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FreeCAD Is Near 1.0

September 21, 2024 by 47 Comments

The open-source parametric 3D modelling software, FreeCAD, is out in a release candidate for version 1.0.  If you’ve tried FreeCAD before and found a few showstoppers, it might be a good time for you to test it out again because the two biggest of them have been solved in this latest version.

First, version 1.0 finally implements a solution to the “topological naming problem”. Imagine you want to put a hole into a surface. The program needs to know on which surface to put the hole, and so it refers to this surface by name / number. Now imagine you subdivide the surface, and both subsections get new names. Where does your hole go now?  If you want to dig into the issue, the inimitable [MangoJelly] has a great video about the topo naming problem. Practically, there were workarounds, like only adding chamfers after the main design has stabilized, but frankly it was a hassle to remember all of the tricks. This is a huge fix.

The second big fix concerns assemblies.  Older versions of FreeCAD were great for making single parts, but combining them all together inside the CAD program was always janky.  Version 1.0 combines the previous two patchwork assembly workbenches into one, and it’s altogether more pleasant to use. The constraints of how two parts move when held together with an axle just works now, and this is a big deal for multi-part models.

If you’re coming from any other parametric CAD program, most of FreeCAD will seem familiar to you, but there will also be workflow differences that will take some getting used to. In trade, what do you get? Scriptability in Python, real open source software, and all of the bells and whistles for free. Now that its two biggest pain points have been addressed,  FreeCAD has become a lot easier to love. We’re looking forward to some good V1.0 tutorials in the future, and we’ll keep you posted when we find them.

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Hackaday Links: October 22, 2023

October 22, 2023 by 9 Comments

The second of three major solar eclipses in a mere six-year period swept across the United States last week. We managed to catch the first one back in 2017, and still have plans for the next one in April of 2024. But we gave this one a miss, mainly because it was “just” an annular eclipse, promising a less spectacular presentation than a total eclipse.

Looks like we were wrong about that, at least judging by photographs of last week’s “Ring of Fire” eclipse. NASA managed to catch a shot of the Moon’s shadow over the middle of the US from the Deep Space Climate Observer at Lagrange Point 1. The image, which shows both the compact central umbra of the shadow and the much larger penumbra, which covers almost the entire continent, is equal parts fascinating and terrifying. Ground-based photographers were very much in the action too, turning in some lovely shots of the eclipse. We particularly like this “one-in-a-million” shot of a jet airliner photobombing the developing eclipse. Shots like these make us feel like it was a mistake to skip the 10-hour drive to the path of annularity.

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