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.

One of the conclusions in the user survey series is that the SheetMetal workbench is really important for users. 9,2% respondents rely on this addon to do their job, it’s also the third most popular choice for what to pay money for by professionals and the fourth most popular choice overall, after UI/UX, TNP, and Assembly WB.

Even calm and steady professionals can get to the point where they’ve just had enough. And for many architects out there, having to use Autodesk Revit on a daily basis is really that kind of a frustrating experience.

Revit is what most architects learn at school and then use at work. To give credit where credit is due, it has many fine points. You don’t get to be #1 if you don’t get the job done. However, it’s really slow, there are data intellectual property concerns, the subscription price is rising year over year, Autodesk management doesn’t seem to have a coherent vision for the product’s future and they don’t listen to customers nearly as much as they should have, and that’s not even the entire list of issues.

In this post, we’ll focus on just one aspect of this love-hate relationship: interoperability. Let’s talk about IFC and why Autodesk should take notes from emerging free and open-source tools for building information modeling (BIM) authoring.

This is the last post in the series where we discuss the takeaways from our recent user research. We already looked at basic demographics data and the use of 3rd-party addons for getting a job done. Now it’s time to talk about things that annoy users so much they are willing to pay to get these issues nuked from orbit.

Ondsel is committed to improving the user experience and we spend a lot of time listening to our users. We often hear the same suggestions and complaints that we’ve heard before but sometimes we get surprised. One of those surprises came out of our recent user survey.

Some users were surprised to learn that FreeCAD has a CAM workbench. Even though Path has been part of the core FreeCAD experience for more than nine years, it seems many users didn’t know about it.