I'm back!

I took some time of for the later part of 2013 for an adventure that in the end didn't work out. Boo hoo!

Now I'm returning back again for 2014 for the foreseeable future! I'm pleasantly surprised to see that people are still actively looking at the pages - despite the inactivity since May and it's remarkable how time has flown. Anyway, let me introduce the new year with some good news.

From last December, I am now a Postgraduate Research student at the EPSRC for Innovation in Additive Manufacturing at the University of Nottingham. (This means I'll be working for a PhD over the next three years). It is a great opportunity to be doing particularly ground breaking research here on various areas concerned essentially with commercial 3D printing and eventually become an expert in this revolutionary field. 

As with all academic research this is non-proprietary, so in theory the modelling techniques that we are aiming to develop may reach into programs such as FreeCAD. I'll later give a brief overview of what we do here now I'm familiar with what projects have been taking place.

I'll later incorporate other posts into this blog related to my research but not exclusive to FreeCAD that might be of interest to some readers. Later on I hope to apply some experiments too. 

So where do I position my self now with FreeCAD? Admittedly these days, I don't have as much time as an undergraduate during the day, but I now have blocks in the evening where I can sufficiently give time to work on it as I choose. 

Drawing Module:

My focus is to tidy up the work that I've done over the past year on the new Drawing Module and get it into a 'playground' state where interested users can test and use it with the strings attached that non-critical bugs exist.

Later on in the week I'll try and write up an update of where I currently am with the Drawing Module - obviously with pictures!

The current big show stoppers in terms of stability and usability are the following:

• Random Draw Crashes (rare)
• Random segfaults (rare)
• Some projections are missing (tangent curves in particular)
• Dimension of edges lose their position randomly (Bug with OpenCascade)
• Background template layer non-existant

Note to people: There has been many substantial changes since May. Feel free to check out the git repo - Drawing branch and try it out! 

If you can find some solid test cases for the above in particular that would be very helpful :)