Each year on the Friday before the FOSDEM event, FreeCAD held a “FreeCAD Day” where, after working for a few days directly on FreeCAD in a hackathon style, the day is set up as an Un-conference meaning any presentation or activity can be attached to the agenda. It’s a lovely format that allows for really interesting things to happen. Again this year the pre FOSDEM FreeCAD Day took place in the Ateliers Des Tanneurs building which we share with the KiCad team for a few days before FOSDEM.
Our colleagues in KiCad use their Friday as a “Learn to Code for KiCad” day and as such a delegation of the FreeCAD team attended the first introductory session. One takeaway from this is how enjoyable, and useful it is, to interact with the KiCad crew a little more with value in the fact that there are lots of FreeCAD user base using KiCad and vice versa.
Numerous activities and presentations happened over the course of the day. After reassembling in the FreeCAD room Yorik began the presentations with an overview of the annual report from the FPA detailing FPA activity and looking at the themes for the next year. Another highlight of the FreeCAD Day is the near infamous “complaints session”.
The complaints session is expertly hosted by Kliment and we don’t say that lightly. The idea of the session is that anyone can say anything they don’t like about FreeCAD and the room doesn’t unpack it or respond. Rather, Kliment potentially seeks quick clarifications before summing up the individual complaint in a single concise sentence. These “quick fire” complaints are all captured in the room on audio recorders and then collated and published after the event. They then can be checked to ascertain if they are known issues with a issue raised or if they need to have an issue assigned. It’s an incredibly valuable process and it’s also heart warming to look at previous complaint sessions and see how many issues have been solved.
Over lunch the conversations continue, making sure to chat to people who only attended the FreeCAD Day and not the other hack days, one great conversation was with Danny. Danny was only 4 weeks into his entire discovery of CAD and FreeCAD. In that short time using FreeCAD 1.0 he had managed to make some reasonably complex parts for 3D printing. It’s really useful to have people like Danny attend these events having so freshly walked a beginners path to FreeCAD, it’s great to explore how Danny has learnt and what resources they have used as well as what hurdles they have faced.
Post lunch more presentations and discussions are delivered. Some highlights include Kurt speaking about his PostCAD concepts and Julian Todd speaking on a fascinating project using the Godot engine to make multiplayer VR sessions for viewing ParaView CFD simulations. Really interesting stuff. Ajinkya spoke about a project, OSDAG, which is an open source steel and graphics design environement allowing for H beam steel sections designs to be quickly designed and assessed.
Roman gave an overview of their excellent cable design and management addon workbench. This workbench allows for the parametric design of wiring and also features push and pull type workflows so that you can drag a electrical connector and conduit in an architectural feature and the wiring will update and re route accordingly. It’s a workbench with great interaction with the BIM areas of FreeCAD, but also opened discussion around cable and harness management and other crossover features between FreeCAD and KiCad. In a similar vein. Michael presented a discussion and overview of their process designing and manufacturing injection moulded enclosures for electronics. Of course this is an area where KiCad and FreeCAD users overlap and became a discussion exploring emboldening crossover functionality, for example could FreeCAD have an enclosures workbench that automatically can parameterise draft angles for injection moulding or shrinkage parameters for different plastics for example.
Rounding out the day Marcus spoke about his ongoing work building a prototype new web presence for FreeCAD replacing and consolidating the various websites and blogs into a more cohesive system. It’s great to see this work become more known in the community and hopefully more follow up meetings and development will be scheduled this year. Finally the fabulous Chris Hennes rounded out the day with a presentation on the FPA grant activity covering how the grant scheme had worked, what it had delivered and what it will look like in the coming year.
And Finally….
One thing we feel is missing from our FreeCAD Day is live streaming. We are really interested to see if there is anyone who has some expertise in this area and may attend next years FreeCAD Day. The KiCad team have a live stream and so we know that the bandwidth for this in the building is potentially there. If this is something that interests you then feel free to reach out at fpa@freecad.org.