Between August the 15th and 18th Springfield Illinois played host to a North American FreeCAD meetup. This excellent event drew together a group of active FreeCAD contributors for a 4 day hackathon, incorporating various meetings, presentations and, of course, social activities.
The event drew representatives from all 4 coasts of the US and was graciously hosted by the University of Illinois Innovation Center . The Thursday saw people arriving throughout the day and was kept as an informal day for people to meet, chat and catch up. Springfield proved a fantastic venue for this event with plenty of interesting places to visit around the area. Just south of the venue for example is the statehouse where Abraham Lincoln gave his famous “Divided House” speech.
On to Friday and the day was peppered with a number of presentations relating to FreeCAD. These included FreeCAD for Robotics, a presentation on the work mitigating the topological naming problem in FreeCAD and an interesting presentation on a concept called “PostCAD” which is aiming to integrate CAD data management and database systems inspired by geospatial data management ecosystems. The presentations have been captured over on the CandL Workshop youtube channel linked above.
Friday evening saw attendees sampling the local bars and eateries. Explorations of the local delicacy the “horseshoe” sandwich were undertaken, an open sandwich with toasted bread, meat, cheese sauce and French fries!
Moving to Saturday general hacking on FreeCAD occurred and also the global monthly developers meeting happened allowing the Springfield attendees to link to other developers. Some time was spent looking through the Version 1.0 checklists and also a meeting was held to discuss good practice regarding management of vulnerabilities in libraries. A group dinner rounded off Saturday and Sunday was a general day for people to either continue hacking together or to start making their, in some cases extremely long, journeys home.
We’d like to thank everyone who attended and supported this event. Many thanks to Kurt Kremitzki for all his hard work putting the event together and final thanks again to the University of Illinois Innovation Centre for hosting us.