FreeCAD 0.13 Official Release Available

A big congratulations to everyone who has helped make our latest 0.13 release possible! This include all the contributors who have helped develop, code, build and of course our endless list of patient users who have been diligently testing our development snapshots.

There has been so many improvements throughout the whole application. Many new features have been added and further performance and stability improvements in sketcher has been achieved over the year. The release notes give a snapshot of what has been achieved over the past year. I stand now still finding it unbelievable how much momentum we have gained over the past year. 

It isn't official but we may decide to back-port improvements and bug fixes for the relatively stable 0.13 release now. 

The Future: The long road ahead

The future looks very promising, with numerous cool features in the works! The most anticipated being the Assembly Project. This is not to mention my render workbench and some other improvements that are hidden away in my git repos which are waiting further testing and refinement. My personal motivation is to get someone to use my render module to produce a render of their design for the new FreeCAD splash screen!

My pledge to everyone get involved, however you think you can! This doesn't have to be programming in python or c++, but there are  many ways you can get involved

• Test our development releases for bugs

• Help other users on the FreeCAD forums

• Create and publish tutorial guides

• Improve our documentation and translation efforts

• Design, Maintain and help our websites and promoting FreeCAD

• Package FreeCAD for Linux Distributions

The Drawing Module

Over Christmas I have been away at home and in the mean time been quite busy with several projects for University and following graduation next Summer. Time has been quite short, so I haven't had the greatest chance to really work on much and that includes the CAM module. Instead, for the hour or two I have most evenings, I have been looking at several areas and thought it would be interesting to take on the Drawing Module. This module is quite isolated therefore much easier to develop without having to consult people.

Drawing Module:

The Drawing module is used for 'documentation' of FreeCAD part models. There is a great misconception that it should be the equivalent of AutoCAD or its free equivalent LibreCAD, which only recently have I had chance to use for documenting an architecture based project. There has been many discussions on this area on the forums in particular: however I didn't feel the module was intended for the production of technical drawings similar to other commercial offerings.

What I was taught as Engineer is that the production of technical drawings is to provide a reference detailed copy transferred to paper or electronic equivalent. This document should be readable by someone else and should allow this person to fully recreate the component inside CAD or manufacturing this. LibreCAD does offer the ability to document work becomes very cumbersome and leads to unproductive workflow. Let me illustrate, the user must have to export the model projection (degrading model information) and then manually drawing the Dimension lines each time.

What do I mean degrading information?

For example, when the Assembly feature comes this will support higher level information including the relationships of each part and most importantly a BOM - bill of materials. We also lose references between geometric entities such as edges. This means if we update the drawing, these changes are not necessarily propagated through and create extra work for us. With the development of Topological Naming, this should immediately take advantage of this.

The Current Drawing Module:

The Current Drawing module projects a part into a selected view and then gathers all the shapes and exports this directly into a the correct schema (.svg, .dxf) this works fine, as demonstrated currently, however is restrictive. Currently the drawing editor use QGraphicsView with QSvg which displays the SVG Result from the projection algorithm but doesn't allow any direct editing other than manipulating the SVG.

 There is currently the idea of moving to QWebview and rendering using the webkit browser, but I don't think this is appropriate even though it would improve the opportunity to interact. Using SVG for manipulating the drawing seems a bad idea and a more lower level data structure seems more appropriate.

Hopefully later I will explain what I am proposing....