 Okay. Good evening everybody. I'm Mioric. I'm one of the developers of the FreeCAD project. This talk here is mostly about one specific project that I've been doing in Brazil with FreeCAD this last year. Lots of people I talked with asked for more. They would like to hear more about generically about FreeCAD. So since we have quite a lot of time, we have like up to seven. So we have 40 minutes. So I propose to go quite fast with this like taking my 20 minutes like everybody else. And then we have more time to talk about FreeCAD more generically. You asked me question and we talk more about FreeCAD. Is that okay for you? Right. So this WikiLab is the project I will be talking about now. It's basically, yeah, these slides are, I would put that. This is the project we've been doing. It's basically a community-built house. It's not a house. It's actually used as a free software laboratory by the university where it's been built. But it's the construction system. It's also made to make anything else, houses of anything. We just happened to need a laboratory. So that's what we built. And it's built. This wooden system is the WikiHouse system, which is an open-source building system made of wood that is cut by CNC machines, which are robots that can cut piece out of material. And it's built by volunteers. It's extremely easy to build. You see that all these pieces have numbers of them and then you have a manual. And the only tool that you need, you don't see it, but it's a hammer. It's a rubber hammer. And it's basically the only tool you need to build it. There is no screw, no glue, no anything else. It's just all together because the system is really well thought. That's all the joints are made to become rigid. So this is our built building after all the work. It's been built over during about three months. This is the inside. It's not 100% finished. You see that there are still a lot of problems. But it's basically there and it's done. This is how it started being built. You begin to build those structures that you see here on the ground. Then you put them up and then you put the parts that bend them together. I will explain all that a little bit later on. So we begin to build like that. This is the base wall that we didn't build at ourselves. We just hired a constructor to build these parts that are more traditional construction. And that was also one part of the experiment, is to have a mixed system with a part that's built by professional builders and one part that's built with volunteers and see how that could work together, how the experience of one could help the other and that was another part of the experience. And that's the actual building with everybody hammering crazily. And that's really the big part of it if you look at the result. The result is not so impressive. It's just a little house. But the process of it, everybody there who built this thing went out of there saying, this is the best experience of my life. I actually built a house. And the whole point of the thing is actually to be able to build your own thing. Not so much that the result is so impressive or so special, but it's the fact that you're able to do it with no knowledge at all. Everybody was there, like came there without any experience. And after one hour you are professional. You understood the whole system and you can teach the others how it works because you know it's by heart. So this is the first person who lived in the house. This is after you finish the structure. You put the panels on top of it and it's rigid. Normally it doesn't need any more fixation or anything. We decided to put some screws here to make it stronger and because we're trying to make it last. Because most WikiHouse based, I will explain a bit more about the WikiHouse afterwards, but most existing WikiHouse projects have been built inside an exhibition, for example, or there were temporary things that were dismounted after one week or two weeks. And now there are, I think, three or four that are built to last in the world. So this is still experimental. We don't know how long it will hold, but we try to do our best to make it last many years. So we did a bit more than just... So that was a big problem. The construction was slow. We had to protect it from the rain and we didn't think well about that. That was one of the biggest problems we met. Then since we are in Brazil, we have very soft climates. Basically you never have to protect against cold or against heat because we're in the southern part of Brazil where it's never too hot and never too cold. So basically you can forget about insulation. And I will show afterwards what they used to do in Europe because the WikiHouse project is based... it's from Europe. So they have to be really careful about insulation and not letting any cold or any humidity enter because humidity is terrible for the wood. It cannot take water. Otherwise it begins to rot and to change shape and that's terrible. But in Brazil we don't have so much of a problem because the air is helping us instead of being an enemy. So what we decided to do instead of cladding it inside a skin is to let it breath. So we used this material and we left a space between it and the wood so the air could flow all the time and enter below and escape on the top so the air would flow all the time and keep the wood dry all the time. And this is working quite well actually. So it's all open on the sides. The air can flow between all the parts of the structure because we don't have to care much about being tight because it's not important there if you have a bit of air that goes in. Nobody cares. It's even better. So we have a completely different situation than in Europe and we were able to experiment with these quite interesting air circulation systems and this is the inside. You