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Comment by ecjhdnc2025 | Hacker News Reader

ecjhdnc2025

No, it's not, not really -- because the UX work going into Ondsel is going into mainstream FreeCAD (if it didn't originate there, and a lot of recent work did).

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:

https://ondsel.com/handbook/About/about_ondsel/

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Aside from the cloud bits I think the most notable way they are different at the moment is that they have their new configuration variable sets functionality, which maybe core FreeCAD hasn't agreed on yet (it's also not finished I believe).

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.

Correct. Variable sets (varsets) is partially merged into upstream main development branch. Other work is ongoing. Varsets are much more important than just our web service though. Being able to configure and control variants in a design is underappreciated and will be essential to having complex assemblies with multiple copies of identical parts. Imagine a hinge that is reused in many places in the design. The current angle of the hinge should be controlled on a per-copy basis. When you change the angle, you don't want all copies everywhere to reflect the new state. This is a variant.

Yes -- I've seen the video and spent some time absorbing it and I'm really excited to see that. I really enjoy using spreadsheets and configuration tables but there are some really maddening aspects; I understand global recalculation is kind of unavoidable, but I'm not sure why that has to happen when I change the font of a cell, for example :-)

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.

As an aside, I would love to see Brodie Fairhall's take on varsets at some point. His video on advanced parametric modelling with the spreadsheets is an epic of the genre.

In the realthunder form of freecad, I wrote a macro to give me a form of parametric variant generation. I am so looking forward to this.

In the meantime, have you ever watched the Brodie Fairhall video I mention in a sibling comment?

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).

I am using freecad this way already. The macro is for generating variants as part copy objects (fully independent) which are then exported as STEP (or STL).

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.

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