FreeCAD creating a print in place hinge - Fully Parametric

[Music] in this video we're going to look at doing a print in place hinge um we're going to make it fully parametric so that you can make the hinge of any size and it'll print flat like that and when you take it off the bed you'll be able to just close it there'll be no we're not breaking anything nothing's stuck it's just going to be print in place and i'll show you how to do that how to design it how to print it and i'll show you one that's printed now before we get going i just wanted to say i have a bunch of people who are watching my videos that are subscribed and i appreciate that for all my subscribers but i have three times as many who are not subscribed so if you wouldn't mind if you just press the subscribe button you'll see more great videos like this with things in from free cad 3d printing and cnc routing i appreciate it thanks so let's do this the first thing i want to be clear about is that i've already modeled this once clearly because i have it on the screen here so don't worry if when you do it and you start creating this model if you don't get it right the first time so i've already gone through it made sure it works make sure it's all parametric i can show you quickly um what we're headed to so i can change the height and i can change the width of the hinge to suit whatever it is we want to do so i've already done um i've already printed a couple and i will tell you that this is my second iteration of this hinge the first one was a little loose so i designed it the first time it came out a little loose so i redesigned it and now it works quite well so i'm quite happy with it so let's get on with it let me show you how to make this okay we're just gonna fire off the macro and create a new file so the first thing we want to do is to draw the profile of the hinge and we're going to do that profile the hinge um in this plane here in our xz plane so i'm going to center it around the wcs that just makes life easy and what we're going to do is we're going to draw a circle so we're going to do the one with the hole in it first and then we're going to draw a rough shape of what we want i'm just going to come down like this it's going to go here somewhere and then finally we're going to have this sort of radius that comes off here and then we're just going to constrain this so we will of course we want this radius to be coincident with that center and we want this and this to be tangential and that will do that and what else do we have so we i think we have that guys in the right place yep so now we just want to dimension that and we're going to make just to get started we're going to make that five we're going to dimension this to 10. and then we just need a dimension for this length so we're going to go from here to here give our length and they can stay as it is for now and so that's our basic profile the other side of the hinge is going to be the exact same profile except for it won't have a hole in it and the hinge is just going to be uh you know both of them going to be the same length of course so before we do any parametric dimensions i'm just going to create a pad with this i'm going to do it symmetrically on the plane and for now we'll make it 50 long just for because so that's one side i'm going to just go ahead and i'm going to do the other side so i'm going to make my part current i'm going to create a new body and i'm going to create a new sketch and it's going to be on the xz plane again and now i'm going to do the exact same profile without the hole in it so so this time we'll go from here to here like that then we're going to just do our radius bring him out he sort of comes out something like that and then we're going to make this guy and this guy tangential that's done make that a vertical because you can quite get it and we're going to dimension got to make sure that this guy if we look at our center point we want our center point of that guy to be on there so i'll make those coincident i must have something else selected so i'll just deselect reselect center that point and we're going to make this guy a length from there to there and we're going to give this one a dimension and we are done so i can close that and i can create a pad i'm making 50 as well and i want to make that pad symmetrical so everything's hitting on the same spot and then of course we need to use our parametric so that we can make them the same so let's go ahead and create a spreadsheet i'll move into the spreadsheet workbench and create a new spreadsheet and i'm going to rename this spreadsheet to inch sheet just so it's not called spreadsheet and i know that i'm going to need a hinge height i know i'm going to need a hinge width i know i'm going to need a pivot outer a pivot inner so those are going to be my diameters and then a pivot center and i know i'm gonna want a clasp width clasp center and a class clearance i don't want to space clearance and then having done that i'm going to highlight all of these and use the macro that i showed you before which is this easy alias all it does it creates an alias for this name for this field right here so my hinge height to start with can be 50. my hinge width to start with can be 30 my pivot outer is going to be two times my pivot inner so i'm gonna make my pivot inner that's gonna be the whole diameter and then i'm gonna make this equal the pivot inner times two and then my class width is going to be uh we'll we'll actually consider these ones later as we move on because they're going to be calculated and what i want to do as well is i always put calculated alongside those pieces that i calculated that way i won't go and change this manually because i know it's calculated so i like to do that so let's tile these two windows and let's go back to our sketch for the first body take a look at that guy and we can see that this should be the pivot outer so spreadsheet dot pivot outer say okay so that is immediately 10 mil this guy is going to be my spreadsheet dot pivot i'm sorry spreadsheet dot hinge width and if i zoom in there and remember this if i hit this it shows a sectional view of anything that's on the surface so i can actually see into my sketch and then this one remember to get to this um edit in the dimension i press that little blue guy there that little i don't even know what that is it looks like a wave symbol like i'm not sure what it's supposed to be um i press that spreadsheet and it's going to be pivot you know so now i have my shape for the first body is all parametric so if i close that this guy is now working with this hinge width so if i make that 45 for instance you can see it's already growing so now this other one that's that's oddly uh proportioned we're going to go in and do the same thing for that so we'll go in here this is going to be spreadsheet dot pivot outer and this guy is going to be spreadsheet top hinge width hinge width okay and now if i say close you'll see they're both the same size it starts to look a bit more the way it should go make my hinge width back to 30 where it was now it looks more proportioned and of course the hinge height is on this pad so where the pad length is we're going to make that spreadsheet dot hinge height and we're going to do that for both these pads spreadsheet.hinge height [Music] okay so now we have a parametric shape so if i make that 120 everything should go longer so that whole thing is parametric but if you look here it looks like there's a hole or there's some kind of shape going the whole way through that's not actually the case it's because of the same length and they overlap so you can see