Making the Enclosure Lid In FreeCAD - 3D printing and parametric design

[Music] in this video we're going to create the lid for this box a couple of people ask me some questions about the box in particular ian chilvers asked me to create the lid and to show how you can check for interference so we can see if we got clearances on the lid i'll show you how we do that and then also uh yavi serrano asked me how you can make holes in the side of the of a box or he's actually doing cabinet they wanted to know how to make a hole in the side of something so i'm going to show you that during the creation of this lid first things first what we want to do is go to our spreadsheet if you remember we had all of the dimensions here on the spreadsheet we're going to need some new dimensions for the lid so we're going to need a clearance so we're going to have clearance sides so that's going to be the clearance between the the box lid and the sides then we're going to have a clearance hole that's going to be the hole in the lid that clears so you can get a screw through into the bottom part of the box and then we also need a lid height so we're going to create that now the clearance for the sides is going to be 0.2 in this case and that is something that is arbitrary we can choose that clearance the clearance for the hole we're going to make this hole diameter plus 2 that way it'll always change if we change the whole diameter it'll update so we're going to say that's b8 plus two and then the lid height i think the lid height can be a quarter of the box height that's the number we're gonna go for so that will be b four divided by four and so that gives you all of those uh extra dimensions that we need now remember we have that little macro so i can select those go to this macro run this easy alias macro and it will make those an alias so now this dimension has this alias so that's all taken care of now i'm going to do is tile the two windows and i'm actually going to bring this window overlapping that window because i want to be able to see these dimensions but i don't really want to take up too much real estate on my modeling okay so the first thing we need to do is to create a new body we don't want to have the bodies together particularly if we want to see them uh in an assembly we want to be able to move the lid off the box so and if you want to print it you want it to be a separate body so what we're going to do is we're going to select the part we're in part design workbench and we're going to say create new body and this is our new body and it becomes the selected body to start from so now we're going to do a sketch for the lid and we're going to do that on the xy plane the same as the boxes and for the lid we're just gonna make a very similar shape to the box itself and what we did is we just made a box put on some radii and i think i figured this radii thing out wherever you start the first click is the size the radius is going to be when you when you do it so if i show you here if i click back here and then i click up close here you see it made that larger radius it took me a little while to figure that out but um it's kind of important to know that because sometimes i made the radius the wrong size so then we're going to take these points and we're going to make them symmetrical and then we're going to tell it that this this this and this are all equal and then we are going to actually give the radius a dimension and that's going to be the radius is going to be this uh inside radius okay so we're going to go spreadsheet dot inside radius and that gives us the radius of the that the box has now we can use the same radius because we're going to have a clearance so it's going to push everything back so you'll have a clearance on that radius even though it's the same radius as the inside it will have a clearance on it so it should still fit in there perfectly well now i'm going to zoom in because we want to make sure that we get our dimensions in the right place so these dimensions go off this and this point and that's going to be the same size as the box width so we have a box length and a box width and so that's going to be the box width because we want the outside of the lid to be the same as the outside of the box so we need to go spreadsheet and then box width and currently the box width and the box length are set the same so we will see that that will assume the 120 and we're going to do the same thing for this dimension we're going to make sure we pick these outside points and that's going to be box length so spreadsheet dot box length and that goes to 120 as well so that is essentially our box lid so we can close that and we can pad that and we're going to pad that to be lid height so spreadsheet dot lid height and that's all good now of course our lid is in the wrong position because this box was drawn off the xy plane too and if you remember the outside of the box i moved it down by a wall thickness so if we want this to be on top of the box if we want the lid to be on top of the box um as we're modeling it it doesn't have to be of course i can we can model it um if we hide this guy we can model it here in this space um with no problem if we turn the box back on though we got a bit of a confusion here and it's probably a good idea to have the box on so so again this box was was created on this same xy plane and with that being the case the um the box outside was moved down by one wall thickness but now the lid is starting at the bottom of the box plus a wall thickness so what we want to do is move the lid up to this surface and to do that we're going to modify the placement of the original sketch so we can take care of that over here so in fact what we want to do is change this attachment and we're going to change the position of this sketch it's on the z axis we're going to change it to spreadsheet dot box height minus spreadsheet dot wall thickness and that will pop the lid directly on top of the box and i just realized i made a