see the details of how the joints are made and they are really tight. That's the advantage of having this wood piece cut by a machine is that the precision is absolute. So you can actually dimension these things to be just tight enough that you need a hammer to put them in and once they're in they are very strong. So we did a bit of testing to adjust the calibration of the machine but it was like the first test was okay because the precision is built in so this is what the machine does. Basically it comes from your model. That's where FreeCAD will enter and that's what I will explain now. Basically your FreeCAD file goes to the machine more or less. I mean the process is quite straightforward and this is the pieces being quite a lot of wood. This whole house is like 170 pieces of wood. It's like two piles that size and when it begins to accumulate like that you really have a problem where to put them before you use them. And a little bit to show you the details. This is another wiki house they've been building. They're finishing right now in Almere near Amsterdam and there was a bit of competition who would finish his first and we won. But it's much easier so that's why we won. We don't have the complexity they had to cope with here but you see it's exactly the same system and exactly the same shape and exactly the same problem. So this is the wiki house project that we took our shape and our system from. This is a system that was begun in 2011 by two architects in the United Kingdom. They built I think above 30 or 40 in the world but those that are still there that were used to stay it's about there must be about four or five now in the world world I think two or three in the UK. Now we have one in Brazil and there is this one in Almere. It's fully open source you can just take their files and adapt like if it was code. Just its 3D models and the whole system of how you build it. They have manuals as well. They have a lot of resources outside just the files which are files as well but you understood me. And it's now well tested. I mean you see that the first ones where there were a lot of defects in how the joints would work and the whole thing would go like that and over the years you have a lot of people who worked on this even pretty famous engineers and the system is now extremely solid. These columns as we call them the main structures is really impressive once you begin to build them and the more you have like three or four or five pieces you're trusting each other. And after the five pieces are there it's extremely solid. Everybody will look at that and you can really hang a lot of weight on them. And it's a heavy construction so it has a lot of stability and it's really something that you feel that it has matured and it's become something really you can trust. This is the WikiHouse, the whole story of the WikiHouse project. You see the shapes being changing over years, all the research that went into finding the right shapes. Basically I would say, I would repeat the question, why are not they using screws for example? I would say there is a kind of point they want to prove that it's possible without any other materials and also the extreme simplicity that you need your hands basically to build it. I find it quite impressive and you would have screws that would begin to need lots more equipment and there is something incredible in the fact that you just need your hands and a hammer and I kind of like that. So we try to... Yeah, you need the machine. Okay, but let's say you have a part that's production of the piece and then you have a part that's building and the building part is... you would separate one from the other and then the building part is like pure without any... But that's true. That's the kind of stuff you find on the WikiHouse website. You grab their files. It's basically all the old ones are based on SketchUp, those are SketchUp files but they're now migrating to some scripting system for Reno so you could enter the parameters and it would build the 3D model automatically for you. Of course, we try to port that to FreeCAD. That's what's coming now. That's the kind of material you find there. That's what we use basically without modifying anything because we want to not try anything fancy and take their base system and try to do it well and next time we'll try to experiment some stuff but we really try to do it the best way we could so we try not to modify anything from it. It's basically modular. You make it as long as you want. It's just repetition of modules. In the WikiHouse files, you also find them already separated to be processed to become files, CNC files, G-code files to be used by the CNC machine so this is already set up but we redid that part as well and then you have mounting manuals. You see that they say you could use some tools and so this is FreeCAD. This is the project I'm participating to since the project started in 2002. I've been there since 2008 I think. FreeCAD for who doesn't know it. It's basically a 3D modeler, an open source 3D modeler. It's a GPL license and it's basically its main focus is that it's a technical modeling application. Basically we used to say it's used to build, to model things that you will build in the real world afterwards. So it's from electronic components to cities basically. Anything you would need to build afterwards and you would need precise modeling and controlled modeling that you could do and redo afterwards. It's generic because that's what I was saying. It's multi-purpose. It's used for any kind of stuff. It's not really specially for that kind of, for buildings or for this or that. A bit like who knew AutoCAD. That was the strength of it. AutoCAD was something everybody used. Engineers, hobbyists, architects, everybody would use the same software and