For BRL-CAD's fourth year participating in the Google Summer of Code, we expanded our involvement and accepted a record 11 students. Predominantly evaluated on the student's ability to develop, communicate, and interact, their proposals were selected from among more than 50 received as exceptional candidate developers for BRL-CAD. A categorized summary of this year's projects follows.

BRL-CAD is once again delighted to be participating in the Google Summer of Code! BRL-CAD was selected as a mentoring organization and will be helping students develop project proposals through the April 6th application deadline. Any students interested in joining the BRL-CAD development team this summer can jump straight to our project ideas page. We're certainly open to other ideas too. As a comparatively smaller development community, chances of having a good application accepted are (very) high with BRL-CAD so join our mailing list and introduce yourself today!

A little over a month ago at a week-long coffee-infused hack-a-thon in-person gathering, many of our core developers worked on improving BRL-CAD's source code. The team inspected and fixed more than fifteen hundred issues being reported by Coverity Static Analysis*. Just released, the 2011 Coverity Open Source Integrity Report includes a two-page case study detailing our efforts. The free report is available (registration req'd) through the Open Scan Initiative website.

A new version of BRL-CAD's geometry converter plugin for Pro/ENGINEER is now available for download. The ProE-BRL plugin is a production exporter that has been developed over the years as a means of importing geometry into BRL-CAD from Pro/ENGINEER. This update of the plugin for the Windows platform supports Wildfire 4 (64-bit), Wildfire 5 (64-bit), and Creo (32-bit and 64-bit). The plugin will work on other platforms, but will have to be compiled from a source distribution.

The Advanced Joint Effectiveness Model (AJEM) [1] development team recently announced the availability of a new AJEM release. As BRL-CAD is incorporated as an integral part of AJEM, a brief overview is provided.

After a few month release hiatus, BRL-CAD 7.20.4 is now available providing several dozen bug fixes and feature enhancements. Our support for NURBS geometry continues to stabilize with improved step-g import support, ray tracing enhancements, better wireframes, and numerous robustness improvements. MGED/Archer continues to approach an alpha release with support added for interactive editing of pipe primitives, improved visualization, new BoT mesh healing capabilities, and more.

The results are in! We're happy to announce the winners of the BRL-CAD logo competition. Over the past two months, there were lots of excellent submissions conveying many different skills and interesting logo concepts. The competition was tight with a tie-breaker vote needed to sort out the finalists. On that note, on to the selections!

BRL-CAD has been accepted to participate as a mentoring organization in the European Space Agency's Summer of Code in Space! Modeled after the Google Summer of Code, SOCIS is an ESA pilot project offering students the opportunity to get paid (€4000) developing space-related Open Source software. Interested students should apply soon, before the July 27th deadline.

BRL-CAD 7.20.2 is now available! The 7.20 release marks the introduction of a new CMake-based build system for BRL-CAD. Improvements continue on geometry conversion and tessellation to polygonal formats. Progress is made merging MGED and Archer for an upcoming combined alpha with numerous command improvements, bug fixes, and interface enhancements. Experimental enhancements to BRL-CAD's rending system are also under development in support of programmable shaders.

The BRL-CAD open source project is interested in a new logo so we're holding a competition for inspiring ideas from the community! You have the chance to win cold cash, make friends, and obtain world-wide notoriety. The competition is simple:

1. Design an awesome logo
2. Submit your design before August to contest@brlcad.org
3. Profit! (if selected)