5 FreeCAD Tips and Tricks (collaboration with @Joko Engineeringhelp)

this video is a collaboration with yoko engineering help we will present you our favorite free cat tips five of these tips are in this video and for the remaining ones switch over to his channel tip number one this device is called a 3d mouse and it's great for those of you who are not familiar with the 3d connection it's a small usb device with two buttons and a knob by pressing the knob forward or sideways you can move the viewport on the object by turning the knob you can rotate the view on the object if you lift the knob up or press it down you will zoom in or zoom out it's designed to be used with one hand while you operate your normal mouse with the other hand i heard about this device in a podcast and got excited when i found out that it's supported by freecad it's not cheap but i found a used model on ebay for an affordable price point using the knob with the left hand and the mouse with the right hand makes me much more efficient if you want to use the 3d mouse in freecad you should use the version 0.19 as i did not had any luck getting it up and running with o.18 in windows there should be no need to install drivers in linux you first have to install the space navd software package with your package manager in ubuntu that's sudo apt-get install space navd in freecad you can configure the device in tools customize spaceball motion the settings regarding the sensitivity work for me out of the box in the next tab you can configure the two buttons i have set one of them to go to the isometric viewpoint and the other one to zoom to fit this way with two buttons i get back to a well-defined starting point have fun with a new level of productivity you get from using both hands tip number two in freecad you'll come to a time when you need to make a sweep that comes out of just a two dimensional path that is possible through other ways but it can be kind of challenging so this is what i think is the easiest way to do a sweep through three dimensions here's an example right this doesn't stick into one dimension in its path and i think this method gives quite beautiful and kind of fun results so i'll make both of these models downloadable from grab cat let's get started on how to do this this method for the path requires one solid and one surface and it's pretty straightforward and easy so in this new part environment we'll go to the sketcher and i want to start by sketching a path on the top plane that'll be the x y plane next i'll make a line and i have a keyboard monitor down here if you need to see the hotkeys i use we will shift v to create a vertical dimension let's go two inches on that we'll go t for tangent make that tangent shift r for radius i like 1.5 and then maybe i'll make another arc again t for tangent we'll go v for vertical shift r again maybe this time we'll go to kind of a larger radius again we'll select these t for tangent maybe we'll make this coincident and i can even select these two and t for tangent right so now the only question is what dimension should this line be i'll shift v maybe 8.5 inches looks pretty good and maybe i'll sneak in another arc here again t for tangent we have two degrees of freedom so all you say e for equal over here and then maybe shift h for horizontal dimension 0.75 so that'll be my path that i desire to have when looking straight down now we'll make this into the surface component since we need a surface and a solid and let's extrude that say six inches and there's our surface next i want to grab the sketcher make another sketch this time on the right plane or the yz plane so i can better see my sketch i'll make this a wire frame draw style and we can make this largely however we wish i just need to make sure that this sketch stays within the bounds of the surface that i've extruded tangent we'll give this 1.5 let's say i'll highlight this point and shift v for let's make that two inches tall this is one of two degrees of freedom so i'll make that there we go 1.5 seems like a good distance and then let's make kind of a nice long arc here two inches shift r will give that say a four inch radius right shift h we can just constrain that to seven inches if we want to and then maybe i'll make one more arc we'll go tangent all right so we have three degrees of freedom give this a radius of three maybe i can import the end point and make a vertical relation and we lastly have one degree of freedom left what kind of overall rise do we want i'll give that a let's say five inches i'll select my polyline tool and to make this solid i'll simply close up a closed boundary on here and i do have a redundant constraint so i should click auto remove redundance here it looks like constraint 18 can go and 22. and there we have a fully defined sketch so let's close that i'll change my draw style back to as is and let's go to the part workbench and do an extrude this would be six inches symmetric so i have a surface that completely intersects with my solid from here i can generate exactly the path that i want to because i presumably drew the path that i want to have when i'm from the top looking down and drew the path that i wish to take when i'm looking from the side i can combine these into one by selecting my solid holding control selecting my surface and running an intersect and when i do that it only keeps the parts of these surface and solid that i created when where they intersect so i've combined the two paths now it's pretty easy for me to go back to the sketcher make a sketch this time let's say on the front plane let's make an import as to exactly where our surface begins and i can do something like a hexagon to make it a little bit more interesting we'll make that horizontal i can select two points here and do a vertical maybe point two five close that now from the part workbench to actually generate my sweep we'll say part utility to sweep over here sketch 002 will be my selected profile i'll click on sweep path and while holding the ctrl key i will highlight every part of my surface to generate my path with the whole edge highlighted we'll say done and okay now we've generated a sweep you'll notice this swept as a surface i can come over here and say solid is true and rebuild and there we've become solid so i can use the spacebar to hide my reference surface and we've just made a nice three-dimensional sweep so i hope this was a helpful quick tip and i'll see you in the next one tip number three getting measures from your models is not the most user-friendly part of freecat the blue ruler that is present in all workbenches measures the distance between two points which is sometimes helpful but more often than that i'm interested in the distance between two faces there are not connected by a straight line the measure tool in the part workbench is already much better as it allows you to switch between a 3d distance and a delta along each individual axis if you select two points or a point in a circle it shows you the absolute distance in space if you want to know the distance in each of the three dimensions they can be found in the reporting window another step further is the measure tool in the manipulator workbench you have to install