it's something that has been lost in the commercial world because they want to specialize because they want to sell specific solutions for each profession. And we like to go back to the old good times with FreeCAD and try to have a kind of application that's just a big generic thing that you just wait for your creativity to work on it. And it's parametric. That's a big feature of FreeCAD that all objects are defined by the parameters. It means instead of modeling cubes you would define an object that for example that's a brick wall and you would say it has a width, length and a height. And then your object is defined by these three parameters and then you can change them afterwards. You change the length, the object changes its length and everything is driven by these parameters. And that's the website of FreeCAD. That's FreeCAD basically. It's pretty, for who doesn't know it, it's pretty common application. Like you have a very standard QT-based interface and a 3D view and modeling tools. The interface has nothing special. That's the kind of stuff that people do with FreeCAD. Where is Juan? Here. He did it. This one. That's one of the last ones that appeared on the forum. People do kind of crazy stuff with it. More and more. And houses as well. So one of the first things we did with this project is convert the SketchUp stuff to FreeCAD. One of the main differences is SketchUp is based on mesh geometry which are basically points and triangles. Everything is made of points and triangles. And in FreeCAD we use beer geometry which is basically surface. Beer means boundary representation. It means that the objects are defined by their boundary surfaces. And these surfaces are basically nerve surface. Like every edge of the surface is a curve of mathematical curve. So you can basically do anything that could be a curve, a mathematical curve. That means you have extreme control over exactly where your surface is passed through. It's a bit the same analogy as bitmap and vector graphics. Like in vector graphics you have the mathematical definitions on where the points are. If you zoom closer you still see a perfect line. And in bitmap graphics there are pixels and if you zoom very close you see the pixels. And it's the same thing. Mesh geometry is like faceted. You already have the location of the points and with beer geometry we can recalculate the triangulation anytime so you don't have any resolution in it. So we took the files from SketchUp, imported them in FreeCAD then converted in beer geometry. And then the thing is of course it's like dumb geometry where each point of the object is already fixed somewhere, has a coordinate. And we want to turn that into parametric object that you could like stretch the whole thing or put more modules or what if I put a window in it or remove a window and I have all that interesting parametric behavior. And actually this is something you don't need to do at once. You don't need to have the difference between parametric world and a world that has no parameter at all. You can start with shapes with little parameters and then add progressively more parameter and next time you take the file and you want to modify one of the objects you had some parameters to be able to modify them further and then you can really do that step by step that's what we did. And then we had all the integration with all the stuff that's not the wiki house and then the fun began is that you begin to be able to produce a lot of interesting stuff from your files. So that's basically what happens. You take these SketchUp models which are like dump objects and then you extract the contour of these shapes and these become parametric in FreeCAD. You can put dimension in this and say this must have like 20 millimeters and then you have a parameter and then afterwards you can change that to 30 if you want and you don't need to redraw the shape. It would just go further. All this is really a step-by-step work that you don't need to do at once and then you can refine, refine, refine over time. This is the finished model in FreeCAD with all the rest that's not only the wiki house and you see one of the good things is that you can organize that really well the way you want and group the objects by type and do, of course it's in Portuguese but just to get you the idea that you can really go into pretty complex models and keep something that's really easy for a human to understand how it's organized and that's one of the big points I think this is when you remove the stuff on top of it it's really the wooden construction, the inside and all the piping is there everything is in the model basically it's pretty complete and so we had this model that's the wall building and we had another model that's just one element and that's the one we used to produce the files for the CNC machine because it's basically seven of these modules so we did just one and used the same output seven times basically and so it's pretty well organized already from the wiki house project you have these side panels you have the inner structure then you have the reinforcement and then you have the side plates everything is already defined and separated in the wiki house project you just have to understand how it works and it's really amazingly well done and this is what we're producing with it all these things that I will show now that you need to have and of course the most beautiful thing free software to do that kind of experimental stuff is that you end up coding because you end up adapting it for the special case and so we had quite a lot of new free-kit codes being done thanks to this project as well that's the kind of 2D plans that you need to get the authorization to build this thing in our case we were on the university grounds we had to ask for authorization to all