After many delays, both external and inadvertently self imposed, I’ve gotten KiConnect to a stable enough to call v1.0.0! Yaaaaay!

KiConnect v1.0.0

FPA Grant Wrap-up

Over ambitions as ever… When I first wrote up the grant, I realized it was a lot, but as I was unemployed at the time, I thought I could manage… Then I got a job.

  Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now

This was manageable for a while, I was even keeping up with my proposed live streams but as the responsibilities of my new roll grew my time was getting more and more crunched. And then I got involved in starting a local Repair Cafe. Good choices all around.

With recent grumbling about permitting AI contributions to FreeCAD, threats of core maintainers departing under this policy and my general desire to have absolutely NOTHING to do with AI, I figured it was time to start taking part in the weekly FreeCAD developers meeting. Last Sunday (26/06/02) was my first one and while I mostly kept to myself (some snark was required) I have some observations.

The Core Argument Against a no-AI policy.

Firstly I think its important to show Yorik’s proposal for a no-AI policy, so far I’ve yet to see anything as articulate as this from the pro-AI camp.

Babies first FOSDEM! I’ve been thinking about going for several years but was never able to make it happen, in particular without a solid reason to be there, it was hard to justify. But this time around, I had updates on KiConnect to present and the FreeCAD Project Association graciously provided a travel grant to get me out there. And because I don’t fly around the world for a weekend, my partner decided to join me and we made a vacation out of it.

Welp, 2025 was pretty awful. From an American prospective, a bunch of idiots thought to themselves, “I guess I can accept a little fascism, as long as my property taxes don’t go up.” And then the other half of the country voted for it with enthusiasm. Now the entire world is in disarray and I’m constantly thinking, what’s the point.

*sigh*

moving on…

What actually went well in 2025….

KiCON US

One thing that did go well was my third attempt at a KiCAD workbench for FreeCAD. I tried this once with KiCadStepUp as the basis but as it was too monolithic I had trouble hooking into it to use as an API. My second attempt used the KiCADs SWIG bindings. This went decently well but a conversation with Wayne, project lead for KiCAD I figured I should wait for KiCAD v9 and use its new long term API. I started this project late 2024 and spent most of January hammering on a prototype that I was satisfied with. This became KiConnect

Staying in the theme of this basically being a junk build CNC, I wanted to spend as little on the enclosure as possible. Not having anything suitable around the shop, I headed to one of my happy places. Habitat for Humanities ReStore.

And as luck would have it, I found something that might work on my first visit, and with a $16/25% off tag. A bargain at twice the price.

Barback V2 design files have finally been cleaned up! The project was plagued with tons of DAG errors and cyclical dependencies. With burnout from the big push last November, the hardware basically working, the firmware still needing a lot of attention, and being actively asked to pour at events… Time for this part of the project was hard to find. But with that last part, actively pouring drinks, we’ve come to find many short comings in the current design.

Needing some storage bins for the garage I came up with the idea for self-aligning stackable bins. Cut from 3/4" ply, the trick is the 45deg on the bottom panel and inside edges. My first attempt was a quick hand drawing and somewhere along the way I ended up with misaligned pieces. So in order to ensure my dimensions made sense I figured I’d FreeCAD it up. It’s pretty simple but still parametric, able to adjust for material thickness and inner dimensions. Plus, I figured if the design did work out (so far it’s looking good!) I could CNC batches of them, that would only need the 45def chamfers routed and final assembly. Would also update to include hand holds.

Barback relies heavily on pumps. Might even say they’re required. And pumps need motors. You can probably guess where this is going… motors need drivers.

I’ve been self hosting email for at least three years now, and since the start I’ve been wanting a particular feature. Many may remember years ago when Google announced how Gmail would start prefetching and locally serving up images. A feature that was announced as privacy protecting, but in Google classic fashion really just meant they wanted to increase the value of you data, by preventing other from also tracking it. Googles awful privacy track record aside, it’s still a pretty good idea. I wanted that feature. I wanted Dovecot to automagically fetch remote images to a local server and rewrite the URLs. This method had one particular downside, running a server and a small risk of someone randomly guessing image URLs. What I did end up settling on was… instead of serving them from my own server, I’d simply inline the images with base64 encoding, attached as a multi-part section.

The Barback was a smashing success for fact it was banged out over little more than a weekend hackathon. It’s been to dozens of parties, served countless cocktails and has been on several bike rides. It’s never been recharged, the straps are falling off, in addition to always having been a bit janky, and the code has barely been updated. So it’s time for Barback V2.

I’ve been working the design for V2 for quite a while but never felt ready enough to move onto CAM. The whole thing is designed in FreeCAD, using a combination of Part Design workbench and Assembly 4. This combo works really well for my design and fabrication style. All my parts are ‘flat pack’ designed, where everything is oriented the same way, as if it will be cut from plywood…. because it is going to be cut from plywood.