FreeCAD 1.1 Tutorial, For Beginners Who Like Clear Instructions

May 13, 2026 by Donald Papp 23 Comments

If you’ve been interested in FreeCAD but haven’t known where to start, here’s a wonderful video tutorial for FreeCAD 1.1 by [Deltahedra] aimed squarely at how to model a 3D part from scratch while also following best engineering practices for part design. It focuses on a concise and meaningful workflow that respects your time and doesn’t make assumptions about skill level. It even starts by taking a few moments to explain how to navigate the interface, a courtesy many will appreciate.

FreeCAD can do quite a lot, so a tutorial that focuses on a specific yet broadly-applicable task with a clear context is a great way to narrow the scope into something manageable, and be comprehensive without getting bogged down in minutiae. [Deltahedra] does this by exclusively using the part design workbench, demonstrating what to do to make a part step-by-step, and showing common mistakes that can happen and how to fix them if they occur. Beyond that, it’s left up to the curious hacker to delve for themselves into what else FreeCAD has to offer.

Since 1.1 is (at this writing) the latest stable release, one can also be confident that the tutorial will match the user interface and features one sees on their own screen. After all, it can be frustrating to attempt to follow a tutorial only to find out things are a few versions behind and nothing is where one expects it to be.

Best practices aren’t just fussy rules about how to do things, and [Deltahedra] demonstrates this by showing how certain procedures just plain make more sense when designing shapes. Our own Arya Voronova has also shared best practices for FreeCAD, so check that out for some added perspective. You’ll be wielding FreeCAD in confidence and comfort in no time.

Thanks for the tip, [Vik Olliver]!

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Another Gift To The World From CERN: Their Entire Set Of KiCad Libraries

May 12, 2026 by Jenny List 67 Comments

As the foremost boffins of Europe toil deep underneath the border between Switzerland and France in their never-ending quest to truly understand the fabric of the Universe, they rely on a vast amount of electronics. The PCB layout team at the particle accelerator thus work with a huge array of parts, for which of course they create KiCad libraries. Now the folks at CERN have made those libraries available as open source, so you can benefit from their work.

The libraries themselves can be found in a GitLab repository, and at the moment are offered only for KiCad version 9.x. We tried installing it in our KiCad 10.0 installation and it refused — complaining of a missing JSON file — but we’re assuming that with more time and effort we could have made it happen. We’re told official 10.x compatibility is on the way.

Browsing the repository shows what a multiplicity of parts are included, so we can see this becoming a standard install for many people and the CERN footprints turning up in many projects featured here.

Thanks [Daniel] for the tip!

Broadcasting GPS On The Local Network To Help Geoclue Find You

May 8, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Rather than having users go through the inconvenience of having to punch in their current location, an increasing number of applications and websites use location services that can pin-point the current location of a user to within a certain number of meters or kilometers.

Unfortunately, [Evert Pot] found that with the demise of the Mozilla Location Service (MLS) in 2024, accuracy of the Linux Geoclue service had dropped to a resolution of about 25 km. Since a LAN tends to not move around a lot, this seemed like the perfect time to help Geoclue out with a local GPS server.

All that Geoclue looks for on the LAN is an mDNS service identifying as _nmea-0183._tcp that responds with the GPS coordinates as network packets containing an ASCII payload encoded using the NMEA 0183 standard. With this knowledge [Evert] was then able to quickly put together a Python-based server that simply blasts the static GPS coordinates of the LAN in question.

With the service running, Gnome Maps and Firefox with Google Maps both displayed the right location down to the house, as can be seen in the screenshots. With the same LAN service and a Mac system there was no such luck with Apple Maps unless Location Services was turned off, though presumably Apple uses its own equivalent to MLS.

The ESP8266 Gets An OS, And It’s Familiar

May 8, 2026 by Jenny List 22 Comments

A couple weeks back we brought you news of KernelUNO, a command line shell and very simple operating system for the Arduino Uno. It’s a neat idea, so it’s hardly surprising to see someone port it to another microcontroller and add more features.