mistake on this radius this should not be the inside radius it should be outside radius so we're going to fix that my mistake another reason why we want to put the lid on top is so you can see that it all lines up and there we go so the beauty of parametric design so there you go now the lid is fitting directly on top of the box it is closed of course and we can move it anytime we want to but for now we're going to model it right there in position so the next thing we need to do the way this lid works it has a pad on the inside that lines up with the inside of this box and that will hold the lid in the left and right direction while you put screws into each of the corners so the next thing we want to do is create that pad so again we're going to do a new sketch we're going to do on the xy plane everything so far has been on the xy plane no reason not to and then this one is going to be a box and of course you can't see the sketch so here's a little trick this little box up here switches between section and full view so if i click that now it's a sectional view so i can see my box that's a that's a neat little trick that's a good one to have again i should tell you i am working in free cad version 0.19 i know version 0.18 is the current released version but this point one nine the the development version is very stable and i've been using uh these versions of 0.19 for some time and if you want to see my build it's actually 0.19 revision number 22611 and you can download those off the main freecad page just where it says download if you scroll down uh there's a place below where you can see what needs to uh or what the development versions are what you can download so i strongly recommend that because some of the features are going to take a while to get into the released version but they work very well and they're very stable okay so i've just done exactly the same thing to this box or this sketch of a box that i did to the lid which is put those radii on the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to select this point and this point and the center point and you guessed it i'm going to make that symmetrical then i'm going to dimension this radius this time it should be the inside radius so we're going to do that spreadsheet dot inside radius and we'll say okay and then we want to say this and this and where did that radius go i should have made them all equal before i went in there you know what i think that one's almost disappeared so i might have to yeah that radius has become so small there's not even a radius there so that's a little bit of a bug let me go back out of here i'm going to control z so the first thing i'm going to do is say that radius that radius that radius and that radius are all the same now i'm going to dimension this radius to be the inside radius so we're going to say dimension get this guy spreadsheet inside radius and there you go now they're all the right radius and then of course we want to do those same dimensions so go out to these make sure you go to these outside points not the inside points otherwise you can end up with the wrong dimension and this one is just a spreadsheet um inside whereas a box inside width and inside length so this is going to be the inside width now this has to fit inside this box so actually we want to modify that it's going to be inside width minus the spreadsheet and then our clearance sides times two so you want two clearances i'm actually going to put that in friends just so i have that right say okay and that is my inside dimension and then this guy is going to be this dimension so similar thing here this is going to be spreadsheet dot inside length minus spreadsheet so clearance sides times two let's say okay and there we have it so now i can close that and we're going to pad this but we want to make sure that this sketch is at the bottom of this part here so so the original lid we moved up now we're going to move this sketch up as well so we're going to go on our z position and we're going to say that this is spreadsheet dot box height minus spreadsheet box wall thickness and i should put our sketch right on the bottom surface of that lid and we can check that we can go here and turn that off that turn around there's our sketch right there so now we're going to pad this sketch and we're going to pad it and the amount we're going to pat it is going to be the wall thickness because that's how much clearance we put on there so that's going to be wall thickness minus the spreadsheet clearance sides and then we're going to reverse it because we want to stick out of course so we say okay and then there's our lid and that top bit fits into the bottom bit okay so now we have that we need to put some holes through this box so to do that we're going to do another sketch and we're going to do it on the x y plane and we're literally just going to draw a hole and we're going to use this handy dandy little trick again and this time we have a diameter which is this clearance hole so i'm going to hit that guy and say spreadsheet dot clearance whole and then we need a couple of dimensions so we're going to go from this center point to the center of the circle and if you remember we set this up to be whole center length so then the other dimension is again from that center point to the center of the radius and it is whole center width and once again these dimensions are the same at the moment because the box is the same so close that and you can see that my hole is back on that line there but i think i can still do a pocket and say it goes through all and reverse and there it goes my hole is all the way through that piece so for javi serrano how you put a hole through you just draw a sketch you make a pocket and then you can put that all the way through or you can put it to a depth whatever depth you want and we're going to say okay to that and now we're going to make this hole the mirror and we're going to mirror it on y plane that is not the right plane the x z plane there we go