Tag Archives: optimization

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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