The FPA members have voted for Q4 2025 grants. tetektoza will revamp and enhance the selection system around specific bug reports listed in the grant application. He will be awarded a grant of 3,000 EUR. Pierre-Louis Boyer aka PaddleStroke received two grants, for maintaining and improving the Assembly and Sketcher workbenches, 3,000€ for each grant. […]

Maintainers have been backporting some of the fixes to the v1.1 branch where possible — 45 backports in the past 7 days. The list of changes in this recap applies to the main development branch (future v1.2). This week in FreeCAD development: Sketcher: Part: PartDesign: CAM: BIM: TechDraw: GUI: Other changes: Syres916, kadet1090, moench-tegeder, PaddleStroke, […]

Around this time last year we created a small tutorial to make a festive tree decoration, shamelessly using the winter holidays to actually write a tutorial that, whilst pretending to be festive, really explained the use of the revolve tool! This year we are aiming for similar, we are going to create a star shaped […]

We are currently at 17 release blockers for FreeCAD 1.1, so the FPA members have raised the price per fixed release blocker from $50 to $100. Meanwhile, two more people have collected bugfix rewards: For more information on the bugfix rewards program, please see our earlier blog post.

The following text is a guest post from Turan Furkan Topak reporting on their trip to the GSOC Summit. Many thanks for taking the time to write this report. /Jo When I applied to be a mentor for GSoC, my intention was actually just to mentor in my own area of interest. That was how […]

Maintainers have been backporting some of the fixes to the v1.1 branch where possible — 22 backports in the past 7 days. The list of changes in this recap applies to the main development branch (future v1.2). This week in FreeCAD development: Sketcher: Part and PartDesign: Assembly: CAM: BIM: GUI: Other changes: Roy_043, PaddleStroke, luzpaz, […]

We recently posted about the planned FreeCAD activities around FOSDEM 2026. These include the FreeCAD Day on the 30th January and the joint KiCad/FreeCAD booth at FOSDEM itself on the 31st and 1st. We also mentioned that Chris Hennes (@chennes) and Jo Hinchliffe (@concretedog) are co-ordinating the Open Hardware CAD/CAM room talk track at FOSDEM […]

People have been using FreeCAD in academia and research for many years, and the range of these research projects is surprisingly broad. Today, we are talking to Matt Thomas aka LT72884, who has a great YouTube channel where he explains how to use free and open-source engineering software for rocket design, CfD simulation, FEM, and […]

Maintainers have been backporting some of the fixes to the v1.1 branch where possible — 14 backports in the past 7 days. The list of changes in this recap applies to the main development branch (future v1.2). This week in FreeCAD development: Sketcher: PaddleStroke fixed incorrect creation of an offset when sketch directions differ (PR#25941) […]

Maintainers have been backporting some of the fixes to the v1.1 branch where possible — 33 backports in the past 7 days. The list of changes in this recap applies to the main development branch (future v1.2). This week in FreeCAD development: Sketcher: PartDesign: Assembly: PaddleStroke fixed error messages that show up when you attempt […]

Maintainers have been backporting some of the fixes to the v1.1 branch where possible — 49 backports in the past 7 days. The list of changes in this recap applies to the main development branch (future v1.2). This week in FreeCAD development: Sketcher: PartDesign: Assembly: CAM: BIM: FEM: GUI: Other changes: Additional improvements and fixes […]

The team has just published builds of the first candidate of FreeCAD 1.1, you can download them on GitHub. Here is what it means and what’s going to happen next. The release candidates are basically preliminary builds of the final version. They are aimed at a particular demographic: people who want to help the team […]

In an amusing twist, this Forged in FreeCAD story will contain similar words to the last Forged In FreeCAD story, most notably, “concrete” and “lathe”!The last “Forged in FreeCAD” story was the SL-24 Opensource Record Lathe, and indeed this story is a lathe story that includes concrete in the construction. The Modulathe has a couple […]

