Comfac Technology Group & Cornersteel Systems Corp are building the first school-powered FreeCAD development ecosystem in the Philippines — making world-class parametric CAD, simulation, and procedural design free and accessible to every Filipino engineer.
Project FreeCAD is not a training program. It is a national engineering capacity initiative — using open-source software as the platform, Philippine schools as the engine, and CGG as the anchor investor.
Cornersteel and Comfac migrate all production workflows to FreeCAD. Real engineering problems drive real improvements. This is the test bench — if it works here, it works anywhere.
Partner schools provide OJT students and thesis researchers who work on real CGG problems. Students build global credentials. Schools save tens of millions in software costs.
Every module, symbol library, and equipment assembly built by the partnership becomes a public good — less information asymmetry, more affordable engineering for all Filipinos.
CGG has committed a minimum of ₱1M annually to Project FreeCAD — with the goal of increasing this as milestones accelerate. This funds technical leadership, AI tooling, OJT interns, infrastructure, evangelization, and school outreach.
| Line Item | Budget | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Technical Leadership & Development | Monthly retainer | Led by Nicco Salonga (FreeCAD Lead). CGG funds the engineering work — FreeCAD UX improvements, addon development, migration execution, and upstream PR submissions. |
| AI Tooling | Monthly | Claude Code (code generation & review), Kimi (document processing), Qwen (local model support) |
| OJT Interns & Contributors | Per cohort | School OJT students on active milestone tasks; milestone-based payments for deliverables, bug bounties, and contributor rewards |
| Infrastructure | Monthly | Forgejo/Gitea self-hosted, Nextcloud, build servers, CI/CD pipeline |
| Evangelization & Materials | Ongoing | FreeCAD promotional content, demo videos, tutorial production, conference presence, and social media to grow the Philippine FreeCAD community |
| School Outreach | Quarterly | Campus presentations, MOU signing events, faculty workshops, Open Engineering Summit hosting |
The #1 barrier to FreeCAD adoption. Layer fidelity, block/attribute handling, Philippine title block formats. Automated round-trip test suite running on Cornersteel's real drawing library.
Vector PDF → SVG → FreeCAD geometry. Scale extraction from title blocks. Raster PDF deskew + vectorization path for scanned drawings. Output lands in correct workbench layers.
FreeCAD as a full BIM authoring tool — IFC export with Philippine NBC/NSCP compliance property sets. Multi-user file linking and collaboration mode for team projects.
One-click Bill of Materials from any FreeCAD assembly. Philippine parts database with real market pricing — cost appears as you design. Output to ERPNext, Excel, CSV.
Computational Fluid Dynamics via OpenFOAM backend. Simplified HVAC setup wizard — reducing CFD from expert-only to senior-student level. Philippine climate conditions pre-loaded.
Finite Element Analysis with mesh generation wizard, Philippine structural steel grade material library, load case templates, and improved result visualization. ANSYS replacement.
Every labeled drawing is a lesson. Thousands of lessons become a model. A good enough model starts doing the tedious work — and frees engineers to do the thinking work.
The Philippines has a massive existing archive of engineering drawings — floor plans, structural sheets, electrical layouts, MEP schematics — locked inside scanned images, photographs, and legacy PDFs. These cannot be edited, queried, or connected to modern design tools. To use them, an engineer must manually redraw everything from scratch.
The labeling flywheel exists to train an AI that can read these drawings the way a trained engineer reads them — recognizing not just lines and shapes, but what those lines and shapes mean: this cluster of lines is a partition wall, this symbol is a fire exit door, this block of text is a room designation, this hatch pattern is a concrete column.
Every drawing a student labels teaches the model to recognize one more pattern. As the dataset grows, the model gets better at importing drawings from any source — scans, photographs, hand-drafted originals, legacy CAD outputs — and converting them into clean, editable, intelligent FreeCAD geometry with minimal human intervention.
The AI does not need to be perfect to be useful. Each capability below becomes available as soon as the model is accurate enough for that specific task.
Scan or photograph an old drawing — hand-drafted, printed, or faded — and the AI converts it to an editable FreeCAD model. It recognizes walls, doors, windows, columns, ducts, and fixtures from the image itself, not just clean vector data. The engineer reviews and corrects, not redraws.
