Open Source Hardware Projects in Hamburg

[pieterhijma]

Dear all,

I'm new to the forum and wanted to introduce myself and the project I'm involved in. I'm a computer science researcher working for the INTERFACER project in Hamburg. In short, the project aims to create a digital infrastructure to support the global Fab City Initiative of which the premise is that bits are easy to transport, atoms not so much. The idea is to exchange open designs of products to produce them locally within the city. Hamburg in particular aims to have a Fab Lab in each area of the city and to make this happen we are working on the OpenLab StarterKit in a sister project in which we build open source machines for setting up a Fab Lab. A first example is this laser cutter and in the coming years we will design and build more machines.

Although this machine was designed in Fusion 360, we would like to use open source tools as much as possible of which FreeCAD is of course a strong candidate. I would love to hear about your opinions on this, such as how to approach this, what the requirements would be, etc.

Personally, I do research in automating the documentation process of such open source hardware machines and we're aiming to use FreeCAD for this purpose. In the laser cutter repository you can find an assembly manual that has been manually created. Our goal is to automate this process. I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on this as well, for example whether anyone has already tried something like this.

Feel free to reach out to me in this topic or via DM.

Kind regards,

Pieter Hijma

[chrisb]

Hi Peter, welcome to the forum!

Sounds like an interesting project to bring the open source idea into the "real world".

Starting with a laser cutter seemed on first sight to be pretty much of a challenge, but looking at the plans it seems indeed to be doable.

(BTW: you may contact the author of the INTERFACER project page. I'm pretty sure that it should read "customer" instead of "costumer"; and "incentive" for the generous support of such projects.)

[pieterhijma]

Dear Chris,

Thank you for the warm welcome and taking interest! Indeed, the text contained those mistakes, but in the meantime they and others have been fixed. Thanks for pointing that out. It's still early days for our project, so in the future I expect we will have a more professional landing page.

Great Sketcher lecture by the way, clearly done in LaTeX. I haven't spotted one overfull or underfull box, despite having inline images, so I now understand your attention for detail I think you would like our approach for automated documentation with kind-of a TeX-like language (but then better) for interacting with CAD files.

Best,

Pieter

[chrisb]

I think you would like our approach for automated documentation with kind-of a TeX-like language (but then better) for interacting with CAD files.

Probably yes, I'm a friend of generating thing sfrom specifications. Keeps things current with less possibilities to create errors.

[pieterhijma]

Dear all,

I feel quite indebted to the FreeCAD community because I wanted to post the two topics below so much earlier. However, I've been simply very busy (and still am) but now with the FreeCAD day and FOSDEM coming up both of which I and my colleagues are attending, I really want to let you know what we've been up to.

As said above, I'm part of the INTERFACER Project, an EU funded project in the EFRE program. We have our own INTERFACER Project website now by the way.

In the post above I mentioned automated documentaton for Open Source Hardware. In the meantime I and my colleague have some concrete results to show. You can find a couple of videos here that explain the workflow. The software to do this can be found here. Our FreeCAD version is based on Realthunder's branch.

Unfortunately, we didn't do open development but I'm happy to discuss the features that we've added and where possible help in trying to merge in the parts that are deemed interesting by the FreeCAD community. For example, the layer states may be interesting and the way we have different colors for SVG output. This may be interesting for the TechDraw workbench for example.

Another topic I'm involved in is the Open Toolchain Foundation. We are still in incubation phase but we acquired funding to do support software development and innitially we direct these funds mainly to FreeCAD. Note that the scope of the Open Toolchain Foundation is wider, from CAD to firmwares of machines, anything software related in the chain of tools required for manufacturing, engineering. However, for this particular funding opportunity, it was technically necessary to find an overarching theme for which we chose FreeCAD. We will tell more about this in the near future.

By the way, we are organizing a Hackathon in Hamburg on 6 and 7 March. Let us know if you're interested. For anyone joining the FreeCAD day and FOSDEM (where the Open Toolchain Foundation has a stand), please come meet us!

Best,

Pieter

[adrianinsaval]

We are still in incubation phase but we acquired funding to do support software development and innitially we direct these funds mainly to FreeCAD. Note that the scope of the Open Toolchain Foundation is wider, from CAD to firmwares of machines, anything software related in the chain of tools required for manufacturing, engineering. However, for this particular funding opportunity, it was technically necessary to find an overarching theme for which we chose FreeCAD. We will tell more about this in the near future.

That is very interesting but I really think you should strive to get the features you develop onto the master branch, right now it seems one would need to compile your version of freecad to be able to use your tools, this is an obstacle to adoption as the vast majority of user will be using the official stable freecad version. Considering you are at least partially publicly funded I think it's even more important to make your developments reach a wider audience.

[pieterhijma]

Thanks for your reaction! Yes, you're completely right. I think in the end we don't require much from FreeCAD itself. From the top of my head, I remember exposing something for the camera direction to Python and I believe we added a custom Projection module for SVG export. I think this module could be put in a workbench as well.

So, I think it's good to have a discussion about that but I guess that is more fitting for the developer's corner.

[pieterhijma]

That discussion is now a topic in the Developers Corner.

[pieterhijma]

Dear all,

I've wanted to update you for a long time about the progress of the automated documentation for Open Source Hardware that I discussed above.

A quick summary: I and my colleague did research into how to automate assembly instructions for open source hardware. With this post, I wanted to let you know that our paper has now been accepted and it is publised, open access in the Journal of Open Hardware. To show that the concepts proposed in the paper work, the paper has DOIs to software packages including a workbench that works on a FreeCAD version based on Realthunder's branch.

Since I received positive reactions about this work, I have been working on porting the workbench to the main FreeCAD branch in the meantime as was rightfully suggested by @adrianinsaval. That work has completed and although it is still a research prototype, it is now much easier to install. Thanks to @wandererfan for merging my changes and to @captain_morgan for the fruitful discussion at the Vancouver Hackathon (that we both attended virtually).

Additionally, the software has now its own website https://osh-autodoc.org, so if you're interested I would refer you to that page. The workbench is currently not yet in the Addon manager because it requires a FreeCAD version greater than 0.21.1.

OSH Automated Documentation consists of two software packages, a workbench and a compiler that generates a PDF and closely interacts with the workbench.

The functionality that our workbench adds to FreeCAD is roughly the following:

• picking items for incorporating it into assembly steps
• layers states that capture which layers should be turned on
• Position objects for partial exploded view
• SVG "screenshots" where different parts can have different colors

Feel free to contact me if you're interested. Please note that the software is not yet as mature as I would like.