the university instance and stuff that was the worst part of the whole thing is to be able to obtain all those authorization so you need these drawings to be able to show them renderings to this is one of the this project was financed by a crowdfunding campaign and this is one of the image we had to produce to show that's how it would be when it would be finished to make people want to contribute to the project there would be afterwards like a call for artists to propose drawings to be painted on top of it that's not done yet no, that you export that's one of the things I would actually explain this was basically produced by FreeCAD with a little bit of rework in Inkscape afterwards because some things are still easier to do in Inkscape to put these texts that are not in FreeCAD this one basically is the FreeCAD model that you saw so it's just an earlier version it was exported in Blender and a couple of textures, lights put in Blender and rendered in Blender that's the distance between the two that we're trying to reduce and the idea was talking the other day that Tom Hossendahl from Blender is to be able to have like a one button you would push in FreeCAD and it would like land in Blender with a preset of lights already and you would like have almost a one button render and he's really interested in developing this further so we should be able for the next time to reduce that distance that you need to produce a nice render and there are other solutions as well that are becoming real-time rendering etc that are becoming interesting to use together with FreeCAD that you could have all the modeling in FreeCAD and just export some other application to do the final image these spreadsheets that's one of the biggest advantages of having a sound model of your building is that all the quantities are there how much wood will I need exactly how many square meters of wood would I need, how many bricks I would need are there and then once you have that putting prices on this is pretty easy in Brazil we are lucky enough to have several public sources of prices for the construction that are maintained by federal government like they take all the public works they do and they extract from that the price the median price of one square meter of brick wall one square meter of floor and so it's public you can use that for your own project and it's basically the same price that you will find that you will build it so if you have the right quantities you have a really precise estimation of the price the final price of the building that's what we use to estimate how much money we would need for the crowdfunding and it turned up to be exactly what we spent which is around 15,000 euros 60,000 Brazilian real it's about four now it's 15,000 euros including everything there is like a fee of the crowdfunding platform that's about 7% if I remember correctly then there is the price of the wood there is the price of the cutting of the wood because it's firm the company that did the cut and the price of the guy who did all the brick works and so so the cut was made in Brazil? yes everything was made locally at like 100 meters from the construction yard did you say 15? 15 like 1.5 1.5, yeah and this price is about the same price that you would spend for brick house of the same size in Brazil but it could be reduced a lot a big part of this price went to the company who did the cut and if you imagine that you would build several of those houses and that you could have a machine that you could operate with the same volunteers that build you could reduce that price crazily so this could be even reduced a lot if you begin to think on a bigger scale or on a more community based planning but maybe but all yes you could every builder, the builder who was looking at that and I think you guys are using crazy lot of wood this could be done with like half the wood and yes but then you need more experienced people to do it and it changed the and I think that there is kind of pedagogic thing that you can build your own house and you don't need to be especially you need motivated people to do all the manual work you can do it really in a simple way and this project has this crazy capacity to show people that it's really simple yeah yes only that this is a really hard system to calculate because you wouldn't have any software that is able to calculate this kind of so many joints and have a precise result and the effort in all those things is really complex and I believe this system where you cannot have at this moment official calculation of it you have several important well-known engineers that work on this system including Arup which is maybe the most famous engineers office in the world world they are based in the UK and built in the world and they worked on this and so you have lots of famous people lots of engineers work on this system and it all goes pretty much together with experimentation and each generation of this how that goes further you begin to know that they see it and you begin to know it's I would say it's a common knowledge that goes building together with the building but that believe it's really hard to calculate beforehand yes no it's a CNC machine with a cutting head that's basically like a drill machine it's a little head that goes you put the wooden plate on the machine and this machine goes cutting this thing yeah that is true but we had a hard time finding we didn't find a big enough of these machines around the construction yard and there must be like a couple of them in Sao Paulo which is where we were building and this one was really convenient and it was closed it was people from inside the open source community it was much better to go with them because of all the circumstances and so we like stopped looking after other possible solutions probably