FreeCAD 0.13 is now stable

FreeCAD 0.13 is now the latest stable release of FreeCAD. This version has a lot of improvements and  a new Ubuntu PPA for stable releases.

• Release Notes
• Complete changelog
• Ubuntu Stable PPA

FreeCAD is an Open Source Parametric Solid Modeler. It has excellent community support, modular architecture and it's fully programmable via Python.

Happy New Year !!!

Happy New Year to all !!!

2012 Flash Back

The year that is leaving today was an interesting one in the field of Linux CAD.
Below are listed the top events of 2012 for Linux CAD:

Playing with FreeCAD: Airfoils and Blades

FreeCAD is a very interesting tool. One of its advantages is that it can read and use data from various other programs. This feature is very important and can save you a lot of time in various tasks. One of these tasks is airfoil and blade design. There are various tools that can create airfoils and then export them in a format that FreeCAD can use for further editing.

Lost in support:FreeCAD

FreeCAD is a perfect example of a well-supported application under Linux. Also its active community provides excellent documentation and support with lots of tutorials, answers and helpful advices all accessible with a few clicks from the application's homepage.

Playing with FreeCAD: Trapezoids and Ribs

FreeCAD is an application  whose development I have been watching closely since I first learned about it. What I like on FreeCAD?

• It is Free and Open Source Software.
• It's a feature-based parametric solid modeler. I actually believe that this kind of modeling is the best way to create complex 3D entities.
• FreeCAD has its own workflow without trying to mimic the way that other similar applications work.

FreeCAD is under active development and currently is on Alpha stage(FreeCAD's development team decided recently to remove the "Alpha" status from FreeCAD).
But despite the missing features it can create complex geometry thanks to its Sketcher which is a very good tool.

A little workaround for compiling FreeCAD dev on Ubuntu 11.04

FreeCAD is an Open Source 3d Parametric Solid Modeler with major improvements during the last months. I had posted earlier this year a how-to guide for compiling the latest development version on Ubuntu.  But now this process needs a workaround to make the Part design module to work properly.

New FreeCAD module

A new module named "Ship" is available for FreeCAD. It aims to be a user-friendly module that will add ship modelling functionality on FreeCAD. I downloaded it and installed it after some tricks (I had to define the correct installation path in the makefile) into my FreeCAD dev installation but I didn't make it work
(Or I didn't understand how it works).

Several different ways to do the same thing

You may have noticed that,while using a CAD program, there are several ways to get to the same result. Also different programs use different techniques to get to the same result. What's the point of this post ? To prove that CAD is much more than a single program or only one drawing technique. Let's create a very simple 3D object, a pipe with 100mm height,outer diameter 20mm, inner diameter 15mm, by several different ways and programs.

Pin FreeCAD development version to the Unity Launcher

When you test the development version of FreeCAD on Ubuntu 11.04 you will probably need to pin it to the Unity Launcher. Unfortunately when you open FreeCAD from Nautilus, the right click--> Keep in Launcher option doesn't work.
The FreeCAD icon will be kept in Launcher,
but you cannot start the program by clicking it.
So how can you start FreeCAD from the Unity Launcher ?
Here is a simple workaround:

Compiling FreeCAD on Ubuntu: The easy way

If you are curious about the progress on FreeCAD's  development you will probably like the idea of installing the latest development release from source. Let's do that step by step on Ubuntu following the instructions of FreeCAD's documentation

FreeCAD 0.11 is almost ready

FreeCAD is an Open Source 3d Solid Modeler based on OpenCASCADE.

Screenshots of CAD apps

Here are some screenshots of CAD applications running on Linux (Ubuntu 10.10)