FreeCAD: Learn how to create knurling on a curve for a reflector pattern using Lattice2 workbench

hi viewers and welcome to the channel and today we're going to be carry on with the knurling or the reflector surface and we're going to be looking at placing it across an arc so at the end of the tutorial we'll end up making something like this now this has come from a request from a patreon obviously they will get this video first also any other patrons of qualifying level they'll get a private link to the video before it's released to the wider community so i hope you enjoy this video i hope it answers your questions and let's have a look at this technique if you like what you're seeing please subscribe to the site i also have a co-fire or coffee site that you can donate to if you so desire and that's at ko hyphen fi dot com for slash ming0 also run a patreon where you can subscribe and get extra content and that's at www.patreon.com for slash mango jelly solutions any money that's currently donated will be used to span the channel so we're starting from scratch and freecad we have the sketchup workbench open this one here you must remember that lattice2 workbench needs to be installed so to install that we can come up to tools and add-on manager and we can install it from there so what we need to do first of all is create a sketch and we're going to create the diamond pattern we're going to go along the xy plane as before we're just going to recreate that sketch so for that i'm going to use the polyline and i'm just going to create a sketch around here now i'm not altered constraining this time to these lines here just placing it around here and then we can adjust our constraints as we go so we've got this here and i'm going to take these two points make sure they are symmetrical over the center point so i've selected the bottom and the top and use this point and use the symmetry and we're going to do the same with these two these two points and this one and make that symmetrical we can now move these around and their symmetry so we're going to take this one and this line point on the line constraint that strains that up and we'll do the same with one of these sides as well this one and this one and point online now this can move in and out and up and down so let's set length of this with a length constraint to 10 millimeters so we've got that there also going to set this point and this point with a height of 10 millimeters so that's locked that down so we've got our diamond all set ready to go i'm going to close that so we've got our diamond shape it's 10 millimeters in length so if we remember back to the previous video any geometry we make it's best to keep that in proportion to that diamond so we've got 10 millimeters then we use 100 millimeters 180 etc to allow this to be duplicated along and cover that surface area with leaving the minimum gap in there so we've got that we come over to the part and what we're going to do is screw that and we'll give it a strew say about four mil so this is what we're going to repeat we're going to add some drafting into this as well but first thing i'm going to do is if i'm going to be repeating this along a surface let's say let's bring back the sketch and just quickly sketch something in here from the top let's cancel that and go from the top x y plane and i say we'll start with a planner surface if i was doing a planner surface and if i was sketching the pawn here and i wanted these to run the whole length of this then we'll run across the top and then we'll stagger this diamond to here and run across like we did in the previous video i'm just going to get rid of that sketch because we're not doing planner faces whilst we're doing the arc so we need to clone this to this point here the reason why we use a clone we've come to the draft workbench and this is where the cloning tools are we've got the grid in that's appeared which we can hide in the status bar down here just turn this screen off because we don't need it the reason why we clone this is because if we make any amendments to this extrude then the clone will take that on if we create this as a secondary sketch or inside the sketch then we have to go back and modify those if we actually modified this astrud so make sure the extrude is selected come to modifications and we're looking for this little sheep icon this clone here just click that and it clones it the reason why i'm using the menu bar is because these toolbars depending on how big your screen is your setup if you've moved these they may be in a different place because the clone 2 for me is actually in here but if you had a bigger screen then this would be expanded out some people have asked me about sharing my settings my settings just come straight out the box in of freecad so i don't actually make any amendments in there i adjust my screens allow them to be bigger for demonstration that means these will shrink down we've got this extrude now so you can see it's a clone because we've got the sheep and right click transform you can use the actual placement sentence for this and we need to place it down and we're going to place it points basically in the middle and bring this across so those are touching so we can see them in there should be basically minus five and five depending on which way our placement is placed so we're coming into here and look at the position we can see it's five and minus five there so those have been placed now if i come back to this extrude and come down and that's place a taper so we're going to taper this so it comes up and creates basically another diamond pattern on top and tape it to the base looking for the taper angle to bring this out and if we adjust this to say 20 degrees you can see they both have been adjusted so that's places at -20 and we've tapered from the base upwards to here and you can see the clone took on the taper so you can see those are exactly the same so any modifications to this will get deflected on the clone so now we've got our shape we can come over to the part workbench now for us to pattern this shape it's got to be basically one shape now we can compound that together without losing any parametric capabilities of these to do that we select them both control select them both i might depart and then come down to compound and make compound that now acts as a single object i know there's two inside and then we can still change these that's fine if you wanted to do that by the toolbar we've got this icon here which will be inside this drop down so now that's compounded together we can actually start thinking about our curved shape our arc shape so for that i'm going to come over to the sketcher and i'm