Quick disclaimer: maintainers have created a branch for the upcoming v1.1 release and started reviewing and merging patches for v1.2. They have also been backporting some of the fixes to the v1.1 branch where possible — 36 backports in the past 7 days. The list of changes in this recap applies to the main development […]

This week in FreeCAD development: Sketcher: TechDraw: BIM/Draft: FEM: CAM: Other changes: Additional improvements and fixes were contributed by FlachyJoe, kadet1090, PaddleSgtroke, marbocub, ipatch, pyro9, chennes, marioalexis84, and NewJoker. If you are interested in testing the latest weekly build, you can grab it here. PR stats: since the previous report, 35 pull requests have been […]

It’s a given that the FreeCAD community is awesome and make amazing things. Every now and again though a project really stops us in our tracks. None more so than this, the SL-24, an open source record lathe. Part CNC and part high end DIY record deck this project allows people to experiment with cutting […]

FreeCAD 1.0 introduced a new, refactored material system, which includes updated appearance properties of FreeCAD objects. What was previously one property ‘Shape color’ is now six new properties in the ‘Shape Appearance’ group of properties. This article explains how to set up these properties to achieve the desired surface look. There are six appearance properties, […]

This week in FreeCAD development: Sketcher: BIM/Draft: FEM: GUI: Other changes: Additional improvements and fixes were contributed by chennes, tritao, oursland, leoheck, mosfet80, adrianinsaval, and kpemartin. If you are interested in testing the latest weekly build, you can grab it here. Builds for macOS are temporarily unavailable. PR stats: since the previous report, 67 pull […]

This week in FreeCAD development: BIM: CAM: TechDraw: GUI: Other changes: Additional improvements and fixes were contributed by chennes and pyro9. If you are interested in testing the latest weekly build, you can grab it here (currently broken due to CI issues). PR stats: since the previous report, 31 pull requests have been merged, and […]

Every year there’s lot’s of FreeCAD activity centred around the fantastic FOSDEM event in Brussels. This year as well as the usual FreeCAD Day, Chris Hennes (@chennes) and Jo Hinchliffe (@concretedog) are coordinating the Open Hardware and CAD/CAM devroom. Chris has just posted the text below on the FreeCAD Forum, but we include it here […]

The author of this post has been out representing FreeCAD and other open source projects at the fantastic SFK25 Conference. Arranged by the dedicated Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova (FLOSSK) team this has been a vibrant international conference with a great array of talks and workshops over 2 days. I delivered numerous workshops there […]

This week in FreeCAD development: Sketcher: Part and PartDesign: CAM: Other changes: Additional improvements and fixes were contributed by Syres916, LarryWoestman, captain0xff, marcuspollio, chennes, ipatch, ebswift, paullee0, OPGL, pyro9, Roy-043, kpemartin, petterreinholdtsen, and tetektoza. If you are interested in testing the latest weekly build, you can grab it here. PR stats: since the previous report, […]

This year, we had three students working on FreeCAD. All projects have been successful. Here is a quick recap. chiragsingh1711 implemented 3D PDF exporting in the TechDraw workbench and added an exporter to the general list of exporting options. The code is mostly complete and requires some fixes to bring it closer to our coding […]

This week in FreeCAD development: Sketcher: Part and PartDesign: TechDraw: GUI: Other changes: Additional improvements and fixes were contributed by marcuspollio, PhoneDroid, chennes, FlachyJoe, Roy_043, adrianinsaval, and schmidtw. If you are interested in testing the latest weekly build, you can grab it here. PR stats: since the previous report, 45 pull requests have been merged, […]

The FreeCAD Project Association (FPA) are keen to develop a recurring CAD challenge/competition and are looking for a project co-ordinator. Inspired by CAD challenges such as the “Too Tall Toby” program the co-ordinator will lead on designing and delivering a pilot activity, leading to a sustained event. Duties will include co-ordinating judging, designing challenges, engagement […]