both parts of the information okay so now we need to make the cutouts for both sides and the critical part for that is going to be to mark the centers of those cut outs or those the pieces that we're leaving in so first things first we need to make this body our active body so we double click on there make that the active body and then we draw a sketch and this time we're going to go on the x y plane because we're cutting straight through and then we can drop this down all right so first things first we're going to cut into the side that had the holes in it so the second side so i'm going to turn off this first side so we're going to cut into this side and for this one we want the outsides to be cut away so that we don't show any holes on the outside remember this side has the holes in it so so what we're going to do is we're going to set this up so that the cutouts start out here and then those cut outs we want to have um four cut outs so we're going to have a cut out here leaving the middle piece in and then we're going to cut out here and then we're going to cut out here and we're going to join it back up here so that's the basic shape of our comb that we're going to use so once more we are going to constrain this using geometry first we're going to switch to that sectional view so that we can see our whole drawing and we're going to constrain our horizontal pieces where they should have been horizontal and it didn't catch them the the better you are at drawing these out free hand again them horizontally it'll automatically put in those constraints i sometimes don't get it as straight as i should and so what happens is that it ends up messing that up so i'm gonna hit these guys and tell them they're all in line i'm gonna hit these guys and then i'm going to do the same for these guys this time they're all in line and now i want to create some centers so i'm going to have a center for each of these um pieces so i need to make sure that everything stays central so in this case we're going to have a center here and a center here and we have to constrain these lines as well so i'm going to tell those they're equal i'm going to tell those lines they're in line that way just it makes it easier to constrain them and i will give them a dimension from the center to that center pull like a help here and then i'm going to give a dimension from that center to that center and then i'm going to tell this that it's symmetrical around that center line i'm going to tell this that it's symmetrical around this center line didn't slight everything go so you have to select point point and then the line to make that work and the same with this guy around the center line so now they're all central so if we give them a dimension that dimension will stay central around the line so uh one thing we need to do is we need to work out what this class center should be so if we have um if we're gonna have three of these guys in there we're gonna need to divide that hinge height up so that we get um the right amount for each of those and then in addition to that we're going to say that this guy this guy and this guy are equal and we will give this one a dimension too so the class width is going to be equal to the hinge height divided by six and the clasp center is going to be equal to the hinge height divided by three and our class clearance is going to be 0.4 for now so this is we're going to say that this this are calculated and now we're going to just assign them so this is going to be clasp center spreadsheet dot clasp center this one will be spreadsheet don't clasp center and this one will be equal to spreadsheet double clasp width now where possible or actually as a matter of preference we should do our calculation in the spreadsheet that way we don't have odd things in our dimensions or our constraints that we're not sure about because we want to make sure that the calculations are obvious to us so when we hit here i can see that what the calculation is otherwise i gotta go into the into each of the dimensions and see what we calculated so that's all good um and then we need to just finally constrain everything so we're gonna we're gonna go in here we're gonna give this a width just to be on the safe side and then we're just going to check where our six degrees of freedom are and we need we have a point point width width i don't know why that one is not constrained let's just check that it's because we don't have a dimension from there to there which we should have and we're going to make that dimension also parametric it doesn't really need to be but we're going to just so that it's always um larger than than the uh if outer so we're going to call this pivot outer and we'll just times that by two of course i said don't do that and then i immediately did it but for this one it honestly it doesn't it doesn't matter it's not really uh that big of a deal it's just a matter of keeping um keeping these center lines beyond the pivot outer so where else don't we have we need a dimension that goes across here and we also need our dimensions that go from here to here and here from here so let's go ahead and do those because they're going to be our clearance it's going to be a pivot clearance that we create and in fact i'm going to change this one to pivot clearance instead of pivot center and again that clearance we can create and i'm going to call that 1 mil for now so i need a dimension that goes from here that's our center point to any one of these and that's going to be spreadsheet the pivot outer divided by two plus the pivot clearance spreadsheet pivot clearance this one is going to be pivot outer divided by two plus spreadsheet dot pivot clearance and that is that side and then we're going to do the same for this guy spreadsheet pivot outer divided by two plus spreadsheet pivot clearance and there we have our clearance is done so finally we need to have a dimension that goes for this width here and to do that we are going to just dimension that width and we're going to call that spreadsheet pivot outer times three and then finally we have to have a distance for these so what we're going to do is we're going to make all of those equal distant and i think we'll be good to go so that's looking a little bit um crowded there so i just want to close my spreadsheet for a second so we can see and so what we're going to do is we're going to take that and we're going to make this this see that line there this and there's a line under there we're going to make those equal and there you have it so now if i close that and i create a pad i'm sorry not a pad we're creating a pocket and we're going to do that pocket symmetrical and we're going to make that pocket equal to spreadsheet pivot outer plus pivot clearance and there you have it so now we have our hinge and we have three pieces there with holes in them ready to accept the other side of the hinge and what we're going to do with that is we're going to create the other half to fit into those holes and we will put um pins on the other half so let's see how we do that video became very long it's actually an hour long so what i'm going to do is i'm going to make it in two parts and i'm going to deliver you this part on saturday and then i will post the second part on wednesday next week so thanks for watching if you liked it please give us a thumbs up if you haven't already subscribe thanks you

Channel: Adventures in creation

Views: 9,287

Keywords: FreeCAD, CNC, CAD, CAM, CNC routing, Design, DIY, woodworking, 3D printing, maker, creativity, art, crafts

Id: BD_iP7djo7Q

Length: 28min 45sec (1725 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 23 2021