going to create a sketch on a different plane so i'm going to come around and we're going to create a sketch along the zx panel let's make sure nothing's selected create a sketch zx and okay now we've got our sketch ready to go so what we need to do is create an arc now i'm going to create a single arc we can create a secondary arc if we want two skins but for this demonstration we're going to be using the commons so we only need one arc and this is purely for placement and support so i'm going to take this point and this line and point on the line constraint that means that is symmetrical over that line we just need that there because that's the center point of the arc we can set a radius across here i'm going to set a length going across here and we're going to set this to something like 100 millimeters now it's worth mentioning that this hundred millimeters is only from this point to this point this surface won't be a hundred millimeters in length so we may need to do some adjustments in there or calculate this surface length to get a better fit but we can get around that if we don't want to do that with certain booing operations which i'll show you towards the end when we start bringing this together let's hit close we now got this arc i'm going to come over to the lattice 2 workbench we're going to start working with this arc so remember this is just for support so click on the arc and come up to lattice 2 and drop down to the polar right this polar right here and pick polarized span n we've got a polar array that's been added to that arc so you can see that how that's been added across there if we've got problems with the placement with this then sometimes will happen this may be over here somewhere and we can come into the polaroid and come into the placement and we'll open this placement up open up the position and you'll notice that it's actually on the attachment so the attachment here and the offset and the position we can see all these are zeroed but if we look at the placement this is the actual placement of this object as it's been attached to it then this attachment is basically the local coordinate system of this object and you can see this is basically an offset and if we had like it over here you would actually see it in the offset so we've got 10 in there we just take that out and zero so we've got our kites running all along there now in the previous video you saw how i placed these against these kites by selecting the object and placing them against there we need to do an extra step because you notice how these are placed they are the wrong orientation so we've got to create a placement in here that allows us to align it with these because we can't take the default alignment the default alignment is this way and if we try to place that against here well what will happen is if we take that compound control click the polar array come up to the lattice2 and then come down to populate with copies properly with copies you'll see those are placed incorrectly so we've got place these with custom placement so it controls that so in the previous video we didn't actually bother with replacement dart because this was pointed over the point of origin but we're going to need that for these starts here because we have to orientate this in the correct orientation we want this orientated so it sits if we look at the top basically in the orientation it is at the moment so we need to add a placement dart against here and then match that da against these so this star here if we take this for example will actually sit in the same orientation but this corner of this object now to add a placement dart to this it's quite easy we can either click on the compound and add it to the compound or we could add it to one of the faces if we double click the compound we get this handler here to allow us to move this and we can see where the point of origin is so the point of origin is here we want it here so we're going to have to move the dart once we attached it to this point down here to do that i'm going to select basically the face of this object and this one here i want to the lattice to come down to the attached placement and attach placement we get a dart that's attached to that center so we look at that dart you can see it's flat face to that center but moment it's deactivated so it looks like it's attached at the moment it's not i'm going to place it along the xy plane we can see that the body of the dart actually intersects the object let's try internal cs so that's the placement that we want but we want to offset this so i'm going to come around to the top and at the moment it's quite hard to see that dart in there so we've got to get ourselves into a position or even make this transparent we can make this transparent so we can see through to do that we come over to the compound look at the view come down and we're looking for transparency let's bring this transparency up so to about 80. so we can see that in there we could also use say the wireframe but i prefer to make something transparent so we can see what's actually inside that so now we've got that placement let's go back to the tasks make sure the plane compound face hasn't changed because selecting different things on here will change that but we're okay if it's not we just click this again and select that face if we come down to the bottom we got our attachment offset so we've got basically a nudge along the xyz and also rotation we want to move this look at top along the y click on the y not round y this is the rotation this way here in y direction and we can move this down and you'll notice it's moved minus five because this is ten millimeters and this moves from basically halfway down so that's in the correct position let's come up here okay the thing is if we move that now this can go quite for quiet so this kite will be placed against this kite which we don't want i'm gonna place that now and then do further adjustments against this so we'll just click on data so we can see our data tab again what we need to do is first click the compound and its placement and then what we're placing it against the polaroid you want the lattice to and then we're going to use properly with copies and then moved object and you can see that object has been moved along this arc notice the color it's not transparent which is fine so we can work with a transparent object but it doesn't get saved on the copies that go across here this just makes our life a bit more easier so you can see that these have been placed dart on diet or chiton clients so we can make some amendments to this now so we've got to match these kites so we've got to stand this one up basically in the same manner