pencil as a prize for their best student. Of course, they left with enough pencils and stickers for each student and and ear full of thanks for their support.
We look forward to seeing you and your FreeCAD project/product there next year!