It's great to see others investing time and talent into open-source CAD. At Ondsel, we believe open-source CAD is incredibly important and we're thrilled to see innovation in this area.
I am sure Ondsel will vary somewhat in UX over time (because they will be somewhat ahead of what they upstream) and because a few things may be unavailable for open-source licensing.
But most of what has changed in terms of UX is already in 0.22-dev. For example OpenTheme will work (don't know if it is included by default), the "glass" tree overlay from RealThunder is there, the overlay panels, the sketcher improvements, the new integrated Assembly workbench etc.
Ondsel is a commercial distribution of FreeCAD with a cloud-based engineering suite integrated -- file sharing, cloud compute (for parametric recalculations and STEP export) etc.
Here is how they describe themselves -- in some useful detail:
Ondsel are seemingly using that to integrate with recalculation of designs in the cloud compute facility (think Thingiverse customiser but a bit less basic).
I eagerly anticipate that in mainstream FreeCAD, because none of the alternatives are great -- e.g. Spreadsheet is simultaneously cool, powerful and utterly exasperating once it's well-integrated. I am sure we will see it.
Thank you for all of your work -- I am away from my CAD projects at the moment but I will be digging properly into 2024.2 as soon as I can.
The shapebinder technique near the end of this video is amazing!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yp6cIMA7LsI
And there's another clever technique using variant links (which you can take a bit further with BaseFeatures):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9C_ahIVKOI
It's funny. People describe FreeCAD as maddening or sadistic, and for sure there are elements of the workflow that are frustrating (I'd be happy if I could do the five things I use the Draft workbench for without ever having to open it), but at the same time, it's so liberating and enthralling once you get your head into its way of thinking.
For me it's like QGIS or Inkscape: it's mindblowing that this tool is available to me for free. The trivial things I've been able to do have really changed my life (and I don't mean to overstate that -- these are things I never thought I'd learn and the impacts on my creativity have been striking).
The macro expect a part container named "export_family" with a single spreadsheet that is used as a template to set any properties and generate the part name.
It will also export any objects within a part container named "export". It also handles recursive part container.
All of that makes possible to export for 3D printing in a single click. Including handling multi material objects more conveniently.
I tried the variant link, but I could only have one variant per link somehow. I couldn't import the same part with multiple variant in the same assembly.
We're also building an optional web-based file sharing and collaboration layer.
I'd be happy to support the project but current subscription levels are too high for a hobby shop. I wonder if there is a chance for a pathreon or similar type of support.
What you could do instead is donate to the FreeCAD Project Association. Part of the money goes into the development fund, that is, grants for developers.
As for the FreeCAD Project Association, thanks for the tip, that's already included. I prefer to spread the butter all over the bread I'm eating, if I can say it that way.