as these get a new object on the left hand side move to compound so let's open that up and have a look at the placement so we can just double click that placement and zoom in and we need to do some rotation so come down and look at the rotation so first rotation if we're looking and using the handler down here we can see x runs this way so i'm going to knit the x direction around x rotate this in the x direction so 90 degrees that's now facing towards us which is right now we've got to rotate it around this way around the y and come down looking around y we've moved it along y minus five and we're looking around y this one here so we move that up and we do that minus 90 degrees so look at the kite it now matches our other kites if i hit okay will happen it looks like it hasn't done anything if we look at our placement now we've got a tick by the side of it that means it needs refreshing we can either hit ctrl r or can i edit refresh and we've got all those going around our arc so we've got our placement if we click polar array we can fill out this arc with the amount of iteration so we're coming down to the count got seven at the moment pressing up on the keyboard and hitting ctrl r we can still see those filling in and we may want to select the top and i put a count of 14 across there so we've got 14 items that run all the way along there you can see how they appear along there that's 13 which is a benefit we can see we're getting some gapping in there this gap in doesn't matter we can solve that when we come to our booth in if we take this will happen when we do our boolean if we do a straight intersection with this we may get a few problems and we can overcome those problems and we'll come to that in a moment so we've got the polar array and the placement and that compound which has created our moved compound there we now need to take this and basically repeat it this way to do that i need something to repeat it against now remember we've got the sketch here if i click on the move compound and press the spacebar to hide it we can see the original sketch and i'm just going to hide that as well i want to create a line that runs this way that's to something like 80 or 100 millimeters remember we're working in we need to go to the sketchup to do this we can attach a sketch to the vertex so this vertex here i can actually attach a sketch to that by going create sketch and it asks it for the attachment mode so translate hit okay and you can see that here's the arc and we've attached it there we can add it to any of the planes if we want that's a quick way of attaching it to that one this is just for support so i'm going to click on that point and run a line along this way and then set the distance so say its length now let's click on top to make sure i get the right one so i need to set a vertical length let's say 80 millimeters so i've got the 80 millimeter length there hit close now i'm going to attach a linear array against this so come over to the lattice 2 workbench and click that edge and click the line array or lattice 2 and drop down to linear array and linear a span slash n we can change the mode at later time if we want if this appears say over here then this is to do with attachment again so at the moment you can see we've got placement here and we look at the placement and the position x is zero y zero and z is zero so if this was somewhere over here then we'll just come into here and just zero these off the same if we add let's go back to the sketcher and add a sketch xy plane and i'll place a sketch say here and close that if i come over to the lattice 2 and attach this linear array against that you can see from the placement the position is still 0 0 0 and that's it relative to that line so any moments into that will be offsets and we can just zero those out so we don't need that one that's just demonstration so we have the linear array and we have the move compounds i'm going to take the mu compound and the linear array and create an array of these across there so first of all we need the object the move compound control click the linear array got to lattice2 now populate with copies and then populate with copies build array they'll build that right across there so we've got multiples of those objects and then we have to just affect this linear array so we can click on that linear array if we can or coming into the properly linear rain you see the linear rays there see i've clicked it and it's highlighted in this tree view now if we come down to the count we've got a number of elements which is five which is read only come down to the count lasted series generator the count and we can increase this to say eight hit control r it's still got some gapping in there so increase it to nine control r on the keyboard and that's all in there it's nice and tight and it's looking good so we've got basically the object that we're going to use for cutting we need to do some modifications to this so this populate linear rate this one here we need to downgrade that to a compound object to allow us to do boolean operations against that you'll find that you can do boolean operations against this and sometimes it will work and sometimes it won't so for safety go to lattice 2 and we want the parametric downgrade and we downgrade to leave so this downgrades and puts the results in the compound so now we've basically got a part workbench compound object that we can use so you can see that's all nice and clean there these two sketches i'm just gonna hide so i'm gonna select those and press the spacebar so with this we need to use that in some kind of boolean for our object for that i can come over to the part workbench i'm going to select top and i can either create a primitive in here say a cylinder or i could use the sketcher let's start with a cylinder so cylinders there click the cylinder and change the radius to say 30 and the height we want the height to encapsulate all of this support or part of this as long as it calculates the depth so radius is 30 height is 40. you can see that's gone right way through there we need to push this into here so right click transform what we're looking for is the object to be inside and above and below that means when we do our boolean operation of the intersection so taking both those control set them all and doing the intersection we get this if we don't get this for instance let's delete that and if i took linear ray actually that's come in come down to the polar array because this one causes the most problems if i increase the number of elements or the count because that's read only number elements to say 14. we can see they're starting to approach on each other and sometimes this can