3d Printing Two Color Signs Text in FreeCAD

hi this is irv shapiro with the dr vaxx channel and today we're going to continue learning about free cad but specifically we're going to learn how to make multi-color signs with text now in fact we're going to really learn how to add text to a model i've done a number of videos about making multi-color signs with text and some of them i use tinkercad it's very very easy to do and so the first question i ask myself is why bother with freecad if tinkercad is so easy what we're going to learn is a free cad you have a lot of precision you have a lot of flexibility about what you can do and at first it's going to seem a bit more complicated but once you get the hang of it it's really quite easy so stay tuned and let's learn something together this is another video on the dr vaxx series part of the dr vaxx community the dr vaxx community consists of folks that are interested in using desktop technologies to make things 3d printers lasers electronics a little bit of programming a bit of woodworking if you want to hear about all of these videos as they become available make sure you subscribe and click on the bell below there's also a free discussion community at forum.drvax.com that has over a thousand people that are actively engaging with each other and learning how to make things with desktop technologies now today we're going to talk about freecad so the majority of this video is going to be a screen capture with a little picture of me in the bottom right hand corner i've added one new feature today that will show you right now that feature is there's now a circle around a larger cursor a number of viewers mentioned it was hard to follow the cursor so i've made this easier when i left click you'll see a blue purplish dot when i right click you'll see a yellow dot so that should make it a bit easier for you to follow the video now this should not be your first free cat video there's a whole series linked above and also in the description of a bunch of videos you can watch to get started with a free cat i will attempt to step you through this clearly but i'm not going to cover every click because some of the concepts are taught in earlier videos now before we start drawing let's go through the steps we're going to cover so if we look here the first thing we're going to do is we're going to create a body we're going to create a sketch and we're going to extrude the base then we're going to create a shape string a shape string is the text what they call text or text that you have the ability to manipulate as an object it's really text almost as a sketch we're going to move that shape string from a standalone entity into the body we're going to learn about bounding boxes and how to use parameters of bounding boxes to center things we're going to learn about the recompute option for cause which will cause freecad to recompute and redraw something we're going to pad our shape string to give it dimensions we're going to export it as an stl and then we're going to show you how to slice it so let's get started drawing i'm going to select my part design workbench and you'll notice my toolbars changed now i've pointed this out to people before but it's worth pointing out again you may not see all of the icons because depending on how your toolbars are arranged there may be icons off on the side so just go to any place where you see the big dots and you can drag those around so that your icons look like my icons remember you have to be on part design also i'm using freecad version .19 the latest release i just downloaded the standard release from the free cad website we're going to start by creating an empty document then we're going to create a body a body once again is a collection of sketches and transformations of those sketches that create something that some people might think of as a part but a part is a different concept a part in essence is a collection of bodies all together so we're creating a body and a body is a single fully connected object so this cup is a body but if the handle was separate it would be two bodies because a body is always fully connected now we're going to create a sketch and our sketch is our two dimensional drawing that we're going to transform into a body we're going to put that on the x y plane you'll notice that went green here i could also select that manually so the x y plane and click ok now we're going to center this around the origin because that'll make centering the text easier we can just center our text around the origin i'm going to create an octagon a octagon is just a regular polygon so we're going to select the polygon object here i'm going to hover over the origin until it turns white and drag out a polygon and then left click a second time so i dragged with the left click i left click the second time and then i'm going to right click to release that tool now i don't want my text to be on an angle i want it to be relative to a straight polygon so how do i make the polygon straight well if i select one of the lines in the polygon and then i select the horizontal constraint my polygon will now be straight i can still resize it but i can't rotate it because i have a constraint of horizontal here now how do i decide this size well i can strain it by selecting two points i'll select this point here and command on a mac control on a pc a second point and i'll put a horizontal constraint on it of 80 millimeters i now have a diagram a drawing a sketch that is all green that means it's fully constrained you can see it says fully constrained here i can close it now you'll notice that there's a box around the outside that's because in view i have bounding box turned on i just turned it off that bounding box is going to be very very important because a bonding bounding box shows us the full dimension of an object we're going to need that later on i'm going to leave it off for right now i'm going to go to pad you can go to that under tasks are up here and i'm going to make this two millimeters high but i want it to be