FreeCAD Badge

About

The OSE FreeCAD badge certifies basic proficiency in FreeCAD which allows individuals to participate in OSE's large scale collabarative design events such as Design Sprints. Using modular design, wikis, and realtime editable docs - it is now possible to collaborate on rapid CAD design with hundreds to thousands of people. See more details in the video, which then goes through the exercise in the second half.

The working document used in the video is

edit

Procedure

1. Do the Lesson 3a and 3B from FreeCAD 101
2. Do the actual exercise of drawing a feature on a feature in FreeCAD according to the above lesson:
   1. Create a 3D object.
   2. Put a 3D Feature on top of that object (pad or pocket)
   3. Put another 3D feauture on the Feature from Step 2. This is your Feature-on-a-Feature exercise.
3. Record a 1 minute video where you show that in one minute you can do the Feature-on-a-Feature exercise, and post on a public video site.
4. Submit video link to info at opensourceecology dot org
5. OSE sends you a badge to put on your log - and then you can do about 80% of any CAD design
6. You add a FreeCAD badge to your work log - we'll send you a badge icon with your name

Motivation

The goal here is to qualify hundreds of people to collaborate on Design Sprints where create a complete design of a complex product such as a tractor or car in as little as one day. We do this by using existing Part Libraries for FreeCAD, Design Guides, and above all - a collaborative, realtime process where we break the design into small parts and then work together as a team. The key here is having enough people show up - breaking through the typical solo or proprietary CAD design process with inherent bottlenecks to design speed. Standard design involves locking down parts as only one person works on a part, or proprietary design which is not open to collaboration. We find these industry standards hugely wasteful of effort. We are breaking through these patterns by allowing many people to work on the same part, working in parallel teams, and keeping the design fully open. Our aim is to demonstrate that an open design process can lead to superior economic results - as in design completion and iteration on time scales of days as opposed to months or years.

How It Works

In order to make peoples' effort worthwhile, we aim for tangible results. As such, we host Design Sprints only when 144 or more people commit to participating - 12 teams of 12. This number is a minimum that allows for rapid design progress - and is based on a typical breakdown of a design into 12 modules with a team working on each module. With basic training that can be acquired in 4 hours of time, one can participate meaningfully in large-scale, collaborative CAD design. By learning basic design principles from Design Guides, plus the philosophy or mindset of Collaborative Literacy, plus the technicalities of documenting so that one's work is transparent - then one is able to participate meaningfully. The FreeCAD Badge certifies a basic proficiency of the technical skill required for CAD design.

Notes

Note this is not the same as an OSE Developer Badge, which also requires knowledge of wiki documentation.