cause a bit of an issue when we come into the leaves and the cylinder and create an intersection you can see that we've got a number of items missing across here because we've got overlaps and a geometry just doesn't look right if we do get that we have to amend the either linear row if that's causing the problem or the polar array this one here another way to solve it is instead of doing the common first let's hide this cylinder so i'm not going to use the cylinder is to take these leaves and boolean them together so i'm just going to first check on the polar array number of elements 14 so we increase that to 14 there and we can see that we have overlap a bit of an overlap there you see how we change that how that changes so 14 was causing a bit of an issue if we do have that what we do is basically take those leaves and run a boolean operation which makes a union of several shapes also available up in part boolean union this may take a little while to union all that together so when it's finally completed it creates something called fusion then we can bring back the cylinder control click both of those and then run the intersection and then we get our shape and we can see we haven't got any problems with this shape so now we've created this let's have a look at doing something the same with a sketch so i'm just going to delete that comment we'll keep the fusion for the time being and delete the sender this time i'm going to come over to the sketcher and we're going to look down on the object from the top and just zoom out so i'm going to create a new sketch along the xy plane same plane that this was built we can see that sketch has been dropped in along here the good thing is is that if we use the section view we get the outline basically of like a border that we can sketch within so as long as our sketch stays within here we'll be fine so we can add whatever shape we want in here to use for the cutting so i could basically make something like this here skate to get the mouse pointer back hit close so i skeptically sit in there select the sketch come over to the part workbench and extrude this and let's say 40 millimeters because we want to take this extrusion right way through this object and it's a case of just taking both of these and creating an intersection and that's the same as going to part boolean and intersection there it creates a common and we can see that object so we've got a curved object in the shape first sketch so let's just delete that and have a look at that extrude and come into the sketch section view and this time let's get rid of this sketch and we can just add say a slot in here and close that's extruded up because we affected the sketch of the strude and then we can control select both of these and create the intersection and there we have our object now going back to the original sketch this one here we have the arc that this is built across so we still have that edge which we could use in geometry so i could build something with this edge let's say let's create a new sketch and this time we're going to go along the zx plane for the x airplane hit okay you can see that arc is in there and it's just a case of well pulling in this arc creating a new arc in escape matching these two arcs so i've got an equality against those two arcs and using this point in this point quits and constraint and do the same here click select and delete so that's on that arc there and what should we do let's add line and we can say bring this up and across we could follow this arc with another arc and we'll do something like this and connect this back up like so so we got those there so we've got something that actually is holding this reflector that we can use to hold it let's hit we close want to actually change the placement of this so coming to the sketch look at the placement the position we're not attached to anything so that's good we can move this along the y-axis now we can place it say there and come over to the part we'll extrude that now because this sketch is looking at the sketch where it's built on it's built upon this plane so normal to sketch is going this way so we can do it along the normal or we can to be make sure we can use the y-axis click on y so basically from here to here not quite sure what that measurement is so let's go for something like 15 millimeters hit okay let's reverse that so that's strewed come down length forward is 50 that's just put that as -50 and we'll go a bit more so fifty five a little bit more and then we've got that strew that's holding that reflector so we can have that whatever shape we want actually sitting on top of there and we can either take both of these file export as stl or we can join those together with a basic union of both shapes let's create the fusion of that single object these are all just what's left over from what we've been doing with lattice so we can just click on those and press the space bar just to hide those and that's it so that's how to create that curved reflector upon there or a kind of knurling i mean if you're looking at this you're looking basically at acceleration pedal at knurling for an object it can be used for multiple things so i hope that's helped we'll be looking at b spline in the next video regarding the knurling and the reflector and how to place that upon a b spline surface that is slightly different again i'll say slightly different it requires yet another layer on top of that when you get an undulating b-spine surface where you have say a b-spline here and a different one that's like the reverse of it or something that's totally different then you add another layer on top of that it becomes more complex but it is still doable you have to take a different approach with that once again and also call in another workbench and also we'll be looking at that video as well at some point so i hope you're finding these videos useful and i hope to see you next time if you like what you're seeing please subscribe to the site i also have a co-fire or coffee site that you can donate to if you so desire and that's at ko hyphen fi.com for slash ming0 also run a patreon where you can subscribe and get extra content and that's at slash mango www.patreon.com solutions any money that's kindly donated will be used to expand the channel thanks a lot for watching and subscribing and i'll see you again soon

Channel: MangoJelly Solutions for FreeCAD

Views: 6,540

Keywords: CAD, three, 3D, CNC, Printing, solidworks, autoCAD, freecad 0.19, freecad 19, freecad basics, basic course, fundamentals, learn freecad, freecad beginners, freeCAD 0.20

Id: vLGCNd42Eig

Length: 37min 30sec (2250 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 18 2022