in the add-ons menu it allows for measuring a variety of things you can measure the distance between two objects it also measures the length of an edge here 50 millimeters and it also measures the radius of an arc most of the times the manipulator workbench is good enough for my measuring needs the last tool in my measuring belt is the fc info macro this comes in handy when you're more interested in a volumetric perspective of your object it shows you for example the parameter of a phase the surface can calculate the weight with a given density and calculates the bounding box it also shows you the center of mass and the center of form as well as the moment of inertia number four i get a lot of enjoyment out of using freecad to create really crazy geometry and i think this is a pretty good example right i think it's a a pretty intense sweep that changes as it goes one tool that really helps to make things like this is a macro known as the parametric curves macro or the 3d parametric curves macro this does not come with freecad by default so to get this in i will simply go to tools add-on manager and click on macros and then i think it's actually the first one it is 3d parametric curve click on that click install restart free cad and you've got a macro so why don't we jump in and see what this thing can do if you've never used a parametric curve in cad before it can get a little bit confusing so i'll try to break this down as much as possible we'll go to macro macros i'll click on this and say execute and it gives us a nice menu to work off of i'm going to right click and at least in linux you can say always on top i think you can do that with an add-in called desk pins for windows and you can see it pre-populates some equations for us and variables so if i click on a say b spline create curve and i change my view then i can see that it's created it's pretty cool almost gear-like curve based off of these equations so that's the basic workings of it but if i want to create my own then i'm going to say for my variables right a of t is just a variable like x right so if i say t and then i'm going to say zero and zero so i'm not going to use the other two variables but if you wish to have a variable that you know is a function of your other variable or something like that you certainly can and if i say i want my x values right so if i plot my curve what are my x values going to be and if i say my x values are going to be t and my y values are going to be 0 and i create my curve then you can see here that i've created a line and the question is how long is my line well my line is going from 0 to looks like 2 pi so i have a line that is 2 pi long and i of course can change that right if i want to go from 0 to 10 in whatever my set unit is and i click create curve then my line now is a length of 10 of whatever my units are but that's not that exciting right we can be a lot more exciting so if i want my line to go up and down maybe i'll make my max t value 100 right so my variable t is going from 0 to 100 and i want my x values to be sine of x is that going to look different than a line let's see well first off i have an error because out of habit i put in x and i'll leave this in so that you can see my mistakes and hopefully learn from them we're going to create a curve and we still have a line and why is that and that's because the sine values are only for the x values right so we have to specify what we want our y value to be so if i say my x is just t then i know that my line will still go from 0 to 100 but i want my y values to go up and down with my x values and so i'm going to make this sine of t i'm going to delete the curve i just made and click on create curve and there we have a more appropriate sinusoidal type of curve that we were looking for right so our x values are progressing from 0 to 100 in constant fashion and our y values follow the sine profile and that's how we make a sine curve right so if i say my x is cosine of t from 0 to 100 and i create my curve all i've done now if i delete my old curve is create a circle and this circle overlaps itself a number of times because it's going from all values 0 to 100 and that's not very exciting but if i say my z values are going to be with t and i click on create curve i know i've created a very interesting spiral right and this is going to look very familiar to the spiral that you can add in the part workbench now if i delete my curve again and i can even delete this curve what if i want to have a different spiral right what if i want to have a spiral that kind of moves outwards as it goes what if i said sine times let's say 2 times t and i create my curve now you can see this very interesting shape that i've made and then i can say something like t plus sine of 2t and i think i need to say t plus cosine now so so now i have these great equations and i can make it more interesting still what if i say sine of t as before and cosine of t and this time i vary my z value quite a bit maybe i'll say 0.5 times t plus sine of 5 times t now i've created this very interesting profile that kind of goes up and down as it spins around so when it comes to creating really crazy geometry it's fun to be able to play with math and have it actually have kind of a practical purpose and be able to see some crazy geometry so i'll put some files up for download and i hope this was a helpful quick tip number five i do quite a bit of 3d printing and was looking for a way to accelerate the process i tried the 3d printer slicer macro as it seems to do the simple task i wanted it to perform namely sending objects to my slicer of choice you can install this macro via the add-on manager in order to get it to work you need to open it via the macro menu and do a few modifications delete those two lines then add an additional check here in the last two lines add the program name of your slicer however when running this macro it combines all the shapes which is not what i want the behavior that i expect from an export is to export each individual body as a single stl file and then open cura with these files i have changed the macro a little bit to work the way i want it to work you can download my version from the add-on manager as well if you have cura installed and in the path you don't need to change the macro otherwise you have to put your slicer in the slicer app variable when you now run the macro each visible shape will be exported in the same directory as your freecad file with the label of the respective object added to the file name existing stl files will be overwritten and the slicer is started importing the individual files you can now change and arrange each individual part in the slicer in order to send only a selection of the parts to the slicer just hide the rest and only the visible parts will be exported i hope you enjoyed these tips and found them helpful if you have not yet seen the other half of this collaboration head over to the yoko engineering channel and enjoy watching five more tips

Channel: WayofWood

Views: 6,892

Keywords: wayofwood, freecad, tips, 3dconnexion, parametric, macro, measuring, fcinfo

Id: GqjB3v_mhBQ

Length: 23min 15sec (1395 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020