Earlier this year, we shipped Ondsel ES 2024.2 with a small nifty feature: backing up your entire Ondsel ES preferences to Lens and then restoring them. Here is a quick guide on how to do that.
We launched Ondsel Lens in 2023 as a FreeCAD-first product data management system. But there is one thing we cannot deny: STEP is a hugely important standard in the industry. If you go from one 3D CAD program to another, more often than not it’s what you use for model exchange. Even if you go from KiCad to SolidWorks, STEP is how you store your PCB designs for use in assemblies.
With Ondsel Lens you can publish your 3D CAD designs privately or publicly and you can do it directly from the Ondsel Engineering Suite. Let’s learn how to do that.
We’ve just released a bugfix update for the latest stable version of Ondsel Engineering Suite. The changes mostly affect users of the Assembly workbench, VarSets, and the Ondsel Lens addon.
Back when we did the user survey, the generation of bills of materials (BOM) was the next important thing after the ability to create assemblies. People don’t even need collision detection as much as they need their BOMs. Based on this data, Pierre-Louis Boyer (Ondsel) recently added a Bill of Materials tool to the Assembly workbench for the upcoming Ondsel ES v2024.3 and FreeCAD v1.0. It is already available in weekly builds of Ondsel ES and the upstream project.
There’s a valid question: how can FOSS CAD programs possibly compete with proprietary offerings? The answer is the community. Commercial CAD vendors need to pay for everything, but FreeCAD has an army of passionate volunteers and contributors. Grants for developers and Ondsel’s involvement are rather recent happenings. Mostly, the community has been managing the project for over 20 years on a shoestring budget or no budget at all — that is rather impressive.
Ondsel ES and FreeCAD have been developing a kind of symbiotic relationship. We build on FreeCAD, so we rely on it being great, but FreeCAD also benefits from new features and improvements we are bringing. However the upstream project is also larger than any group of developers: literally, everyone can help improve it, including non-programmers.
One of the questions we've been getting from users regarding the release of Ondsel ES 2024.2 is whether we are shipping it with all the recent toponaming fixes enabled. The answer is 'no'. While most of the work in the TNP project is done, the code is largely untested by the larger community, so we don't feel comfortable shipping it in an actual release of Ondsel ES. However, let's take this opportunity to talk about TNP and the amazing work that the community did there.
We’ve just released Ondsel ES 2024.2, the second public version of our flagship desktop CAD application with built-in collaboration tools.
Now that the basic assembly workflow is mostly complete and operational in Ondsel ES, we are beginning to add new tools. One of the features coming in the next release are exploded views.
“Once you get past the part design workbench in [software], it becomes apparent that [software] is like 10 different software packages integrated into one.” — r53toucan on Reddit.
if you think this user is talking about FreeCAD, you're wrong. It’s CATIA — a generations-old 3D CAD program that served as an inspiration in the early days of FreeCAD. The two programs share more than just some core concepts: they’ve been struggling with many of the same issues and went in different directions to fix them.
A lot of companies that use CATIA are interested in migrating away and are looking at open-source alternatives. It's a good time to look at the reasons why and consider what they could be looking for in an open-source program such as Ondsel ES.