Highlights from the 2026 FreeCAD North America Meetup: 3 Great Presentations

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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 versioning system will work. He also laid out the future release plan.



Sh*t sliptonic wants to talk about

Sliptonic is Brad Collette's GitHub handle and the focus of his talk was the development process. He talks about development's team handling of regressions, merge process and other daily issues that the development team solves and the user does not see directly. He touched on some of the successful initiatives that streamlined the development process and also some ongoing issues that the team is encountering. Brad did not only speak about his experience, he presented lot of statistical data from the development platform the team uses.



Version Control for Beginners

Ephi Blanshey presented the his work on the History Workbench. This workbench uses Git to provide efficient versioning. The project integrates versioning into FreeCAD's UI with some neat features, such as graphical comparison of changes. The workbench is not part of the FreeCAD core installation, but it can be easily installed via the Addon Manager.



The FreeCAD North America 2026 was hosted by the Knox Maker community and workshop. Next planned event is the South America 2026 meetup in Huancayo, Peru. It is planned in conjunction with Continental FabLab Summit and the date is not set yet, but it will be probably November 11-13 2026.

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