development help available - introduction

[dsaiko]

Hello, and welcome.

As I find FreeCAD really exciting, I would like to introduce myself and offer some future long term development help.

** Technical background:
I am a professional developer since 1997. Well, quite a past, but I was quite young then. I started as VC++ developer, being certified by MS, but moved to Java world in around 2001/2 and spent (maybe too) many years by different frameworks and databases doing mainly web application developments for different companies. As I had enough of web guis and js stuff, I moved to server side data processing in 2013.
Beginning 2016 I switched to iOS development for a large corporation, to get break from all this Java world.
My small set of github repositories can be found here: https://github.com/dsaiko?tab=repositories (but mostly quite old stuff moved to github from google code in 2014).
Was using QT4 and Qt5 for different hobby projects few years ago.
I am strongly anti MS oriented, using Mac at the office, Linux at home.
In general, some time already looking to join some opensource development, which would become my hobby, fulfil my internal needs to support some meaningful and useful open source technology, teach me new things I would not meet in my professional career. Was for example considering and looking into Slic3r Prusa Edition.
I take things quite seriously, if I start participating here, my plans would be quite long term.

** CAD background:
Kind of none, remember AutoCAD 2D at uni. Last year I felt in love with 3D printing, was looking for the best designer to use, have finally learnt Blender. With that, I found out why its not used so much for part design and why people call it "in-precise".
Not willing to use something like Fusion 360 or other similar "kind of free" cloud solution where I have no control over the software and the files. My first tries with stable FreeCAD 0.16 were not very successful and I did consider it to be too much buggy and crashing.
After I found Prusa is using OpenSCAD and FreeCAD, I gave FreeCAD more attention and at the end I like it quite a lot. Right now at Lesson 11 of Learn FreeCAD Youtube tutorial. The biggest challenge I want to pass soon after finishing the tutorial is to design a chess knight. If I am able to achieve a satisfactory result, I am fully dedicated to this software.

** FreeCAD:
Have migrated to source builds to get familiar with the trends and insides. Source build seems more stable than Ubuntu's repo daily builds. Not sure why.
Good thing is, I am able to achieve results which make me quite happy.
As I plan to 3D print a lot, will use FreeCAD on daily basis.

But ...
I am getting used to save the project before any new operation. Crashes are quite frequent, undo is very problematic.
After importing SVG shape and performing set of simple operations on top of it, performance became quite an issue.
Workbenches still confuse me. Still not sure why there are same tools in Part Design and Part workbenches,
why main application preferences display content relative to selected workbench etc.
I kind of understand why professional CAD users may view FreeCAD as
https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/com ... _about_it/

And that is why I am here. Would like to help at least a bit to improve things.

** Learning path:
Sure there will be some learning path for me.
First I would like to finish watching some more tutorials, then probably would try to pick up some bugfixes or crashes, working on unit tests, moving further later on.

btw: is there any reason why scale supports only 2 decimal places? after importing svg, I had to scale twice as 0.01 scale was still too big. Could I start for example by going through different tools and changing the precision of parameters at least to three decimal places?

[ickby]

Hello,

welcome here! Every help is very welcome and appreciated. The experience has shown that long term involvement is needed for developing FreeCAD, the source is rather complex and large and hence you won't get results easily and fast. There is no development plan or release cycle for FreeCAD, normally here a developer picks his field of interest and work on that after discussing in the community his ideas. So have a look around and see what you would like to work on most.

btw: is there any reason why scale supports only 2 decimal places? after importing svg, I had to scale twice as 0.01 scale was still too big. Could I start for example by going through different tools and changing the precision of parameters at least to three decimal places?

Which scale do you mean? The Draft Scale tool uses in 0.16 and 0.17 the FreeCAD input field which supports arbitrary decimal points.

On a personal note: We changed many many things in PartDesign for 0.17, and even thought we made good progress it is still very buggy and in need of some development love. So if you like to step in there I would gladly guide you through.

[chrisb]

In Preferences->General->Units you can set the number of decimals, are they set to 2 or some other value?

[Patola]

Hello, greetings from Brazil! I also am as interested as the original poster in participating in FreeCAD. I have a kind of bumpy development experience, at some times exchanging the role of system administrator and changing to developer back and forth, and have had experience from low-level C to C++ to Java to python to perl and a few others, from 2001 to current. Now I have simply left my job and I am fully dedicated to 3D printing (classes and projects) so I do have a lot of time, finally, to contribute back to Open-Source software. I have already made a few incursions in Slic3r and Cura and I am preparing to do some stuff for MatterControl, but the 3d modellers (OpenSCAD, Blender, FreeCAD) that interest me most, in particular FreeCAD.

I have been doing all my mechanical modelling in FreeCAD and I have to confess, it really takes some using to the 'way of thinking' of FreeCAD. As a teacher, I am quite interested in breaking this barrier, both in my classes and with code.

I would also be very interested in guidance on the code. Particularly I am looking at the 'low hanging fruit' issues to see if I can do something to get acquainted. http://freecadweb.org/tracker/search.ph ... ngingfruit

Alas, I have already asked, but there is one HUGE MEGA BLASTER thing that FreeCAD has which could make it EXPLODE as the one-stop for 3D printing enthusiasts, and that is the FEM workbench with its analysis of forces. Except that FDM/FFF 3D printing is anisotropic and there is so far no solution for evaluating the layer adherence of materials and influence of infills and walls, which are slicer settings. I have been told that just modelling anisotropic indexes would help, but with no specifics, and the papers I have been reading really do not help much because they are very specific modelling for quite different settings and materials from Stratasys printers. Does anyone know anything about FEA for FFF 3D printing?

[dsaiko]

In Preferences->General->Units you can set the number of decimals, are they set to 2 or some other value?

thanks, that's it. was set to 2. need to spend more time with all settings, all toolbars etc.

[ian.rees]

Couldn't help but notice you guys both mentioned Slic3r - someone mind knocking https://github.com/alexrj/Slic3r/issues/3167 out? I think it's going to be about a 2 line change for someone who understands Perl. -Ian-