FreeCAD Blog By MangoJelly Solutions

I talked about creating a Rhino3D tween curve on my Patreon page a few weeks ago ( https://www.patreon.com/posts/75954207 ) and an idea that I have to get this working as a macro in #FreeCAD. But I thought I try to make a few intermediary macros to get myself back into the swings of programming again.  I already created the 'curve to freehand b-spline' in a previous post but now I want to take this a step further and create a 'ISO curve to freehand b-spline mesh'.  This means that there would be a fully eatable mesh that can be lofted, approximated with some kind of NURBS surface such as a Gordan surfaced or even a plane loft or ruled surface.  Building it with Freehand B-Splines will allow a user to double clicking the individual curves to edit the mesh via the control points.  The ISO surface interrogates a selected surface and creates a UV grid which follows the contours.  My idea is to take this ISO grid and make it fully editable as a mesh allow the resulti...

The starts of a List of #FreeCAD Errors With Resolution / Fix / Work around To date there is no known list of error messages with resolutions in existence.  The process of creating such a list is not straight forward.  You may think that all that is needed is for a programmer to go through the code and list them along with the resolution, but it is not that straight forwards. FreeCAD is written in C++ and modules can be written in both C++ and Python. If your developer or have an understanding of the coding languages used then you could search the projects github repository.  Looking through the code for the commands that output the standard information, error and warning message to the screen will allow a list to be compiled detailing these errors.  I have included the links below to allow you to take a look at where in the source code that these messages are echoed to the screen : https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/search?q=printerror https://github.com/FreeCAD/...

Boosting FreeCAD Performance with the Linux Nice Command If you're a FreeCAD user frustrated with performance lags, especially during heavy modeling or rendering tasks, here's a trick that might help you push your CPU to prioritize FreeCAD. The Terminal Snippet That Might Improve Performance Buried in an obscure forum thread (unfortunately now lost to time), I found this little gem of terminal wisdom: sudo nice -n -20 sudo -u yourusername ~/your/location/of/freecad.AppImage This command sets FreeCAD to run with a niceness value of -20, which is the highest possible CPU priority for user-space processes. Understanding the Nice Command in Linux The nice command controls how the Linux scheduler prioritizes processes. Here’s a quick breakdown: Niceness range: -20 (highest priority) to 19 (lowest) Default niceness: 0 You can check process niceness using top or htop,  look under the NI column. For more technical depth, you can refer to: Wikipedia - Nice (...

FreeCAD Macro: Create Freehand B-Spline from a Selected Curve If you're exploring FreeCAD macros or looking to replicate Rhino3D’s tween curve functionality, this guide will walk you through how to create a freehand B-spline from a selected curve using the Curves workbench. This macro is part of an ongoing effort to bring more organic, editable curve control into FreeCAD. Goal: Convert a Selected Curve to a Freehand B-Spline The first step in this project is converting a selected edge or curve into a freehand B-spline, not directly connected, but one that follows the curvature of the original. This allows for more flexible editing and prepares us for the next stages, like applying this to ISO curves on a surface and generating multiple B-splines per edge. Watch the Macro in Action Here’s an unlisted video showing the macro in use: https://youtu.be/fycOs-0Oy8M What Is "Discretize" and Why Use It? To build a B-spline, we first discretize the edge. This simply mean...

If you follow my FreeCAD YouTube channel you'll have seen the quantity of videos that I have produced.  At time of speaking over 340 videos are available to watch at: https://www.youtube.com/@MangoJellySolutions   These are being added to weekly and currently I have been non stop averaging 2 videos a week.  This includes also making content for Patreon, replying to comments and questions (my inbox is constantly full so please bear with me) and managing the many aspects of being a teacher and content creator (including starting this blog). Most of my video's are 'adhoc' but I do have some long running series / themes such as: Learning FreeCAD for Beginners Understanding FreeCAD Curves Workbench Series Lattice2 Series Lately I have started working with a developer who has extensive knowledge of the FreeCAD code base, the hope this is going to unlock the secrets of FreeCAD and bring more value to the channel.  In exchange I am helping him understand YouTube as a creator...

Being visually impaired myself (due to injury I became partially blind and now have an artificial lens in one of my eyes to 'fix' my sight) and the channel attracting a good spread across ages with varying eye sight and visual abilities I have decided to start to build a information resource to help in this area. Anyone with any information they think that would be helpful and should be included please contact me and I will add. This includes both tools and style sheets that can help with visual aids. What styles work for you? Do you like the dark styles or do you prefer the default light style that comes with freeCAD as default. Please note that his page is still a 'work in progress' and it's worth checking back for updates. I am especially interested in any setting for higher definition monitors that need special configuration if any. At the moment there is a project carved out in the freeCAD development road map to fix issues with larger and high resolution...