All right, thanks everyone for joining us, thanks for everyone who is coming on in the room.
Again, if you are sitting at an edge and see you soon next year, certainly make some friends.
We're going to cram everybody in as best as we can.
Welcome to the open hardware and CAD CAM Devroom and Fossilum 2026, our next speaker is York
from the FreeCAD project.
Hi, is this working?
Yes, okay.
So, welcome, thanks for coming.
I will do a talk about FreeCAD and basically what's new in FreeCAD, what's new in the community,
what's new around the project.
I'm York, that's me, I'm an architect by trade.
I'm a FreeCAD dinosaur, I'm with the project almost since the beginning.
I care mostly, I take care of the Bing, worry-bange, the draft a little bit still,
but it's mostly in other hands now, we have to deal with my old crappy code from 20 years ago.
But I'm also the chairperson at the moment of the FIA, which is the non-profit we have built around
next to FreeCAD, because we made especially to not be on top of FreeCAD, but to be a side thing of
FreeCAD, so the community stays in control of the project.
And that is a picture of my baby and you have to look at my baby.
And that's where to...
And that's where to find me online on the internet.
So I will talk about the fresh new release of FreeCAD that we will have
hopefully soon out, there is like one more big blocking bug to fix and it should be out.
So I won't say anymore when, because last time we say,
don't always next day, next week, and then it takes for more, but it's pretty soon.
So I will show a bit of what's in this version here, and also a bit of what developers are working on,
what the community is doing, and a bit of FIA news, what we're doing with the non-profit
next to the project.
So that's a screenshot of actually FreeCAD1.0.
I use it just to basically say that FreeCAD1.1 is the same.
Basically, it's meant to be bug fix release before anything else.
So for 1.0, we really rushed a lot.
We wanted this 1.0 to be the next big thing out there, and we had to put some stuff there
that we really wanted that mattered, like the assembly workbench or the system that we have
to fix, what we call the top on a main problem.
That number of reference would change in your model, and then something would change positions.
All these things were really rushed into 1.0, because we had to do it.
It took so long to get there, and we had to get it out.
But there were a lot of instability.
So after 1.0, we sit down, and we go slower, and we fix things.
And that was in many levels, the code itself got work on it.
But also the process that we had, we were trying to put more human testing into things.
So when someone writes a new feature, we said, OK, let's wait until someone not only looks at the code,
but also runs, we kept with it, and plays with things, and make sure things don't break.
It's also all our process went slower, and better, and we believe all we're pretty happy with the
stability that we gained back, I hope, when you get your hands on this, you will find the same.
But basically, things are the same.
It's the same old-free candidates, where to the same things are the same place.
Only only things that may be used so crashing when you were using 1.0,
that this floating panels would vanish, or wouldn't work with wayland, etc.
All the things got a lot of work on it, and all of this got hopefully much, much, much more stable than 1.0.
A bit of frequent porn, of course, a nice image to allow, and there is this forum section where
people can post what they're working on, and it's always a nice place to have a look for nice
stuff people are working on. Hope you all went to our table there, there are crazy machines,
spaceships on the table, so make sure you go there, that there is real stuff to look at.
UI improvements, there are a series of improvements to the UI, all of a freecat.
