FreeCAD LinkStage3 Tutorial: Configuration Table using spreadsheet.

hi to all how's it going before we start with the actual tutorial please uh let me just acknowledge the incredible work and dedication that real thunder is pouring into freecad during the recording of this tutorial he has pushed a new release of his uh daily build uh where he merged from master the new big changes regarding skecher from abdullah hoping that i haven't butchered his name given the complexity of the code of on both sides master ending stage 3 this created some issues but the speed with which he managed to hotfix a problem is just incredible to me he has managed to release two daily bills in the span of just one day and this kind of active development deserves our help and support so hit his patreon link that you will find in the video description and cover him with love that being said the recommended minimum version for this tutorial is linksage free daily 2021 01.40 and let's start the tutorial we will start by showing you first two neat little visual tricks that freecad can do now one is having a background for the treeview elements for increased legibility to customize that option you need to go into edit preferences go into display user interface and the item background color is the property that you want to tweak to have this new visual enhancement the alpha channel controls the opacity of the background and if we try to make it zero let's see how that looks apply you have the usual overlaid tree but we'll leave it to something like 20 for some better legibility okay apply okay another thing is bringing into all the workbenches the draft grid that most of all is a visual aid and it will help us assess changes in the 3d view during this tutorial so right click on the toolbar choose customize go into toolbars we'll choose we want to be a global [Music] globally available i have already created the customer toolbar and if we go into the search field here and we type just grid you see that one option is struggled draft grid click on that and our button is added to the toolbar click close and as you can see we have this no new toggle draft grid button so let's turn it on in this tutorial we will talk about a powerful new feature a feature present in the link stage free branch called the configuration tab table for those who have used solidworks this works somewhat like it's a design table but more fit for freecad the end product will be a configuration table defining a spreadsheet that allows the user to dynamically switch between multiple sets of parameters for one or multiple objects i will try and show you first a simple example so that we get the hang of how things work and then we'll we will try a more complex example with different configuration driving different features on our body we will start with this already made sketch which is the representation of 50 50x50 aluminum extrusion let's just pad it so we can see a little bit better what's happening on the screen i want the pad to be symmetric to plane i will leave this 10 millimeters as it is and hit ok let's first test the ability to drive the length of this last pad with the help of a value set set it in the spreadsheet so for this we need to move to the spreadsheet [Music] workbench and we will create a new spreadsheet double click on it we'll open it go into windows tile select your 3d view tile again and this gives us a tidy workplace where we have everything visible for the purpose of this video the first cell of our spreadsheet will be reserved for the configuration table but we will see this later in the video let's start by setting on a value in the b1 um cell and this cell will drive the length of our aluminum extrusion let's give it a value and this could be 200 millimeters we'll give it an alias and the alias for this could be extrusion hit the enter button and if we change your cells you'll see that the cells that actually have an alias are colored in yellow turn to your 3d view let's choose our pad double click on it and in the field of the length we need to go and hit the expression editor icon this will help us reference the actual length that we set it in the spreadsheet so we start by typing spreadsheet dot we can already search by the alias that we have given to our cell so extrusion length hit enter okay and you see that the actual length of the pad respects the value that we have set it in the spreadsheet if we change this value we see in real time that we can reference the length of the pad from with uh from inside this our spreadsheet so now it's time to focus on our main goal please notice that our pad is inside a body container this will be important in important in one of the next steps in order to create a configuration table we need two elements we need a way to enumerate the configurations that we will set up inside the spreadsheet and the second element will be the actual configuration table remember that we reserved our first cell the cell a1 for the configuration table and let's imagine that we need three configurations for our extrusion we need a small one a medium and a long extrusion so in the first column we will set the names for our configurations small extrusion in the cell beneath we will make a medium one and a long extrusion right click on the b1 cell choose copy and by selecting uh the free cells underneath it choose past going back going back to our model click on our body right click on the a1 cell choose configuration table and in the property view property field we will type body we will type body because we want to reference our main body that contains our pad so type body dot configuration and in the group name we'll give it a name that is relevant to us so we will call this configuration extrusion length click ok and as you can see by clicking on our body we created a property enumeration in the group called extrusion length and the configuration if we click here we have a drop down menu that references the a uh column in our spreadsheet we can change the value but of course in this moment enough nothing happens because we have the same value for all three cells so our medium extrusion will change it to something like 500 and the long one perhaps 700 so let's go ahead and try our configuration table if we choose the medium extrusion let's activate the grid to better see what's happening let's try the long extrusion and as you can see we have successfully created a configuration table we can actually have different configuration tables inside the same spreadsheet and now that we got the hang of it let's go ahead and confuse the heck out of everybody so we will move we will create a part container move to the part workbench hide our extrusion create a cube vs on the keyboard to view selected and what we want to do is to move the cube inside the part container our cube has different properties it it has a length a width and the height we want to control with the help of a configuration table we want to control the length of the cube choose the b7 cell let's type in 10 millimeters we'll give it an alias this alias will be let's say cube leg length now going back to our length click on the length field and choose the expression editor we want to reference our cell so we will type spreadsheet dot cube length enter enter let's say that we want a small a medium and a long one so we go ahead and create our different our various configurations so click on small next one will be a and the fourth one will be a long let's give this some values we want the small to be a length of 10 millimeters the medium 20 millimeters and the long one 30 millimeters notice how our cube is inside a part container so right click on the a7 cell choose configuration table in the property field type part because we want to reference a part type part dot configuration and as a group name we will choose to name it cube length hit ok and choose your part as you can see our part has a configuration called cube length with different configurations and if we hit the drop down menu we have a small medium and a long value so let's choose the medium one click ok and you can see that we can drive the different values thanks to the configuration that we can find inside the property window okay so hoping that i haven't confused the heck out of everybody we'll leave it here and i'll expect you in the next tutorial where we will take on a more kind of more complex model the model of a bracket and please notice the notice how in this model the different configurations other than having different dimensions i will choose even the number of the holes on the walls [Music] and there's a closing note i just wanted to say a big thank you to my new patreons and i wanted to let you know that i really appreciate your pledge and this makes me want to go ahead with this channel thank you again and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: OficineRobotica

Views: 5,812

Keywords: #freecad, #partdesign, realthunder, linkstage3, 3dcad, free, cad, opensource, development, fusion360, alternative, Configuration Table, Solidworks, Design Table

Id: PqARo51D4E0

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/alTkeperro]

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