Ondsel is changing how engineers collaborate on solid model design. Built on top of FreeCAD, a well-respected open source parametric 3D modeler, Ondse

Ondsel: making solid modeling tools accessible for everyone

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2023-01-25 23:30:04

Ondsel is changing how engineers collaborate on solid model design. Built on top of FreeCAD, a well-respected open source parametric 3D modeler, Ondsel enables users to collaborate, share, and publish designs to the web. From the beginning, FreeCAD was built to separate the user interface from the core application. It is in this separation that Ondsel sees an opportunity, especially for cloud deployment and collaboration.

“You put all this effort into making your designs parametric and flexible, but they’re still useless to other people unless they have FreeCAD and know how to use it,” said Brad Collette, long-time FreeCAD contributor and CTO of Ondsel. “I want to let designers publish designs to a website where end-users can customize aspects of them and then download exactly what they need to 3D print them, cut them on a CNC, or use them in some other application.”

A former Dell software developer, Brad joined the maker movement and started building CNC machines 15 years ago. “I would spend a lot of time in CAD making a model of what I wanted to build. Something simple like a cribbage board. Then I’d have to hand-code gcode to drill 700 holes,” said Brad.