We have a new team editor, teams, the teaming in freecat is still a bit of a mess with a lot of stuff
everywhere. We're trying to slowly go towards a kind of easier way to change the teams,
and to define custom teams without having to tweak hundreds of parameters, and so we have two basic
teams, like one and a dark one, and you can tweak certain colors, and this is getting easier
to get a team like you want. We have a couple of flighting improvements, three-point flighting
editor, where you can tweak the position and the color of the lights, and we have a lot of work
regarding custom properties that you can now add to just any objects in freecat, and
you have much better, much easier dialogue to do. You right click on an object and you add new
properties to these objects, for who doesn't know much about how that work, basically you can
add new properties to objects, and you can have other objects refer to those properties. So you
say basically, okay, I have a cube, but I once had a density property you added, and then you
can have other objects refer to that density value to do something. The height of the
other object depends on the density of this one of whatever. That's the beauty of freecat is that
the parametric relationships that you can create is your decision. You go wherever you want,
and you plug whatever you want into whatever you want, and you define your structure, and your model,
the way your wild imagination can get you. That's the most interesting part we had in the visual
aspect of freecat is that there has been quite a lot of work on what you see on screen, the manipulator
that you see on screen on the left part is the transform tool that you use to move an object or rotate
or scale it. This is no much better, you can click on the different part of this manipulator,
a bit like the one in Blender. It's getting where we would all like to have, it's like you can
really manipulate this thing precisely. On the right side, that's the result of Google Summer of
codes of project of this year. Basically, this is used in a couple of parts design objects,
but of course the idea is to widespread that's everywhere. In freecat is basically, in this example,
you can drag the red arrow and you change the extrusion depth of the object on the object,
on the object itself. This is tied, of course, to the property, you see, it changed when you drag,
etc. And this is really, really nice to use, and this is solid, this work well, this is well integrated
in the rest of the freecat, so this is basically a test bed for, so to me, spread this around as
much as we can. In bin, we have a couple of new things. I have personally not worked much
on bin because reasons used so earlier, bin busy, but we have a couple of improvements in solar
solar studies, you can place the sun and define the sun positions more accurately,
and we have a new solar world bench that can perform lots of calculations based on that,
and that kind of opens the door for more complex energy simulations, etc. Which is a big, big, big,
complex area, and there is no easy way into it, but that's where we would like to arrive at
some point to be able to really perform from freecat energy analyzes in bin.
In can also, you have lots, lots of new parts we don't, nice, new tool, library manager,
with lots of presets, the editor is also new, still some glitches here and there,
but this is nice, there is really a lot of improvement there in can, and that's one of the
modules that's got a lot of works recently, and there are many new developers,
one of them is now a member of the FPA, and there is a lot of activity around come, and
FEM to be honest with you guys, I don't know nothing about FEM, so I just took a couple of
sexy sci-fi looking image and I put them here for you, but basically there is a block post,
only about that, so if it's your thing, I would suggest to go to the freecat blog and look for FEM,
and read the overall blog post, it talks basically about this, and how you will begin to use FEM
for electromagnetic analyzes, and other electric 20-perlated subjects.
In part design, we have a couple of new stuff on the interface, this new whole tool,
and this is the kind of work where the, we have a group in the freecat
that takes care of design, and they've been very active about this, and they're like
writing guidelines for writing interfaces, and this is the kind of direction we're beginning to
steer towards, to have more of this kind of work on the interface, and so it's begin to appear,
begin to be out of only in papers and begin to be implemented and freecat, and you begin to be
able to see that in part design. There are improvements over threadings also, and one of the
nice things is that you have transparent previews, when you're still in the creation panel,
and you change the parameters of a whole that you're making, you see on the industry
review where we'll be where the whole will be, etc, and you've changed the parameters,
it updates, of course, in real time. So before you press OK, you see the what you're doing.
The sketcher also has improvements, basically a couple of new ways to attach
X-term geometry or to use X-term geometry inside your sketches, which is always a complaint that
we hear that's not very easy to use geometry from other objects, and for example, you know
have a projection tool, so you can use projected geometry from an object that's not directly
under under your sketch, or the section tool where you can with the plane use section to an object
as a reference for another sketch. There is much more actually, I should have also put some more
sketch porn here, with like those magnificent sketch full of constraint. We'll remind for the next time.
The wiki has also seen a lot of improvements. We used to, we had the internal discussion,
if we get out of the wiki or not, and the frequent contributor confusion put a lot of work
into the wiki and we're staying with the wiki now, because it's nice now, and it has a lot of
things that we want, it has a good synchronization, it does back up, it has a better search engine,
and it's something that's working pretty nicely. There is much more everywhere, so I would
suggest you guys to refer to the release notes, the frequent blog, the master of the three places
where we often put out what's new, over these other areas that got improvements.
