FreeCAD Part Design with a MASTER SKETCH | Tutorial for beginners | Top and Bottom Plate Assembly

[Music] what's up youtube thanks for coming back to another video i've got a jam-packed tutorial for you guys today so make sure you watch it to the end to pick up all the little things that i do this is a tutorial on how to use freecad not necessarily how to design a drone frame so with that in mind i've developed this tutorial um in a way that i will introduce you to a lot of the different features that are available how you use them is up to you as we go through and you start learning more you'll start developing your own technique and style and that's perfectly okay what i'm going to try and do is just teach you some little tricks and best practices so you can really develop your skills in a way that is going to help you get better and really enjoy 3d modeling all right so the first thing we're going to do is change something in the preferences that's going to make it a little bit easier to select our vertices we're going to come here to edit preferences and we're going to select the display tab here and come to marker size yours is probably set on default to five point i've already changed mine to 11 point that's the one that i prefer but i would recommend from 11 to 15 it's just going to make things a lot easier as we're trying to pull up geometry from our master sketch so once you've selected the size you want press apply and ok and then we're going to do some housekeeping over here on the left side in our model tree as we start creating our model and our assembly with different parts this is going to blow up and it's going to be kind of hard to come back and change something when when we don't know what what everything is so first thing we'll do is change the name of our body here by right clicking selecting rename and we're going to name this bottom plate and then we're going to right click our sketch and we're going to rename that sketch our master sketch and now we can get started on our actual bottom plate we'll do that by selecting the sketch create new sketch but first make sure your bottom plate is selected you don't want to go back into your master sketch so we'll select our bottom plate create new sketch and we'll start that sketch on the xy plane now we have to reference our master sketch and we do that by coming up here and link it's create a linked edge to an external geometry we'll select that and we'll start pulling up the vertices of our sketch here now we're only going to do we're not going to do every single one we're just going to do half of it and i'm going to use this as an opportunity to show you another feature that's really cool um it makes things really simple if if you use it correctly so once we have all of those points selected we will left-click to exit the external tool and we will grab our polyline tool and start connecting all of our vertices and you can see that because oh real quick you saw it turn green and then it didn't turn green that's because i missed one of these constraints here so if you do that just click both vertices and come up here to your coincident constraint and you can see that it's fully defined or fully constrained and that's because our master sketch is fully constrained um and it's it's just referencing that sketch so we actually don't have to come in and put in a bunch of of dimensions and stuff now um on this one make sure you get the both the horizontal and the fix onto constraint you can see them pop up next to my mouse there um same thing with this one we're gonna get the fix onto in vertical and then when we come over here and we get the coincident and horizontal you can see that it's a fully constrained sketch the next thing we're going to do is pull up these circles that reference our standoff holes so grab the external link external geometry tool and select all of these circles here and then we're going to put another concentric circle in the center of each one so grab your circle sketching tool and make sure that you get uh get that coincident constraint on the inside of each one of those and you can see that we're not fully constrained anymore we've got four degrees of freedom that's because each one of these has a different dimension or a different diameter so if we select all four of them and make them equals with the equals constraint you can see that drops to one and then we're going to constrain the diameter of one of them to three millimeters for our three millimeter bolts now that's completely done we're going to go ahead and close our sketch here and we're going to create the first solid part and we'll do that by selecting this sketch that we just created and coming up here to the pad tool and you can see that we've created half of our our bottom plate um it looks a little thick so let's come here and give it a three dimension a three millimeter dimension and we're going to go ahead and leave it sticking out of the top we don't want it to be reversed because that's where we're going to draw our our the arms for our drone that are going to come out the bottom so we will leave it normal coming up out of the sketch plane and we're gonna press ok now we can quickly create the the second half of our frame here we select our pad feature that we just created and come up here to the mirror tool it's got a red dotted line with a yellow little triangle and a blue triangle and once we click that you can see that it automatically created the second half that's because the algorithm automatically chose the vertical sketch axis which is you know straight up and down so that's this as our mirror plane um if it were to select a different one sometimes you