The FPA General Assembly has finalized the list of approved grant applications for the first quarter of 2025.
Ajinkya Dahale (AjinkyaDahale) will develop two new types of curves in Sketcher: restricted and offset curves. Restricted curves are useful when we only need a portion of an external curve that can change. Offset curves are dependent on a parent curve to allow offset for a larger set of curves (independent offset curves already exist in FreeCAD, this is different). Ajinkya was awarded a grant of EUR 2000 for the project.
Mario Passaglia (@marioalexis84) will continue his work on the FEM workbench . He will fix bugs, maintain and reorganize the code, and take care of various shortcomings in the mesh object, such as the impossibility of handling multiple meshes, time-consuming algorithms to search mesh elements, and the lack of mesh quality checking. Mario was awarded a grant of USD 3000 for the project.
João Matos (@tritao) and Benjamin Nauck (@hyarion) will modernize FreeCAD’s rendering and selection systems to fix various performance issues on large projects. They will decouple the selection picking and selection rendering system, abstract the raw legacy OpenGL calls into a rendering abstraction layer, and add a modern renderer to Coin. João and Benjamin were awarded a grant of EUR 4000.
João and Benjamin got another grant approved: multithreading architecture improvements in FreeCAD. They will focus on enhancing the base infrastructure to enable asynchronous operations and deliver asynchronous recomputation of the document and its objects, a multi-threaded signal system, Python async support, and UI enhancements to manage modal or background tasks. They were awarded a grant of EUR 2000 for this project.
Chris Jones (@ipatch) will fix building FreeCAD on macOS with Homebrew. Chris was awarded a grant of USD 1000 for the project.
Amritpal Singh (@amrit3701) will resume his work on Ondsel Lens, a FreeCAD-centered online PDM system developed by Ondsel. He will decouple it from Amazon S3 and Lambda to make it self-hosted on any infrastructure. Amritpal was awarded a grant of USD 6500 out of the Ondsel Onward fund contributed by an anonymous sponsor.