reversed so i want it to be below my x y axis which is really laying flat in my case i want it below because i'm going to put the type on top so i'm going to put the body below the platform below and the type on top click ok and we are all done creating our base now let's create some type now type is created in a different workbench workbenches are not different applications really they're different collections of tools and those tools for the most part not completely but for the most part they share objects they share geometries as freecad evolves that sharing gets better and better and better so we're going to go to a workbench called draft draft is not because it's temporary but because it's a workbench with tools for creating draftings or drawings of objects used in sort of let's say an architectural setting things that are two-dimensional one of the tools allows you to take type and create a string of type so that tool is called the shape string tool very often that tool will be off your screen see how it's off the screen here so i'm just going to move this back over here so i can see it or i could go to tasks and you'd see shape string here shape from text now there's a bug i don't know if it affects pcs but i've noticed it on mac a lot if you have a start page open it sometimes switches that i'm just going to close that start page so i'm going to do a shape from text i'll just click on it up here now you'll notice the x y and z are moving around that's setting the point that i want to start my shape at i'm going to just say reset when i'm ready to start it because i want it to start at the origin that's going to put the bottom left corner of the type at that point what do i want to say well we want to say doctor vax and how high do i want the letters to be well let's start them at i don't know 10 millimeters seems fine now what is this font file freecad does not have a concept of type really built into the draft workbench or at least not a concept of three-dimensional type type as a sketch so what it does is it uses standard computer font files in a multiple formats but you have to sort of via trial and error you see figure out which ones work now where do you get those font files well you can get those font files on your computer if you know where they're located they're in a different place on windows and linux and mac and sometimes they move depending on the version and depending on how your how you signed in how you started your user session on your computer in different places i don't like to bother with that i like to rather download fonts and i found this site by watching another video i apologize i don't remember which video was but there's a wonderful site that we're going to go to now called the fonts.com and at dell fonts.com there are hundreds might be thousands of different fonts that you can choose from so let's uh lucky boss looks good and this has a characteristic we're interested in here it says free for personal use you want to pick fonts that say either free or free for personal use and then download those fonts to your computer so you'll see here it downloaded a zip file i'm in microsoft's edge browser interestingly enough i use the microsoft edge browser on my macs nowadays because i think it's actually quite a bit nicer in a number of ways than chrome and it seems quite fast so downloaded a zip file i can double click on that on my mac and you'll see inside is a ttf file i'm going to right click and copy that and then i'm going to put that in a known location i don't want to leave it in the download folder because i empty my download folder sometimes and then if i go to work on this freecad model again i use that font it'll be gone so i'm going to put it in a directory where i keep all my fonts okay i'm going to select that font now and it is right here and say open and now i'm going to reset my point again so it starts at zero because it moved when i was moving my cursor around i'm going to click on ok and uh we have dr max now it's not in the right place and it might be too big so let's figure out how to fix all that and as importantly it's flat that's not going to work very well so we need to pad it or extrude it and we need to move it let's learn how to do that now the first thing we want to do is we want to include it in the body that we're building right now you'll notice here it's a separate item so we're going to drag that up to body and now it's part of the body if i didn't include that in the body i couldn't manipulate it with the part design workbench i'm using to work with the body so now i'm going to switch back to my part design workbench go back to my model select my shape string and down here you'll see something called placement you'll see something else called position now i could take and just move it around and because i want to move it to the left remember i'm on the x axis and from the zero it's like a number line to the left is a negative to the right is a positive i can move it let's say 10 millimeters or i can move it 20 millimeters i can move it 25 millimeters i can move it wherever i want but there's a problem with doing that manually and the problem is that if i resize the base it'll still be centered but it won't be the right size so then i'm going to resize the type and if i resize the type and i moved it manually it's going to be off center so i want to move it based on the size of the type but if i look down here the only thing i specify for the size of the type is the height in a lot of videos i've watched about using shape strings with freecad people take and measure it using the measuring tool which you can see right up here that works but it still doesn't make it truly dynamic so how do we make it truly dynamic remember that bounding box let's turn it back on that box now surrounds the type and because it's a component a standard component of free cad it has parameters associated with them so i did some googling around i did some research and i found how to determine the size of the bounding box so if we always move it to the left