the laser cuts you would have like two firms in Sao Paulo would do it they would charge a lot more and this might have made things go wrong this is basically the kind of file that you get from your panels once you have all your 3D models these red lines are the it's the g-code it's basically the path that the machine the head of the machine must walk on the piece to carve it like that it must go up, go down and do the shapes this is basically g-code it's the language that most of the cutting machines in the world, even the 3D printers use and they have each machine vendor has a different dialect so you have like to do adaptations depending on the machine but it's basically the same system in our case we weren't able last year half of last year to do it all in 3D so basically what we did is export these 2D shapes of every piece of the model and then the shop where we did the cut they did the g-code from these files because it was like 8 months ago and lots have been done since then in FreeCAD that wasn't there at that time and we had to produce it and it wasn't there so we did it that way but now, so that's the kind of files that were produced from these files now we would be able to do it in FreeCAD if we had to do it today everything is there to make these g-codes and export it directly to a file that it's ready to send to the machine basically Is it computed or is this manual? It's computed you still have to, for example you take this face and you have, let me show you the path module it's in the next slide but we have now lots of tools to take one piece take the driver face of it and then it calculates all the paths automatically so that's all the work that has been basically done last year there has been a lot of work on that CNC part and now it's totally possible to take all your panacea from each one generates automatically a path and you have lots of options if the holes have to go before the external profile if you have to change the order and that kind of stuff it's really becoming cool that's another tool that we have been working on because of this project is a way to gather a lot of piece and join them in a special, in defined area which would be your base wooden material and to try to lose as little material as possible This is done automatically This interface is basically what you use that's the new tool, nesting tool you define the container you add the shapes in it and it's still pretty slow because it's new and not very much optimized so it runs like half an hour for something like that but that will get better over time we need to optimize it but it basically works that's the new path workbench you see that it has quite a lot of tools already basically now it works pretty much like you define a project, a cutting project that's the interface here you define the size of your base material where is the start point of the head of your machine and then it goes fill this up this is a typical path job and so you have a lot of setup to do but then you just add stuff add operations one after the other and the machine will do one after the other at the moment it works only for cutting because most of the people that worked on this are doing it for cutting but it's exactly the same language that goes for the printer only the thinking is different because you're not cutting you're adding materials so probably we will need to think a bit about it maybe some operation need to be thought the other way but the whole process and the file that goes out of this should be the same all the big part, the hard part is done it would be probably a matter of testing and trying to find what needs to be inverted it's being worked on there is already a lot done like one month ago there was a big change that in the order of the... you do first the contour then you do each hole and some guy called something to calculate the distance between the holes and to reduce that crazily because it was done by its position and now it's done by the distance between the holes so you have a lot of possible optimization to do and it's a long-term work actually but it's totally being done right now actually this is the kind of settings that you put on each each operation that's in your job this is the property of each tool you have some machines that have several tools so you can change and then you define them here so the... if the program knows the diameter it will know where the path must go like if you have a one centimeter tool you need to pass your line at half a centimeter from the border so the border of the tool will be exactly on the line that you want exactly not yet but it's... on here which line it is it's getting really interesting to work with and then at the end you select one of those path processors which will convert the generic JCO that we use in FreeCAD to a specific machine at the moment there are like five or six that work well and the Linux ANC is one of the most well-known controller for this machine so that's the one that's mostly used that's the kind of machine that does the work and basically this is what we learned from the whole experience of this project that it's really easy to fabricate architects... I'm an architect by trade I'm not a programmer, I went into this like by my own but architects are not used to touch the fabrication they just buy stuff that's existing and it's totally a new area that we can enter by using this kind of hybrid space between fabrication and architecture and there is a world where that's not really much explored and that it's much easier than what us architects would think most of us would think and cost control becomes very precise because you have a lot of a lot of data to work with and yeah I won't read all that stuff but there is a lot of experimentation and learning to come from this and that's it