What's cooking, what's our developers working on? We're working on new websites that would integrate
the blog, all those little pieces of stuff that we have around would be inside one CMS, and
so that's something, this is not the aspect of it. We'll look at the aesthetics later,
now we're just working on making it work and having all the features that we want.
The lens server is a file server that was created by Oncel, which is a company that's last year
was still there, and they made this commercial version of Riket, a fork of Riket, that they were
developing, and the development was this file server. The Oncel company died, the plot was removed
from them and they lost their funding, so they shut down, but all the assets were transferred to us,
so that's a really, really cool thing that's happened, and we got massive donation
to help us, an anonymous person, gave us a very big donation to help us,
turn all these assets into something usable, that is refining them so they can be used by everybody.
They are deployable, they are installable everywhere, etc. So that's happening now, and so it's not
the Oncel lens server anymore, it's the Freak at Lens server. We have Joe there working on
new learning material, hopefully something that we would be able to distribute to universities
and try to help Freak at to enter universities, etc. We have work on people working on
multi-training. I won't read this because I don't know much about it, and it's still pretty
much working progress, but those are things that are worked on. The rendering pipeline, there's
lots of people working on the coin render, looking for other ways to improve the rendering.
This is something being worked on. Text tool for the sketcher, there is another one that is
concurrent one that is not only for the sketcher, but for textiles. Also, we are looking at
there are various efforts coming in, and this is all being in the process of being integrated.
Around the community, we've done good homework to. We now have all those regular video meetings
that we have. Every week, the FIA has a meeting, every week we have a merge meeting where we
discuss collectively what's gets merged, what doesn't get merged. Every month we have
developers meeting where anybody is welcome to come and talk about what their issues with
development is. All this is annotated, we have minutes, everything, all of this is public,
so we have like good record of what's happening during these meetings. We have a frequent hand
enhancement proposal system, which is beginning to work very well, it's like if you're planning to
make big changes in FIA, now you open your right paper over what you're proposing to do,
and other developers maintain a scum comment and that way we can, the developer himself
has better insurance than when they will begin to work. They won't be people coming. What are you
doing? Stop now, we didn't agree with that, so there is all this process of having people agree
to what's going to happen and that helps things to go further. The key connects,
probably most of you must have seen this this morning, is like a thrilling effort connecting
keycats and a couple of more slides on the FPA, so the FPA, as I explained to you, is a side
body of a breakout, it doesn't comment on breakout, it doesn't comment on anything,
else than its own money, and its use, its money, it has different members, many members of the
FPA are also developers of the breakout, but not all, and FPA basically has money that the
committee gives and it decides where it puts these money, and we have kind of stable income,
my more or less, 1,550,000 Euro per year, and with that, we basically find in the couple of programs.
One is the grants program where developers want to develop something that would need the
couple of thousands here to do that, they come to us, they may build a proposal and we give
them money to do that.
We have a couple of fixed positions, people who earn money monthly from Fricad and those
are basically roles that we want to benefit everybody.
So there is one who is doing bug 3-age, there is one who is taking care of the Adam system,
the Adam developers that are up to date with the development of Fricad, that kind of things
roles that benefits the whole community.
And we have also another program we show that now for a specific for bug fixing.
And again, we're trying to put that money not directly into development because development
is still in the hands of the community, it's the people, the users who have to develop
Fricad and that we find that it's very important that it's made by its users mainly.
So we try to use this money to help developers to develop basically.
In some ways that benefit everybody.
We now have a new bug bounty program that's from last year, basically you fix 5 non-bugs,
you can claim or reward and if you fix more important bugs like critical bugs for the release
or something like that, you get more money.
