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FreeCAD 0.17 is released

by Yorik on 10.04.2018 in freecad , opensource

Hello everybody,

Finally, after two years of intense work, the FreeCAD community is happy and proud to announce the release 0.17 of FreeCAD. You can grab it at the usual places, either via the Downloads page or directly via the github release page. There are installers for Windows and Mac, and an AppImage for Linux. Our Ubuntu Stable PPA is also updated with the new version.

The list of changes and new features is big. Check the Release notes for a full dose. I will resume things a bit here, and, for once, I won't talk about BIM or Arch but about other workbenches. There is also a video showing the main highlights on the forum.

PartDesign

Basically the most fundamental change, and also the main reason why this release took so long to come, is that the PartDesign workbench has been drastically reworked, in preparation for upcoming Assembly system. As FreeCAD's father Jürgen once explained, the PartDesign workbench suffered from several flaws that prevented to implement Assemblies the way it needed to be. Several FreeCAD developers took upon themselves to dig into the already quite large PartDesign code and implement the necessary changes. This obviously caused a lot of new bugs, and it took a long time to bring it to a state where we feel it is suficently stable and solid for everybody to use.

The principal change is that now everything you do happens inside a Body. The Body is a hybrid between a container and a shape. It also contains many helpers such as planes or axes that you can use in different operations. The ultimate goal is that the body is what will allow for one FreeCAD file to be a part of an assembly in another file.

You might feel a bit lost when starting to use the new PartDesign, but fear not, after you pass through these new things, everything still works pretty much like before. And everybody who went through it agrees that it is much better than before.

Path

The Path workbench also got wildly extended. From its embrionary state in FreeCAD 0.16, it has now evolved into an increasingly impressive CAM platform. Yo have now a wide range of tools to perform CNC operations, several filling algorithms to fill areas, fin-tuning and gcode inspection tools and a voxel-based simulation tool like in your favorite commercial CAM software.

There is a long path to be done for Path yet, sorry about the bad joke, but it is no more an infant, it is now a real CAM tool, that can do the whole thing from the 3D model to the machining.

TechDraw

TechDraw is the new Drawing. It is another of these workbenches that has been carried successively by several developers, and on the way has gained impressive features. It still accepts the same templates as Drawing, has much finer control over aspect and linestyle than Drawing had, plus a load of new features: Most of the dimensionning tools of Drawing Dimensioning, hatching (both geometry-based and image-based), support of bitmap images, etc. But I kept the best for the end: The dimensions you add in TechDraw are parametric. You update the model, the TechDraw view updates too, and all the dimensions attached to it.

Addons

Finally, and not the least important, the number of new workbenches being developed outside of the FreeCAD official source code is growing frenetically and exponentially. FreeCAD 0.17 now features an easy Addon installer, that allows you to install any (or all, why not) of these juicy workbenches with a mouse click right from inside FreeCAD.

Go get it, it's free!

 

by Yorik on 10.04.2018 in freecad , opensource