Drawings arrive in every format imaginable — blurry PDFs, phone camera photos of site drawings, printouts from 20-year-old AutoCAD versions. The AI learns to handle all of them. The more formats represented in the training data, the more robust the recognition becomes across real-world Philippine drawing conventions.
Once a drawing is imported, the AI automatically tags every element with its type, material, and relevant code reference. A wall gets tagged with its fire rating. A door gets its swing clearance. A structural column gets its load-bearing designation. The model starts filling in the metadata that engineers currently enter by hand.
From thousands of labeled drawings, the AI begins to learn the rules embedded in Philippine engineering practice — typical partition heights, standard ceiling grid layouts, common duct routing paths. These extracted patterns feed directly into the procedural design modules, making them more accurate and locally relevant.
This is where the investment becomes transformational. Once the AI can reliably understand a drawing — not just see it — it can execute changes that currently take engineering teams weeks or months.
A new fire code requires all corridor partitions in commercial buildings to be rated at 2 hours instead of 1 hour. The AI identifies every corridor partition across an entire building portfolio — 50 buildings, thousands of rooms, tens of thousands of square meters — flags them, proposes the material upgrade, and updates the BOM and cost estimate. What took 3 months of manual drawing review now takes hours.
A client wants all office floors in a development raised from 2.7m to 3.0m ceiling height. The AI updates every reflected ceiling plan, recalculates duct clearances, flags conflicts with structural beams, and regenerates the affected room schedules and finish quantities — across every floor, every tower, simultaneously.
A tile supplier discontinues a product mid-project. The AI locates every instance of that tile specification across all drawings — floor plans, wet area layouts, finish schedules — substitutes the approved alternative, updates the BOM with new quantities and pricing, and flags any rooms where the new tile size creates a layout conflict that needs human review.
A building must be retrofitted for BP 344 (Philippine accessibility law) compliance. The AI scans all floor plans, identifies every door that is below the required 900mm clear width, every ramp with a non-compliant slope, and every restroom missing the required turning radius — generating a prioritized compliance report with estimated remediation costs.
None of this is possible without the training data. The AI can only cascade a policy change across thousands of rooms if it has been trained to reliably recognize what a room is, what a partition wall is, what a door is — across the full diversity of Philippine drawing conventions, formats, and quality levels. That is exactly what the labeling flywheel is building.
Central hub: FreeCAD fork, Philippine libraries, labeling tools, procedural modules, master roadmap/backlog tagged by discipline and difficulty. All school partners have read access.
Each school has their own GitHub or Forgejo repo for their contributions. CGG tracks all school repos via submodule references. Suitable commits are cherry-picked into CGG's fork for upstream submission.
Validated improvements submitted as pull requests to github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD. Student contributors permanently credited on a globally visible project. Philippine addons on FreeCAD Addon Manager.
| Phase | Timeline | Milestone | School Benefit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year 0–1 | Months 1–6 | MOU signed. First OJT cohort enrolled. FreeCAD faculty orientation. 50 drawings labeled for flywheel. School repo linked to CGG master. | Immediate software cost savings. Students gain FreeCAD proficiency. Structured CAD curriculum module ready. |
| Year 1 | Months 6–12 | FreeCAD in one engineering course. First student PRs (symbol library, bug fixes). Wiki contributions begin. Linux migration assessment offered. | Students earn open-source credentials. CGG-produced teaching materials for faculty. Savings documented for admin. |
| Year 1–2 | Months 12–18 | School-specific FreeCAD addon published (PEC / NSCP library). First procedural module co-developed with CGG. 200+ labeled drawings contributed. | School is a recognized co-author of a published FreeCAD addon — permanent global attribution. |
| Year 2 | Months 18–24 | Thesis projects producing upstream FreeCAD PRs. Students using FEM/CFD in coursework. OSE equipment assembly projects started. | Thesis students have global open-source PRs as research output. Simulation in undergraduate coursework. |
| Year 2–3 | Months 24–36 | Philippine FreeCAD community established. Annual Open Engineering Summit. Open Library has 20+ assemblies. | School is a founding member of a national open engineering ecosystem — global visibility for students and faculty. |
The paradigm shift from CAD to engineering intelligence: not drawing a duct, but writing the logic that places, sizes, and connects ducts given parameters. Not designing furniture — designing the rules furniture follows.
