Hi,
my name is Maxim and I was using FC for a couple of months now.
My main field is programming in automation mainly robots and PLCs, but due to unexpected circumstances I had to start to also design our robot cells. I started with SolidWorks but... well, Richard Stallman got me. Unfortunately it's not easy finding free (as in freedom, not beer) software especially for robots and PLCs but at least for CAD design I found this great free alternative which I'm really thankful for.
Another proprietary app that I use right now is RoboDK for robot offline programming. It's a great tool with a similar philosophy (well as far as you can compare closed to open source) as FC for openness in terms of a scripting API. Compared to the Robot WB it's miles ahead but as mentioned earlier I am interested in a free solution first.
So I'd like to know what the status of the Robot WB is. It looks like there hasn't been major development for quite some time now. Is it planned to keep the WB around? Because I have some ideas I'd like to implement. My idea is making some improvements to some of the available tools first and to start using C++/Python again (it has been a while) and open source development in general. I have a mathematical background (it has also been a while) of kinematics specifically serial kinematics though the KDL library probably has all kinds of math implemented already.
To start with I'd like to implement automatic orientation of Edge2Trac objects by calculating the normal vector of edges in Z direction followed by calculating the normal vector by investigating the shapes/faces contigous to the edge. Is someone working on it already? Is it maybe already implemented and I did not find it?