FreeCAD Version 1.0 Released (2024)

After more than twen­ty years of intense and sus­tained devel­op­ment, the FreeCAD com­mu­ni­ty is proud to announce the release of ver­sion 1.0. FreeCAD 1.0 is now avail­able for down­load on all plat­forms.

In soft­ware devel­op­ment, ver­sion 1 usu­al­ly means: our soft­ware is now sta­ble and ready for “real work”. If you are a FreeCAD user, you know that FreeCAD has been ready for real work for years, and is used in pro­duc­tive, pro­fes­sion­al activ­i­ty all over the world already. We in fact were tempt­ed many times in the past to cut to the chase, and call the next ver­sion 1.0 already!

But we did­n’t. Since the very begin­nings, the FreeCAD com­mu­ni­ty had a clear view of what 1.0 rep­re­sent­ed for us. What we want­ed in it. FreeCAD matured over the years, and that list nar­rowed down to just two major remain­ing pieces: fix­ing the topon­am­ing prob­lem, and hav­ing a built-in assem­bly module.

Well, I’m very proud to say those two issues are now solved. Not fin­ished, mind you, not the per­fect, bug-free, fault­less fea­tures we all want, but reach­ing that lev­el takes time and effort. That will be our job from now on. What we have now is a sol­id, work­ing, reli­able topon­am­ing solu­tion, that is already in action in the Sketch­er and Part­De­sign, and is being pro­gres­sive­ly extend­ed to every­thing else. And we have a good and fair­ly com­plete assem­bly work­bench that has a shiny new solver that comes, if you can believe it, from “the oth­er FreeCAD”. Read the full release notes to learn more about allthis.

This ver­sion 1.0 is not a fin­ished prod­uct, sim­ply because FreeCAD is not a prod­uct. It’s our project, our baby, our pas­sion, our tool. Ver­sion 1.0 is our achieve­ment. All of us who worked on it, from the ones who helped raise the project on its feet and are not par­tic­i­pat­ing any­more to peo­ple who just came to help fin­ish­ing trans­la­tions for this release, we worked hard for this, we deserved this, and this 1.0 means: we’ve doneit.

I hope you’ll enjoy using this new ver­sion! If this is your first con­tact with FreeCAD, be sure to check the doc­u­men­ta­tion, the man­u­al, the tuto­ri­als and every­thing the com­mu­ni­ty has pre­pared to help you get start­ed! ~Yorik

With the release of ver­sion 1.0 we want­ed to pro­vide an exec­u­tive sum­ma­ry as a quick­er read of the Ver­sion 1.0 release notes. The full Ver­sion 1.0 release notes are avail­able on the FreeCAD Wiki, and a nice, illus­trat­ed blog post writ­ten byAlex.

High­lights:

• Fol­low­ing a long devel­op­ment process, Realthun­ders Topo­log­i­cal nam­ing prob­lem mit­i­ga­tion algo­rithm has been incor­po­rat­ed into FreeCAD Ver­sion 1.0. This algo­rithm offers resilien­cy against topol­o­gy changes in a para­met­ric chain and a vast improve­ment of a mod­el’s stability.
• FreeCAD has a new includ­ed Assem­bly work­bench which uses the brand-new Ond­sel solver.
• A new logo was cho­sen by the com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers, from com­mu­ni­ty con­tributed proposals.
• The user inter­face has received huge improvements.These include rota­tion­al cen­tre indi­ca­tors, selec­tion item fil­ters, on-mod­el task pan­el and com­bo view modes, uni­ver­sal mea­sur­ing tools, brand-new dark and light themes and muchmore.

Oth­er key improvements:

• There are mul­ti­ple changes and improve­ments to the Core sys­tem. The vec­tor API can now be used in expres­sions, the new prop­er­ty con­tain­er App::VarSet allows the user to cre­ate design vari­a­tions, along with many more improve­ments to the Python edi­tor and Python API.
• A new, stream­lined and faster start page replaces the Start Workbench.
• The Arch work­bench has been merged with BIM and is now the BIM work­bench with lots of new fea­tures and improve­ments added includ­ing native sup­port for IFC documents.
• The Path work­bench has been renamed the CAM work­bench with lots of new fea­tures includ­ing a new CAM simulator.
• The Draft work­bench has a long list of improve­ments. Grid behav­iour has been opti­mised and appear­ance options have been increased with many of the Draft work­bench tools and approach­es receiv­ing extra functionality.
• The FEM work­bench has had a large over­haul with many small but use­ful changes to tools and func­tions. The lan­guage used on the FEM work­bench has been devel­oped to be clos­er to indus­tri­al stan­dardterms.
• The mate­r­i­al han­dling sys­tem has been com­plete­ly over­hauled and a stan­dard sys­tem is now in place for fur­ther development.
• The Part work­bench has numer­ous improve­ments with the Part Scale and Part Mir­ror tools being two obvi­ous improved tools.
• The Part Design work­bench has received many fix­es and addi­tion­al func­tion­al­i­ty with­in the rev­o­lu­tion and groove fea­tures, as well as sig­nif­i­cant changes to the Pad tool mak­ing it pos­si­ble to end extru­sions at mul­ti­ple faces andmore.
• The Sketch­er work­bench has a huge amount of changes and increased func­tion­al­i­ty and UI improve­ments. These include “dimen­sion­ing on the go”, con­tex­tu­al Dimen­sion con­straint tools, a new Off­set tool and more. Cut and Paste includ­ing con­straints is now avail­able with­in and across sketches.
• The Tech­Draw work­bench has numer­ous new tools: Snap­ping, a Cos­met­ic­Cir­cle tool, an Add­Off­setVer­tex tool and many others.