| Module | CGG Contributes (Open) | School Extension Targets |
|---|---|---|
| Ducting Procedural Design | HVAC duct routing and sizing rules — open-source FreeCAD macro library | Insulation calculations, Philippine ASHRAE-adapted sizing, fire damper placement |
| Piping Procedural Design | Pipe routing, sizing, fitting selection rules | Philippine plumbing code compliance, pressure calculations, hot/cold separation |
| Civil — Partitions | Parametric partition wall generation: wall types, heights, openings from floor plan + ratings | Philippine gypsum board standard sizes, fire rating schedules, material options |
| Civil — Floors & Ceilings | Parametric floor finish and ceiling system generation | Philippine tile size standards, RCP grid layout rules, acoustic tile selection |
| Civil — Curtain Walls | Curtain wall system parametric layout | Philippine wind load code, glass specification, mullion sizing |
| PCB Procedural Design | Basic PCB layout rules: component placement, trace constraints, board outline generation | ECE/EE school target — DRC rules, Philippine EMC standards |
| Furniture & Joinery Rules | Parametric furniture generation from room dimensions; mortise-and-tenon, dowel, biscuit joint rules | Architecture/ID school target — ergonomics rules, Philippine material availability |
A publicly accessible repository of FreeCAD models, assemblies, procedural modules, and simulation templates — designed to directly reduce the information asymmetry that keeps engineering costs artificially high.
Hull form templates, structural analysis for fiberglass and steel hulls, stability workflows. Philippine fishing vessel optimization — reducing fuel costs for coastal communities.
UAV frame parametric templates, aerodynamic simulation (CFD), composite airframe FEM. Philippine agricultural drone and mapping drone designs for local fabrication.
Chassis design templates, suspension geometry tools, FEM crash/load analysis. Philippine tricycle and e-jeepney structural optimization using local materials.
Philippine seismic zone structure templates, NSCP-compliant beam-column automation, foundation design parametric tools with Zone 4 earthquake loads.
Solar mounting (typhoon wind loads), micro-hydro system design, small wind turbine blade FEM. Designed for Philippine off-grid communities.
Building energy simulation, duct network optimization, plumbing system pressure analysis — accessible via FreeCAD CFD and procedural design tools.
The Linux migration is optional — but for schools facing Windows renewals, hardware refresh costs, or cybersecurity exposure, it unlocks a second tier of massive savings: ₱49M–₱88M over 5 years.
Deploying pfSense as the campus gateway is not just cost-saving — it is a live network security training environment. IT, ECE, and CS students practice on real campus traffic, not simulations:
| Category | Windows + Commercial | CGG Open Stack |
|---|---|---|
| OS Licenses (50 units) | ₱250K–₱500K | ₱0 |
| Office Suite (Microsoft 365) | ₱500K–₱1.5M | ₱0 (OnlyOffice + Nextcloud) |
| File Storage / Collaboration | ₱200K–₱600K | ₱0 (Nextcloud self-hosted) |
| Firewall / Security Appliance | ₱150K–₱500K | ₱8K–₱15K (pfSense) |
| Antivirus / Endpoint Security | ₱250K–₱1M | ₱0 (Linux + Wazuh) |
| Hardware Refresh (Win 11 requirements) | ₱1.5M–₱4M | ₱0 (existing hardware reused) |
| CAD Software (50 seats) | ₱8.4M–₱13.9M/yr × 5 | ₱0 (FreeCAD) |
| Network Security Lab Hardware | ₱300K–₱800K (new Cisco) | ₱50K–₱120K (used + pfSense) |
| CGG Deployment & Support | N/A | OJT-subsidized |
| TOTAL (5 years) | ₱50M–₱90M+ | ₱500K–₱1.5M |
| NET SAVINGS | — | ₱49M–₱88M over 5 years |
CGG is actively seeking engineering schools, colleges, and technical institutions to join the Philippine Open Engineering Pipeline. No cost. Real student credentials. Real savings.
We'll prepare a cost savings analysis specific to your institution, walk through the MOU terms, and schedule a faculty FreeCAD orientation demo. No commitment required for the initial meeting.
Work on a real, globally-visible open-source project. Build GitHub commit history, earn open-source attribution, and develop skills directly applicable in engineering firms, IT infrastructure, and software development.
CGG co-supervises thesis projects contributing to the FreeCAD ecosystem — from AI model development (labeling flywheel) to procedural design modules, FEM UX improvements, and upstream PRs.