But unless you publish the original project file, customizing it is difficult even if the model was designed to be customized. Many people are publicly publishing 3D printable versions of their designs. So we started from scratch, and it just kept going.”įreeCAD has always put a high priority on open standards and interoperability but collaboration with models outside of the FreeCAD application-or any CAD application-is still difficult. There was no CAM capability there either. “I started contributing to a little open source project and making some friends, and then, eventually, I got connected to the FreeCAD project. “If you wanted to pay for CAM, it was ferociously expensive, and without CAM, the models aren’t very useful for CNC,” said Brad. As it became more popular, he was drawn into project leadership.
When he contributed to a FreeCAD workbench that does tool pathing for CNC machines, he caught the attention of other developers on the project. Then I’d have to hand-code gcode to drill 700 holes,” said Brad.ĬAM technology exists to automate code generation but there wasn’t any CAM software in the open source world, so Brad started contributing to open source projects. “I would spend a lot of time in CAD making a model of what I wanted to build. “I want to let designers publish designs to a website where end-users can customize aspects of them and then download exactly what they need to 3D print them, cut them on a CNC, or use them in some other application.”Ī former Dell software developer, Brad joined the maker movement and started building CNC machines 15 years ago. “You put all this effort into making your designs parametric and flexible, but they’re still useless to other people unless they have FreeCAD and know how to use it,” said Brad Collette, long-time FreeCAD contributor and CTO of Ondsel. It is in this separation that Ondsel sees an opportunity, especially for cloud deployment and collaboration. From the beginning, FreeCAD was built to separate the user interface from the core application. Built on top of FreeCAD, a well-respected open source parametric 3D modeler, Ondsel enables users to collaborate, share, and publish designs to the web. Ondsel is changing how engineers collaborate on solid model design.
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