This FreeCAD addon provides a convenient way to manage designs in Ondsel Lens server instances. An Ondsel Lens server is a server that can be hosted by yourself to manage and share FreeCAD files.
The Ondsel Lens addon is available through the FreeCAD Addon Manager.
Open the Addon manager. Find in the list 'Ondsel-Lens' and install it. The installation will require restarting FreeCAD. You should then see the Ondsel Addon in its own tab besides Start. You can type Ctrl-L to show it.
The addon requires a couple of additional Python dependencies that should be installed automatically by the FreeCAD addon manager.
If you have a problem with dependencies you can install them manually by: Open the Python console in FreeCAD and enter the following code
import addonmanager_dependency_installer
depsInstaller = addonmanager_dependency_installer.DependencyInstaller([],['pyjwt','requests','tzlocal'],[])
depsInstaller._install_python_packages()
Note: pip install jwt installs the wrong library. You need pip install pyjwt.
The addon introduces the notion of workspaces. Workspaces are collections of files that constitute a project and are hosted on the Ondsel Lens server. To start working and collaborating on FreeCAD designs, you must create an account on an Ondsel Lens server.
Visit an Ondsel Lens server in a web browser and sign up. There are four pieces of information to remember:
- the URL of the Lens server, for example
http://localhost:3000, - the URL of the Lens API, for example
http://localhost:3030, - the email address with which you signed up, and
- the password.
Once an account is created, you can open the Ondsel Lens Addon by switching to the tab "Ondsel Lens" or press Ctrl-L in FreeCAD. In the top left, click on the main button that says "(no profile selected)" and choose "Manage profiles". There you can create a profile with a name that is meaningful to you and consists of alphanumeric characters, dashes, or underscores, for example "localhost". If the suggested values for the Ondsel Lens and Ondsel API url are correct, you can skip these values. Finally, add your email address, and press OK. You can then close the "Manage Profiles" dialog.
Now that you have created a profile, you can choose this profile by clicking the main button in the top left and choosing Profile and then the profile that you've just created. This changes the button color from grey to yellow which means that you are in the logged out state.
In the main button, you can now choose "Log in" that shows a dialog where you can enter the password for the Ondsel Lens server. Filling in the password and pressing OK should log you in to the server and the color of the button should change from yellow to orange, which means that you are logged in.
You can now access your workspace "Default (Personal)" and from here you can save files and access them from another location. In addition, you can browse examples curated for this server (the Ondsel Start tab), browse your bookmarks, search for models, or view the most recent models that are shared on Lens.
In tab "Workspaces" you should see a list of workspaces available to you. A workspace maps to a folder on your hard drive and contains files and folders. Files can be in five different states:
- "Untracked": Ondsel Lens does not track this file
- "Not downloaded": The file is only available on Lens
- "Synced": the local version is in sync with the Ondsel Lens version
- "Local copy newer": The local version is newer than the server one
- "Lens copy newer": The server version is newer than the local one
By means of download and upload actions, files can be synchronized with the Lens service and Lens maintains different versions for files. One version of each file is marked as the active version which typically is the last version of a file. Uploading a new version makes that version the active one.
The addon shows additional details for FreeCAD files. It shows a thumbnail of the file, the version information and share links of the file.
A file that is hosted on the Ondsel Lens server can be shared and viewed through the website. Sharing links can also be fine-tuned to permit the recipient certain privileges including download formats.
The addon also allows for an offline workflow. If a user is logged out, it is still possible to work on the files of workspaces that are currently on disk. As soon as a user logs into Lens, the user has the ability to upload the new versions to Lens.
The Ondsel Lens server is the
server software for the cloud service lens.ondsel.com from company
Ondsel.
This addon was shipped with Ondsel's flavor of FreeCAD called Ondsel ES and
aimed to integrate Ondsel ES and the Lens platform. The addon was also
available in FreeCAD's Addon Manager.
When Ondsel ceased operations, the server software was released open source under the AGPL license. The addon had always been open source. Both software packages and its documentation are now incorporated into the FreeCAD GitHub organization.
Development of the server is now continuing under the Ondsel Onward Fund and development of this addon as part of the NLnet grant Lens/FreeCAD integration.
This repository is REUSE compliant.
If you're interested in using or developing the addon, feel free to create or view issues in the issue tracker. The best place to talk with us about bugs and features is on our Discord Channel.