half the width of the bounding box and move it down half the height of the bounding box it'll always be centered so let's go ahead and do that now how do i know what that parameter is well if we look back here we'll see that parameter is called the bounding box x length there's another parameter called bounding box y length and all of those apply to the current shape so the formula we want to use to move it to the left is minus the current shape bounding box x length divided by two so let's take and copy that let's go back to our drawing now instead of having an absolute number let's go to the formula option let's erase what's in there let's paste in our formula the current shape bounding box x length and click ok it didn't move but if we tab out of the box it will so now it moved to the left now we need to move it down so let's go to the y-axis let's change x length to y length okay tab down and it moved down but this type is a little too big for our sign so we need to make it smaller so let's make it seven millimeters high tab down it got smaller but it's not centered anymore what's wrong well freecad has an interesting optimization it doesn't automatically recalculate every formula every time depending on the formulas in order to save compute cycles to keep your application running fast so what we need to do is go up here to our shape string right click on it and say recompute object bam moved to the right place so that looks pretty interesting except our type's still flat so let's make sure our shapeshift string is selected and because we're in the part design workbench we can take and extrude it click on pad we're going to make it too high and the pad this time we're going in the positive direction remember last time we reversed it so this is on top click ok and we are all done we have a three-dimensional coin here we can see here ready to be printed so how do we print it well we select our body we go to file export we're going to select to export it as an stl file and let's just call this dr vaxx coin save now there are a number of ways you can take an stl file and print it in two colors the easiest way is just watch your printer when it starts printing the very first layer of the text that won't really matter hit the pause button change your filament let it warm back up hit the play button hit the continue button and you have a two color print in cura there's a script you can load scripts are add-ons you can load to set a pause at a particular place and there's some videos on the channel about how to do that if you're using octoprint octoprint can pause at a layer there's a video on the channel about how to do that we're going to look at a third way which is the way that i used to print these i'm fortunate enough to have an idex printer an independent dual extruded printer in fact i have two of them and i'm going to show you how to print two color signs on an idex printer specifically the jg maker artist d right now i'm going to take and use a slicer called image maker so let's go ahead and open that up and see how we create a two color print on a jg maker artist d idex printer so i'm going to import a model and the model i'm going to import is the dr vaxcoin and let's zoom in here so it makes it a little easier to see and we'll rotate down a little bit now i need to take that model which is a single model and make it into two models how do i do that i go to free cut i select my model i'm going to take and put a cut at 2.1 millimeters now why 2.1 millimeters well because if i do it at two millimeters i might cut off the actual top layer a little bit i want to be just above the top layer so i want the ti i want the type to stick well so we'll have a little tiny bit of blue in this case below underneath the white but you really won't be able to see it so i'm gonna say start cut so now i actually have two models i have one model here and one model here but both these models have problems now because i cut in the middle of the model that means the triangles that were connecting them are now open the geometry is open that's called non manifold so let me select one of these at a time and click on repair and say auto repair select the other one repair auto repair now i can take and click on view here select my type and say i want that to print with the right extruder select my base i can say i want that to print with the left extruder now i can go ahead and start and slice this model i'm going to use all the defaults and it's telling me part of my model is not touching the print bed well of course not because it's the type on top so do i want to add support structures no i can preview my model now and there we have it now let's change it to preview extruder color and there you can see the base and the type and a raft was turned on which is why you're seeing that outline along the edges well folks i hope you learned something today i learned a lot preparing this video i learned about these extra parameters and bounding boxes and how you can use those to center things by the way that works for objects other than just type any part any body you have has a bondi bounding box around it and you can use it for centering and positioning purposes so if you enjoyed this subscribe to the channel recommend this video to everyone you know click on the bell so you're notified go to forum.drvex.com to engage with other people about these videos and making things and let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 5,526

Keywords: 3d modeling, 3d modeling for 3d printing, 3d modeling for beginners, 3d printing, 3d printing for beginners, free cad software, free cad software for windows 10, freecad 0.19 tutorials for beginners, freecad 3d printing, freecad part design tutorial, freecad software tutorial, freecad tutorial, freecad tutorials for beginners 0.18, freecad tutorials for beginners 2020, pad and pocket, multiple color 3d printing, multiple color 3d printer, 3d printer, Make With Tech

Id: PIHVL9FuuXc

Length: 25min 2sec (1502 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 22 2021