This Eco-Libre 2025 Annual Report will discuss the state of the Eco-Libre project at the end of 2025 and the progress we made throughout the year 2025.
2025 Annual Report
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Tag Archives: cad
Life-Line v2025.10 Released
We’re happy to announce the release of the Eco-Libre Life-Line version 2025.10.
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.
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.
Continue readingOptimizing Expanded Metal Mesh in FreeCAD
This guide will show how to model sheets of Expanded Metal in FreeCAD, without slowing (or killing) 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.
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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:
- Part 1/3: Troubleshooting Large FreeCAD File Sizes
- Part 2/3: Optimizing Expanded Metal Mesh in FreeCAD
- Part 3/3: Life-Line v2025.10 Released
Troubleshooting Large FreeCAD File Sizes
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.
This article is part of a 3-part series:
- Part 1/3: Troubleshooting Large FreeCAD File Sizes
- Part 2/3: Optimizing Expanded Metal Mesh in FreeCAD
- Part 3/3: Life-Line v2025.10 Released
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.
Continue reading2024 Annual Report
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.
2023 Annual Report
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.