and then we are going to add another mirror and we're going to make that on the yz plane so now we have four holes and each one is mirrored so that basically is our lid and of course we can add if we want to some chamfers on the outside here and just say chamfer and whatever size you want to do i'm going to do two mil i think say okay now one thing to note if you move the sketch those chamfers will be lost that's why i do chamfers and radii um but you add this way do all of those at the end because if you make a change then you may have to move them all and if they're all at the end it's much easier to delete them and redo because they do have an issue that they'll they'll lose the face that they're on if you start moving things around so there is my lid and if i go back here and turn on my box there is my box and there is my lid and we should be able to still change sizes and everything should stay the same the lid fits perfectly in the box when we change our size and remember if we change our height then we're going to change our box height right now it's one quarter so if i change that height to be 75 now my lid is a quarter size of the box and you don't have to do i mean if you wanted to change it you could change it to something that's not calculated but i just i like to calculate things wherever i can um i think it looks good i think it helps to keep everything organized and normally what i do as i showed you before so this is calculated let's just copy that i'm going to put that on there and pop it on there because both of those are calculated so i just put that in the spreadsheet and then of course we need to do a save oh looks like i made my box width 25 instead of uh my box height messed up my box there you go and that's the beauty of the parametric side okay so that's the box with the lid and now we're going to have a look at the clearances so the simplest way i've found of looking at clearances um let's just save this file again is to use clipping planes so if i if i point to the end of this box and if i look here i'm on the you know i can see here that that's the y direction going that way so the x direction is coming forward backwards and the z direction is going up so if i want to look into this end what you do is you go into view and then clip in planes turn on the x clipping plane and you can see it's already clipped it and again get it nice and straight zoom in and then i can see from this clipping plane i can actually see that there is a clearance between this surface and this surface and this edge and this edge and those clearances are whatever this size is so if i make this size 0.4 you'll see it get bigger now you can see there's a much bigger gap in there so i can see my clearances work my lid won't touch here and stick up and my lid won't get jammed in this way and i can do the same thing in the y plane if i want to so i can turn on clipping in the y plane and then just rotate around turn off my clipping in the x plane rotate around so we can see to the front and there you can see the clearances again you can also if you want to make it a little bit easier to see you can actually go into here and set this to a color so i can set this to be um a color if i want to actually let's not do it that way let's do it this way random color there we go so there i have it set with a color and now i can see the difference between the two parts much easier so that's an easy way to check on clearances to be able to see in the sectional view without having to do too much uh i'm not doing anything that's permanent because just a clipping plane it's just the view so there pop it back it's all good everything works so i'm going to turn off those clipping planes and then finally i'm going to show you how to save these two parts if you want to save them as stl files so that you can 3d print them of course that's the whole idea of this box so if i wanted to print this lid i'm going to make sure that lid is selected that body and i'm gonna export and here just export to stl so i'm gonna point to my test lid and export it to stl so i've already done it so i'm not going to do it again and then if we want to export the base so we make this the current body by double clicking it and we just go export and again we just call it whatever you want to call it so test box is what i actually called it so i have both of those there different size one but the same files then i'll just show you what i do to get them onto my 3d printer so i use ultimaker cura and literally just open up the file and we saved it as test box so just open that guy up decide what we want to have for our infill and um i have this at 20 just slice it and then literally just save it to a file and then when i'm done with that one i'll just clear this build plate open up the lid there's lid lid is actually up so for the lid this one is upside down so what we're going to do is we'll just rotate it just quickly rotate it 180 degrees and that's how we'd slice that one and then print that one and we'd be all done so that's basically how you would design these boxes and get them ready for printing so that you can package up your electronics i'm working on a project at the moment so thanks for watching the video i hope you enjoyed it you can see it's pretty easy to make assemblies and make them parametric this is a very simple thing um but obviously if you're going to make something that's a little more complex you just have to think about how you're going to dimension it and what's important in terms of how it all fits together and then you have it so if you like the video please click the thumbs up and if you haven't already please subscribe to the channel press the little bell and then you'll get notifications when the next video comes out thanks you

Channel: Adventures in creation

Views: 20,819

Keywords: freecad, cad, cam, 3D printing, parametric design, Electronics, Cura

Id: Re51ZZoZsag

Length: 27min 36sec (1656 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 05 2020