Here’s [hery-torrado], with KernelESP for the ESP8266, which takes the original idea and adds a web console, scheduled jobs, sensor rules, scripting, NTP, and a JSON API. The networking using the ESP’s built-in WiFi takes the original and makes it significantly more useful.

It’s worth suggesting that the ability to call URLs with GET data to pass things to APIs would be useful on a networked processor too, but this is already so well featured it seems rude to ask for more. Yet again though, this project has given a new life to an old chip, and we think it has a way further to go. Perhaps a port to the ESP32 would allow it to reach its full potential, or maybe for a ridiculously cheap and powerful platform, the CH32 series of chips. We look forward to see what more will come from KernelUNO.

Our original coverage can be read here.

ReactOS Gets Unified Installer Image And A New Storage Stack

May 3, 2026 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

Although the ReactOS project is in no rush to dethrone Windows as the desktop operating system of choice, this doesn’t mean that some real changes aren’t happening. Most recently two big changes got merged, the first pertaining to the separate boot- and live CD images that are now merged into a single image, and the second being a new PnP-aware ATA storage stack for ATA and AHCI devices, with NT6+ compatibility.

Although there is still a separate live CD for now, this first change means that testing and installing ReactOS becomes easier, and that the old-school text-based installer may soon be on its way out as well.

Having the new ATA storage stack in place will translate into much better compatibility with real hardware, including the ability to use more hardware to install on and boot from compared to the old UniATA driver.

Combined, these two changes should bring the ReactOS installation and usage experience a lot closer to that of Windows, as well as many Linux distros. If you had issues with the OS on real hardware, this might be just the right time to give it another shake and provide detailed feedback to the developers if any remaining issues are encountered.

Thanks to [jeditobe] for the tip.

New Slicer Enables Horizontal Overhangs Without Support

April 28, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 15 Comments

There’s a rule of thumb when it comes to FDM printing that overhangs are really only possible to an angle of around 45 degrees or so. If you try to squirt out plastic with nothing supporting it, it just goes everywhere. However, a new slicer hopes to enable printing up to 90-degree overhangs with some creative techniques.

The software that enables this is called WaveOverhangs, and currently exists as a fork of OrcaSlicer. The idea is straightforward enough — using unique toolpathing to create rings of deposited material that fasten to those laid down before them in the same layer. Thus as the printer lays down a layer into bare space, the deposited plastic is, ideally, able to fix on to the supported edge. As the next ring is laid down, it grabs on to the cooled ring laid down before it, and so on. The idea is inspired by wave propagation, hence the name. You can see a demonstration of the software in the video below by [Cocoanix 3D Printing].

It’s still a very new technique. The slicer has a whole bunch of knobs to turn and two different algorithms. Get the settings just right and you can print horizontal overhangs successfully. There aren’t exactly presets yet, this is something to explore with trial and error. If you test it out, don’t forget to upload your results to the Community Gallery so the developers can see what works and what doesn’t.

We’ve explored how smart slicers can do amazing things before, too, particularly when it comes to things like bridging.

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Rack Cage Generator Gets Your Gear Mounted

April 19, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 29 Comments

Sometimes, as hackers and makers, we can end up with messy lashed-together gear that is neither reliable nor tidy. Rackmounting your stuff can be a great way to improve the robustness and liveability of your setup. If you find this appealing, you might like CageMaker by [WebMaka].

This parametric OpenSCAD script can generate mounts for all kinds of stuff. Maybe you have a little network switch that’s just a tangle of wires on your desk, or a few pieces of audio gear that are loosely stacked on top of each other and looking rather unkempt. It would be trivial with this tool to create some 3D printed adapters to get all that stuff laced up nice and neat in a rack instead.

If you’re eager to get tinkering, you can try out the browser-based version quite easily. We’ve featured similar work before, too—many a maker has trod the path of rackmounting, as it turns out.