This started this year, we were very careful with bounties, we thought it's somewhere
very highly critical of it, but after one year, I think we love it, it's working well and
people are all developers are using it and it's really gluing something in the community
and it's working really nicely.
And finally we have new positions that is people who are paid monthly over the year.
We are a Peter, as an OCT liaison, he makes the thinking with the OCT project which
is the kernel of Fricad and we needed someone to go there to report a bug's upstream
and to make all this communication between the two projects.
We have someone now taking good care of our web infrastructure and people to work with
the atom ecosystem that we want to be a bit bigger and a new financial officer that's taking care of the money.
I guess that's it, thanks for listening and happy to answer your questions.
Thank you.
Hi, my question is why would you be initially critical of bug bounties?
Like what would be the reasons for Chris?
The main resistance at the beginning is that we wouldn't think of bounties as something we would pay for.
We would think of it as like traditionally people would put money on stuff and we thought this can derail easily to.
Lots of people putting much money on something and that something is not done and then we will get whole kind of people.
Not happy about the world thing and won't be a nice experience and we have a lot of example of things like that.
But then we made our own program, we decided how much we would put into this and this is working really nicely and so it has the same name but it's really our
our bounty system and nobody is able to direct to put money on it and I think that's what maybe what makes the difference.
Thanks.
Hello, just related to the bug bountie again.
Did you see many people just submitting murder requests made with a bit of AI slot?
Just to get the money or had to do with it?
No.
We had a couple of AI slot but it surprisingly the last ones are good quality of people who know what they're doing and I was the opinion that we never will have AI in frecad.
And we're about that question we're still looking into it but things are really changing and so far it's mostly the developer themselves who already developers who went to the bug bountie program.
Yeah, I had a question maybe I'm not familiar with the governance of your project but do you have any sort of CI loop or some way to sort of know that the merges are not actually breaking sort of known designs and whatever else like a standard set of like I don't know 50 or 100 designs that are really complex and see if every version of bug great actually is able to properly.
I didn't get three in your question.
I mean so one of the things that we each up struggle with frecad is we have some complex stuff that we're loading into it and sometimes it struggles with it.
And we're not exactly sure if it's the computer the person is the free ads having a problem or so we're just wondering if you guys have some sort of you know kind of poly insurance that goes on.
Quality checking somehow.
Yeah, that's so automated like every every upgrade.
Yes, one of the things we improved this year and we now have a massive unit test system that you can write unit test for almost anything that happens in frecad.
We ask people developing new features when they submit the pull request.
Please write a unit test to test automatically test your feature.
That's a bettering a lot.
So we now have a lot of testing.
And if that's really a factor in the stability, I don't know.
It doesn't harm certainly to have a lot of unit testing.
But I would say we're trying to better in testing in all matters.
Not only automatic testing, but also human testing.
That's something we have done too fast in the past.
We've just merged.
Okay, it's passing the test.
It's good.
And now we stop and we say, okay, this will only pass if someone, if a human comes here, compiles the thing test and try to break thing and make sure it works.
So it's a bit slower pace, but I think it has helped stability a lot.
Thanks for the presentation.
So maybe it's not completely focused on frecad discussion.
My question is, what do you think about the current state of card format?
So is the best kind of open format the step 242?
Is it good enough?
Or frecad can play a role in this scenario, which is very fragmented, let's say?
Yeah.
It's a hard question.
I don't know.
I think step is proving to be there to stay.
And it's still widely used.
What we can see around the frecad community is step is paramount.
Step is everywhere.
Step is what everybody uses.
Step is the step exporting important frecad is actively developed.
So people are working on it.
People are making better.
When you import a step, you have more and more complex model that comes out of
their instead of one object.
You have all the structure.
You can remove the pieces, etc.
So it's certainly something the community values and works on.
Now it's a bit of a weird landscape where big vendors are pushing the things to their sides.
Whereas as an open-source project, we don't have much act possible actions aside from watching them fighting.
And personally, my course of action is always to stick to open formats.
