This week in FreeCAD development:

Sketcher:

• hyarion added support for constraints with more than three points.
• wwmayer fixed a crash in Sketcher (cherry-picked by PaddleStroke).
• PaddleStroke fixed several bugs, including one where a contextual dimension would overlap with the cursor in UI.
• matthiasdanner fixed a bug and added a second arc helper to the diameter constraint, useful if the second side of the diameter arrow doesn’t point directly to the arc.
• kadet1090 refactored tool hints to remove code repeats.
• FlachyJoe fixed a bug causing negative measures on circles.

Part:

• maxwxyz added alignment to selection for a single non-planar face selection.
• tomate44 fixed a bug where Part_Offset2D would wrongly produce a partial offset.
• kadet1090 patched the Attacher so that the normals would always point outside of the shape, because with the transform dialog, it was the other way ‘round for some faces.

Assembly:

• PaddleStroke fixed several bugs related to flexible assemblies and another one where unconnected joints always touched after a recompute.
• OnesAndZer0s fixed two bugs related to adding subassemblies.

BIM:

• yorikvanhavre fixed a bug that would result in opening several Layer Managers and another one where Arch_Stairs would not hide its base object upon creation.
• Roy_043 made length, width, and height inputs consistent with the X, Y, and Z inputs to make them check for in-command shortcuts and select only the numerical portion of the text on focus change.

**FEM: **NewJoker added two new properties to FEM heat flux load to support an advanced type of radiation interaction: cavity (surface-to-surface) radiation and cavity name (required to specify which heat flux loads form the cavity). He also added a new Hard Contact property that, when enabled, changes the default linear contact to hard contact.

GUI:

• MisterMakerNL updated the dark theme’s tree color and tab bar background to improve the UI readability.
• Rexbas narrowed down the reason why FreeCAD would sometimes crash after being idle to an invalid NaviCube frame buffer and then (hopefully) fixed the bug.
• xtemp09 added a Clear Recent Files command to the list of recent files in the menu.
• wwmayer fixed a crash when deleting a binder after deleting the binder’s source (cherry-picked by 3x380V).

I/O:

• Syres916 added e57 to import file extensions. This file format stores 3D point cloud data, images, and associated metadata.
• PaddleStroke fixed a crash that occurred when exporting a STEP file from a project with an assembly.

Among other changes:

• PaddleStroke fixed a crash in PartDesign on cancelling a sketch without selecting a plane.
• chennes and mosfet80 contributed a couple of fixes to TechDraw.
• jffmichi, dbtayl, chennes, and z0r0 contributed several fixes to CAM.
• Roy_043 fixed a hang on snapping to large point cloud in Draft.

Additional improvements and fixes were contributed by PaddleStroke, theo-vt, pieterhijma, MisterMakerNL, luzpaz, oursland, z0r0, chennes, and mosfet80.

Please note that maintainers are currently not merging any new features or improvements to CAM. For the weeks to follow, only fixes for regressions will be approved. This is because Brad Collette is working on a roadmap for the workbench to help better plan future development to make it sustainable. Please see this discussion page for the rationale.

PR stats: since the previous report, 62 pull requests have been merged, and 37 new pull requests have been opened.

Issue stats: overall, there are 2938 open issues in the tracker, up by 32 from last week.

Since a few recent patches touch the point cloud functionality, here is a new video by Tomas Polak explaining the basics of using point clouds in FreeCAD:

Elsewhere in the world, a new add-on is now available that enables loading 3D models, curves, and points directly from FreeCAD to RoboDK, a proprietary application for simulating and programming robot arms. Here is a quick demonstration: