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The picture above shows part of our team holding up an on-site laser-cut “chain” representing the official launch of the Open Toolchain Foundation! We celebrated this milestone at The Future of Making Conference and Expo on 4 March 2023.

This conference marked the end of the INTERFACER project, a great EU-funded project that allowed us to set up the Open Toolchain Foundation. Our organization will live beyond the INTERFACER project to improve the software ecosystem of engineering.

We looked back on our accomplishments setting up the organization, creating a curated database of tools for engineering, and setting up our forum. In addition, we attended the FreeCAD day and FOSDEM, funded software development in FreeCAD and organized an amazing hackathon.

After thanking all within the INTERFACER team that helped out and made our organization possible, our esteemed team member and expert on open toolchains Julian Stirling took the stage to tell the audience about his experiences with software development for the Open Flexure microscope. You can find our Intro Slides and Julian Stirlings slides attached.

For an impression watch this video:

We officially launched the Open Toolchain Foundation by each of the present team member holding up a piece of our logo chained together representing that the real chain elements are the people behind the software. As you can see in the picture below, we laser cut the toolchain pieces on site on the open source laser cutter Fabulaser Mini designed by Daniele Ingrassia that was present in the pop-up fab lab in the expo establishment.