Life-Line v2025.10 Released

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We’re happy to announce the release of the Eco-Libre Life-Line version 2025.10.

Eco-Libre Release Announcement Life-Line v2025.10

This release concludes the manual merge of the contributions from volunteer Jack Nugent. It includes CAD designs for the self-cleaning, raw surface water intake and sphinx documentation.

🛈 Note: Just want to build it?

This article describes a historical "release" of this project (a snapshot in time of our CAD designs and documentation).

If you just want to know how to build it, see the project's documentation

• eco-libre.org/p/life-line

Introduction

Part of the difficulty in completing this merge was the fact that the Eco-Libre Life-Line’s intake system includes expanded metal as a support structure and a fine mesh for preventing debris from entering the raw water intake drum.

Screenshot of FreeCAD application shows an HDPE drum cut in-half with a sheet of expanded metal atop it
Original Expanded Metal (104 MB)
Screenshot of FreeCAD application shows an HDPE drum cut in-half with a hatch plane atop it
Hatch Expanded Metal (0.1 MB)
We were able to reduce the MemSize of our Life-Line’s Expanded Metal Mesh from 104 MB to 0.1 MB by simply replacing the Expanded Metal Mesh with a transparent solid and a Hatch

Modeling these materials in FreeCAD caused the MemSize to bloat, crashing FreeCAD. In the past month, Eco-Libre founder Michael Altfield published two articles that described the process to isolate these troublesome objects and how to optimize them with a Draft Hatch. These optimizations (as well as simplifying objects like threaded bolts pipes, valves, and steel angle) reduced the total MemSize from 114.8 MB to 1.02 MB.

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Optimizing Expanded Metal Mesh in FreeCAD

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This guide will show how to model sheets of Expanded Metal in FreeCAD, without slowing (or killing) FreeCAD.

Optimizing Expanded Metal in FreeCAD

In our last guide, we looked at how to get a granular view of the size (in bytes) of each layer in a FreeCAD file — so we could figure out which object was causing the file to be so large and slow. We found that 90% of the file’s (uncompressed) MemSize was being caused by just one item: a 95 cm x 68 cm sheet of Expanded Metal.

A photo of a small sheet of expanded metal
Expanded Metal (source). Expanded metal is a type of sheet metal which has been cut and stretched to form a regular pattern (often diamond-shaped) of mesh-like material (source)

Unfortunately, rendering mesh objects (like Expanded Metal) in any CAD software can cause enormous lag in the app.

This article is part of a 3-part series:

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Troubleshooting Large FreeCAD File Sizes

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This article will show you how to find out exactly which layer is causing your FreeCAD file to balloon in size, by getting a granular list of all of the layers in your document tree, sorted by size.

Troubleshooting Large File Sizes in FreeCAD

This article is part of a 3-part series:

Context

Recently, we had a volunteer who made some very helpful contributions to the Eco-Libre Life-Line project — an open-source design for raw water intake, filtration, and storage system for sustainable communities.

The original file was 812 KB. After the changes, the file was 17 MB (compressed). And — worse — manipulating the objects in FreeCAD was now very slow and choppy (spoiler: the uncompressed size was 114 MB).

Before merging the updated objects into our GitHub, I figured that some optimizations could be made to reduce the file size — to make opening the file in FreeCAD much smoother. But which object should I focus on optimizing?

Sorting layers by size

You can see the size of each layer by pasting a small python snippet into FreeCAD’s python console.

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2024 Annual Report

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This Eco-Libre 2024 Annual Report will discuss the state of the Eco-Libre project at the end of 2024 and the progress we made throughout the year 2024.

Eco-Libre 2024 Annual Report
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Vegan Communities in Ecuador

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🇪🇸 Lea este artículo en español

This article will list many vegan communities in Ecuador.

[Vegan Communities Map of Ecuador]

If you’re backpacking through Ecuador or you’re looking to move to Ecuador and searching for a like-minded community, this article is for you.

Map of Veg*n Communities in Ecuador

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2023 Annual Report

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This Eco-Libre 2023 Annual Report will discuss the state of the Eco-Libre project at the end of 2023 and the progress we made throughout the year 2023.

Eco-Libre 2023 Annual Report
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