Creating Sawppy the Rover was a great learning experience, sharing it with the world was even more so. It wasn't until I started receiving feedback that I learned tools for hardware projects lag behind the software world in their ability to support an open-source community. I published a wishlist earlier but haven't made any progress on finding answers. But I know FreeCAD is going to come up in some way. FreeCAD is a large and high-profile open-source CAD project. It will either be part of the solution, or I will need to know it well enough to articulate why it isn't.

Since I had always intended for Sawppy to be open-source, I looked into FreeCAD from the start. Back then, even people behind the project cautioned it was yet ready for prime time, so I took their advice and looked elsewhere. A few years later, FreeCAD release 0.19 close coincided with Autodesk starting to... shall we say... "aggressively increase revenue" from Fusion 360 users. This caused dissatisfaction within my maker circles. Some people took another look at FreeCAD and reported: "It's not as bad as it used to be!"

That was hardly a ringing endorsement, but enough for me to take another brief look. My problem at the time was that 0.19 was hot off the press and all the available resources online were for 0.18 or earlier. And since FreeCAD 0.19 changed significantly, those resources were out of date. I made a mental note to come back later.

As of this writing in July 2023, the latest stable release of FreeCAD is 0.20 which was released June 2022. I expect a year's time is enough for online resources to be aligned with 0.20 and thought I should give it another look. I started reading documentation and encountered a lot of unfamiliar terminology. This is normal whenever I venture into any new technical field, though it does slow down my reading a lot as I looked up definition for each.

I quickly got distracted by a specific acronym: OCC which stands for Open Cascade. (Also OCCT, for Open Cascade Technology.) It is the beating heart of 3D geometry math at the core of FreeCAD. Learning about OCCT opened my eyes to possibilities beyond FreeCAD.