And that's basically our kind of salvation.
The more we can keep track of our own data, we can know what's in our files.
We can store things in things that will be openable in 20 years.
I feel we are safe track.
So yes, inside the frecad universe, we stick to these things, basically.
What are your thoughts and opinions on the DXF and DWG format in relation to open source and the support that we get?
That's a cool question because it comes back since the last 20 years, right?
That we are having these kind of questions.
For those who know the DXF and DWG are property formats from Autodesk that are used back in AutoCADs,
but why they spread around the engineering community.
Everybody use these formats up to today.
You have a couple of open source projects like a library that's trying to crack it on the format to bring it to the open source side.
It's still being always watching that project.
It's still being worked on, it's still being committed every week.
So it's still active and still people believe in it.
So it's not that and it's there.
It's hard to use at the moment.
DXF is something is the open version of DWG.
DXF has text inside.
And DXF is something wide used and we can use and we are using.
It's easy to use in frecad and it's solid.
It gives good results.
DWG, we're still waiting to see where this goes, but what I can see is that it's still there.
Still people are still working on bringing it to the open source side.
Hi.
There was an interesting talk about IDX this morning.
On K-CAD side.
Do you know if FBTA is planning to do anything regarding IDX and collaboration with E-CAD?
It's gone.
No.
Honestly, I haven't seen anything coming away regarding IDX in frecad so far.
So it's not in our plans, but just a matter of someone coming to us with it.
Basically.
Hi.
Is edgy interested in the energy aspect for the future?
But the plans for this, are you thinking of energy plus integration and things like this?
Yeah.
That would be at the moment.
Energy plus is the only viable solution that's fully open source.
Energy plus is a program.
It's an open source solution.
And it's plugged into a constellation of small pieces of software
who together do an energy element analysis of building.
And as far as I know at the moment it's the only pipeline that can produce the final result of a,
let's say, something you can use for a building permit or something like that.
So that would be the probably at the moment the best part to go.
I would say we have a lot of work to be done before being able to use one of those things.
Our part in frequent would be to produce a model that is ready for energy analysis.
And that means it's a bit different than a normal beam model where every little screw,
every little thickness is is modeled.
An energy analysis model is basically only faces.
For example, over house and every face defines what's inside, what's outside,
and what's the resistance to energy.
And so we still have a lot of work to transform a beam full beam model with all the columns
and the roof and the floor into such a simple analysis model.
I would say that's the part we should do in frequent.
That's where we should arrive in frequent.
And then when we have that model,
it's energy plus being something else that will be easy.
We will have the model ready for plugging it into such a structure.
Thank you.
To expand a bit on the testing question.
I see an understanding unit tests are small pieces of testing.
The test individuals of some of the features,
but what I would like to see are there any ideas on having database of complete projects,
or you'll start out automatically the whole free card and then repeat it.
Yes, definitely.
Peter Hema, who is a free card developer, has a project that generates documentation
that is all the sheets of building manual for the microcontroller that it's on the free card table there.
And so all the documentation, step one, you take two screws, step two,
you put the two screws in whole A and B.
But I mean, what things we discussed that I would like to happen is to use that kind of stuff
to test a whole workflow in frequent and to automate a kind of complete work in frequent.
That's the kind of project that we could use to do that kind of stuff.
And then you have a huge database of projects.
And then you can run basically locally.
And after an hour you get a complete test suite result for...
Yes, that's cool.
You can already do that with our unit tests.
It tests basically, it tests the line tool.
It tests the sketch tool.
It tests the putting creating an extrusion, etc.
And you can run them all at once.
And it tests everything in frequent.
It opens, frequently we will see frequent open on your screen and doing stuff,
opening files and closing files.
And it will test everything at the end.
You have a progress bar and it passes or it tells you where it fails.
But this is running every time we compile frequent.
So normally no frequent gets out there.
That didn't pass those things.
All right, thank you, York.
Thank you guys.