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· 9 min read
Brad Collette

We’ve completed the first year as employees and contractors paid to hack on FreeCAD and build services around it. We do have a few things to brag about. We also had some setbacks and challenges. Since we started Ondsel with a goal to be as honest and transparent as possible, let’s talk about things the team learned this year while figuring things out.

· 2 min read
Brad Collette
Alexandre Prokoudine

FreeCAD puts swiss army knives to shame with its plethora of tools and workflows shipped by default: mechanical design and FEA tools, architecture and BIM tools, 2D drafting tools, CAM tools etc. It’s a very impressive achievement for a project that is operated entirely by volunteers in their spare time. But it’s also a bit of a curse.

· 7 min read
Brad Collette
Rebecca Dodd

“I like to have options. I don’t like the idea of entire industries being beholden unto the whims of big software developers.” — Taste_of_Based on r/PLC

When we talk to customers, the question of import/export comes up repeatedly. Working with DWG files is necessary for collaborating with upstream or downstream partner organizations, but these proprietary formats make things extremely difficult if anyone in the chain is not using an official Autodesk tool.

· 2 min read
Brad Collette

Look, there are good reasons why the price of a software product could go up: rising R&D and maintenance costs, market saturation, rising inflation rate etc. But Autodesk’s latest announcement of bumping the Fusion 360 price yet again makes people—especially small businesses—cringe, and it’s easy to see why. It’s about what you do and how you communicate that to users:

Fusion 360 price change announcement

Source: Lemmy.World

· 5 min read
Brad Collette

Free and Open-Source Software has a reputation for poor usability and user experience (UX). FreeCAD is no exception. Some of the most common complaints raised by users are about the steep learning curve, inconsistent workflow, and ugly, confusing user-interface (UI). There are dozens of threads on the forum going back years where someone has come forward with a vision to ‘fix’ the usability problem. These efforts always devolve into bike-shedding, and nitpicking. Nothing changes.

· 9 min read
Brad Collette
Alexandre Prokoudine

The basics of an integrated assembly workbench in FreeCAD are now functional and will be ready for wider testing once another pull request is merged. This means you can play with it now in the development version of FreeCAD and when version 1.0 is out, you will be able to create or link parts, create joints between them, and solve the assembly — in just a few clicks, out of the box, without installing any add-ons.

· 4 min read
Brad Collette
Alexandre Prokoudine

We’ve already introduced some improvements to sketching with constraints before, when Pierre-Louis Boyer implemented contextual constraints. But there are more usability gaps there, and we are targeting them one by one. There’s another major change currently undergoing code review: on-viewport tool widgets to create fully constrained sketches and tool settings to set various properties and choose drafting behavior.