The FPA has issued several more grants. The first three are part of the new annual program.
Ajinkya Dahale is resuming his work on Sketcher and is making it more manageable to maintain and extend. His project has three deliverables:
Simplifying methods: rewriting gigantic methods in Sketcher so that geometry special cases would be ideally moved to helper methods for reuse or at least divided into pieces for each case, making an easier reading.
Tests: this will be done before major refactoring Sketcher to avoid regressions.
Documentation: complete documentation of methods and a document listing best practices to follow when performing such refactoring elsewhere.
The project cost starts at USD $5,000 as this is a time commitment project with less defined scope (similarly to the recent toponaming grants).
Francisco de Assis Rosa will be designing furniture and parametric components for the FreeCAD library . Deliverables are “a few dozen pieces of furniture and parametric components (for architectural and engineering projects) for immediate use in FreeCAD”. The project cost is USD $5,000.
Bradley McLean’s project to complete the toponaming project code transfer was approved in April and then finished within a month, while discussion on other submissions was still ongoing. Bradley was given a grant of USD $5,000 for the work.
As you can see, the first attempt at an annual program wasn’t without organizational hiccups. We are revamping the original schedule and process to improve this for the next round in 2025.
Meanwhile, the FPA issued another out-of-program grant. Andrianos Karampilis is updating the user manual in the wiki. The goal is to update all 23 chapters of the manual to bring it up to speed with the current state of FreeCAD and explore the possibility of releasing EPUB and PDF versions of the manual. The compensation for this project is USD $2,500.