Collaborative FreeCAD Platform

Overview

• [1] FreeCAD project association foundation has worked to make the Ondsel Lens platform freely available.The installation is hosted on Github: [2]. This essentially acts as a repository for CAD models and features online collaborative tools.

Initial Observations

• The tool is a work in progress. It's still under active development but it is functional. I was able to get the server up and tested in about 10 minutes following the Github. It would definitely be worthwhile to actively watch/contribute to this project to get in features that would be valuable.
• Interacting with the models on the server was actually really nice! The interface is snappy and you can easily create new thumbnails of models. You can export models into whichever format you need.
• There are various methods in which you can host this. There is a pre-built .env template built for AWS but someone could create their own to work with any cloud host or local server.
• You can share public links to models or keep some private if necessary. There is the ability to create various workspaces as well.
• Looks like the project stack is built on Feathers(Have not encountered this framework myself...) [[3]] Interesting framework, used specifically for real-time web applications.
• An Ondsel Lens plugin is already available for FreeCAD(I'm using v1.0.1). I need to test this out with the Ondsel test server but I have not been able to connect to the local instance. Have to investigate a bit more.

Potential Features

• It would be nice to have the ability to leave comments/discussions on models. This could be implemented without too much effort I believe.
• Taking this a step further, it would be nice to have multiple users working on one CAD model live (similar interface to Penpot: [[4]]) with constraints as to who is "driving" the collaboration.