FCB Lounge Blog

FreeCAD North America 2026 Meetup was held in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA on August 7-9. This yearly gathering brings developers, users, translators and other members of the community together to meet and discuss FreeCAD and related topics. It is a rare chance for active members of the community to meet face to face, as they are mostly spread around the world and thus communication is mainly online. Three presentation from the meeting have been released on Youtube, you can watch them here. FreeCAD 26.3: What's New by Chris Hennes This is probably the most interesting presentation for wide audiences of the three, as it covers some of the most interesting new features, that will be in the next FreeCAD 26.3 release, which should be hopefully out before the end of 2026. Chris Hennes is one of the lead people of the project and his energetic presentation made all who were listening excited for the new release. Chris also explained, why the new version number is 26.3 and how the new vers...

FCB Lounge has created a free video course for those who are interested in utilizing FreeCAD to create complex 2D drawings: The FreeCAD Draft Intermediate Course . This course covers the basics and intermediate workflows in FreeCAD Draft workbench. The course will guide attendees through the creation of a floor plan of a building from the first line to creation of sheets and export to PDF. After completing the course, users will be able to create an architectural floor plan drawing with appropriate line thickness, line styles, hatch patterns, annotations, room schedule, and all of this will be placed on a sheet with a title block. Users will handle selection of objects, working with layers, setup for print and other important skills needed to use FreeCAD as a drafting software. The final result of the course: floor plan drawing of a garage building The course is divided into 9 video parts: The first part is the introduction to the course with basic information about it. The second part...

Open CAD Studio is a new free open source tool, which can be used for all kinds of engineering designs. It edits DWG and DXF file format natively, which is a great feature as the DWG file format is an industry standard format since the eighties. Open CAD Studio offers wide range of functionalities, including loading of 2D and 3D DWG files, wide range of 2D modelling tools, basic support for 3D modelling. It supports paper space objects and layouts, including built in PDF exporter. Users can of course use printing. The tool also supports layers, blocks, external references and other functionalities typical for a DWG project. User interface of Open CAD Studio Open CAD Studio has first been released at the beginning of 2026 and has provided rapid release cadence. The main developer of the software is Hakan Seven , a prolific software developer and geomatics engineer. As of summer 2026, the project has several other contributors, but most of the coding work is done by Hakan. The developme...