Collaborative freeCAD

[vejmarie]

Hi,

As some of you are aware, I am part of some open hardware projects which requires efficient tools to design computers. We are using proprietary tools but are doing whatever we can to switch to freely available tools to expand our community and help the youngest to learn how to design a computer with there local IT capabilities (aka a PC). We have been able to do it as a standalone solution with RuggedPOD and this is a crazy improvement !

When working as a team, most of the members are spread around the world, and it is true that using freeCAD is not as easy as we would like. From a file management we do not have found yet the proper way to manage versioning, file inclusion, part exchange, and Fem results.

We are thinking at developing some extensions to support our needs which definitly includes versioning, ideally being able to display differences between 2 versions within the Viewerarea as to highligth improvements or regressions.

We also ideally need a way to lock access to some part with online feature (this is the ideal case) for a small group of developper (we do not need scale up higher than 16 people sharing the same project).

And we finally need integration within the FeM module of additionnal solvers like CFD, and multibody part meshes for stress analysis, as well as thermal analysis.

All of this is a huge amount of work, but I really really would like to see it happens perhaps within the next 2 years ( I might be totally dreaming, but let's try to fix goals ).

What might your feedback on this ? Do you believe that the current code could be easily adapted, is this features of interest to the dev team ?

vejmarie

[yorik]

Versionning of FreeCAD files is a long-time subject... Have a search for that on the forum, there are many threads. Bascially there have been many tests and experiments, and so far no real solution to do that. The big issue for me is that with 3D models, a computer-readable (ie, useful for file versionning) diffing is often meaningless for a human to understand the changes in geometry between 2 models.

There are many experiments on the web with mesh diffing or image-based diffing (microelly has been experimenting with that too here), nothing that we tried to adapt already

I begin to think that we need to separate the problem in two, machine diffing and human diffing.

I recently added cookies support to the web browser of freecad, so now you stay logged when you reopen FreeCAd, and that coupled with the ability (already implemented) to click model file links and directly open them in freecad, begins to make it possible to have web collaboration tools that integrate well with freecad. But everything is still to be done

[vejmarie]

Versionning of FreeCAD files is a long-time subject... Have a search for that on the forum, there are many threads. Bascially there have been many tests and experiments, and so far no real solution to do that. The big issue for me is that with 3D models, a computer-readable (ie, useful for file versionning) diffing is often meaningless for a human to understand the changes in geometry between 2 models.

There are many experiments on the web with mesh diffing or image-based diffing (microelly has been experimenting with that too here), nothing that we tried to adapt already

I begin to think that we need to separate the problem in two, machine diffing and human diffing.

I recently added cookies support to the web browser of freecad, so now you stay logged when you reopen FreeCAd, and that coupled with the ability (already implemented) to click model file links and directly open them in freecad, begins to make it possible to have web collaboration tools that integrate well with freecad. But everything is still to be done

Hi Yorik, the complexity of the tool is something I was expecting, but the need is there. I will try to spend more time with the community to get specs draft from a user perspective rather than machine perspective, and see how it could be implemented or not. I will also spend some time testing other 3D solutions to better understand how they might be addressing such needs. I will also dig into the forum.

I believe we might be needing the help of the human to define when a diff shall be generated, using the same "principle" that git is using keeping track of stable state, having the ability to "branch" a model, and commit changes. The key issue will be how to manage merge conflict, and this is probably where we need to have 2 models driven at the same time. From a process workflow this is mostly what we started to discuss with the team, without reading that much from the "old' debates.

[yorik]

In any case, this is an important topic, everybody would love better ways to work collaboratively with FreeCAD. Looking forward to whatever info you will find...

[ajrio]

Is there a working group moving forward in this vein of light? I would like to contribute.

[Jason C. Wells]

It sounds like the OP is talking about the need for product data management (PDM). PDM is a gigundous thing all on it's own. Especially so when you start talking about a global scope of collaboration. One of the things I've been wanting to try at home is to use something like Alfresco for managing engineering models. I haven't got around to it.

PDM is a hard problem. It's a problem of enormous scope. The fact the Yorik mentions file versioning in FC is encouraging. The fact the files have UUIDs already is also encouraging. FC is sowing the seeds of future success in this regard. I also think that PDM is an almost entirely separate discipline from modeling. There are a large number of software in the open source world that get close to what the OP is talking about. They are CMSes and DMSes and other acronyms that are distinctions with no difference.

I'm not sure that a programmatic means to "diff" a 3D model is useful or even possible. I can produce identical engineering definitions with zero equivalence in the model topography. In my mind versioning is an administrative task, not an computer aided design task.

Regards,
Jason

[Jee-Bee]

for opensource PLM systems i found earlyer a list of a bunch of them…
http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/CAD_PLM
i think aras is the most expecting one…. I have also looked to openplm but last modification is about 17 months ago… i have no clue if it is comming to live again...

[ajrio]

Could one outstanding solution be to package model changes as "history". Then the conceptual Versioning platform would then do the diffing by equating known simplifications of the features derived from the history?

Just an idea.

[bernd]

I like the "take the stairs step by step" approach very much ...

... being able to display differences between 2 versions within the Viewerarea ...

Just displaying the differences in Geometry of two complex modells would be a huge step forward. We had some disscussions about this in London at LibreGraphics ... I do not know about Mechanical CAD but even the expensive Architure CAD does not have such tools AFAIK. To be honest I have never seen such tool on complex 3D geometry at all.

[levity]

To be honest I have never seen such tool on complex 3D geometry at all.

ANSA from BETA CAE can do this