After operating for almost two years, Ondsel has made the difficult decision to cease operations and close down. We are incredibly thankful for the support we’ve received from the FreeCAD community and the larger engineering CAD communities.
Laser cutters are a staple in maker spaces and are often the first exposure users have to CNC equipment. They are fast and accurate. They produce usable parts from inexpensive materials. They can cut and engrave and are intuitive to use.
However, laser cutters typically have a different workflow compared to other CNC machines. Instead of G-code, the input for laser cutters is usually 2D geometry files such as SVG, DXF, or image files. The control software then automatically generates the G-code internally. This means that users need to prepare their SVG files before feeding them to laser cutters, and the procedure is different for every cutter.
To make things easier, we developed a post-processor for the CAM workbench that generates SVG files automatically. It helps streamline the workflow and cuts down the time it usually takes to go from design to product.
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.
We are happy to announce the release of Ondsel Engineering Suite 2024.1, our integrated solution for collaboration on 3D CAD designs.