might have to play with a little bit but when we have the right plane selected that we want to mirror across you can see we get an exact image of the other half and we'll select okay and let's make sure we stay on top of our housekeeping so over here this pad feature it's got these these sub features that we used to create the pad and you can tell because it's got this arrow here and then these come out underneath it so we will right click it we're going to rename this our body now we can create the holes for our arms and for our flight controller but you can see now that this piece is in the way of our master sketch we can't see it anymore so let's come here to the mirrored um feature that we just created and press the space bar and that will actually hide everything that is has been created up to that point so if we press the space bar we can bring it back and we can hide it so let's go ahead and hide that with the space bar sorry i'm saying it a few times but i don't want anybody to miss it because it could get frustrating so yeah now let's create a new sketch we'll come here create a new sketch and put it on the xy plane and now we are going to pull up this geometry um for our holes we'll use the external geometry tool and we'll go ahead and grab these three vertices that's all we're going to grab and i'm going to show you another cool tool to get it to the other parts so once we've pulled up that geometry let's create holes by using the circle tool putting them coincident on each one of those points and then we will select all three holes and make them equal in size with the equals constraint and then we will dimension the diameter of a single one to three millimeters now you can see that it's fully defined we'll go ahead and close this here we're going to select our mirrored function and press spacebar to bring our body back and then we will select our sketch and come here to the pocket tool it's this little blue square with the red cut out in the center and we will pocket it but you can see it didn't do anything that's because it's creating a pocket into the plane we need to create a pocket out of the plane by clicking this reverse button once reversed is checked you can see we've got our three holes and it's just good um good practice to we know that these are going to be through holes so you come here and select through all so that just means no matter what we change the diameter of or excuse me the thickness of our bottom plate we know that those holes will always go all the way through we can select okay and now we need to get these three uh to these three other places here and we could use the mirror tool and we could mirror it this way and we could mirror it down but then we wouldn't be able to get it to this side so what we can do is select our pocket come up here to this circular pattern of yellow with the one blue and this is create a polar pattern and when we create that you can see it's just mirrored across kind of horizontally or diagonally to this other side but over here you can see we've got our angle is 360 degrees and our occurrences are two so let's go ahead and increase the occurrences you can see if i increase it by one we get another one to pop out and it's it's they're equally spaced um throughout 360 degrees but we actually want four so we'll increase that one more and you can see now on 360 degrees they've been equally kind of distributed around that circle um if we wanted to make four in a 180 degree range then we could change this to 180 and you can see it's got a polar pattern now that's going 180 degrees around this way but we want this to be 360. so it's evenly based throughout our whole uh bottom plate here and then we will press ok so now that we've created a new feature and we've complete uh finished adding all of the um additional features to it let's do some housekeeping on our pocket here we will right click and rename it i'm going to rename this flight controller and arm and once that's done um there's we're almost done with our bottom plate there's just one more quick thing i want to show you um that's how we're going to get these nice rounded edges on these corners and just it's important to note that this tool it's the fillet tool it should be the last feature that you add to your part and that's because there's something in the coding that um you know if you come back in and you edit have to edit things you're going to have to redo your fillets for some reason the fillets break no matter what whenever you're making a model and you would make changes to it so not a huge deal but it could get frustrating if you didn't know that so let's go ahead and let's select this edge right here and let's use the fillet tool you can see we've got a nice little fillet with a one millimeter radius let's increase this to four millimeters and then let's also select this one so to do that we have to come here in the tasks pane and select add reference and then you'll see this one disappears but that's all right so just click this one and you can see as soon as you click that one you get both fillets so let's do it to this this end too let's click add reference and add this corner and then add reference and add this corner you can add them to all the corners if you want um you know you can change different sizes if you want to do a fillet of a different size you would have to click ok all of these are four millimeters so we click ok and then let's say i wanted to do a larger one here so i would select this corner and we're going to come to fill it and then let's give this an eight millimeter so it will just press eight or you can use the arrows um and then let's add this one to it let's come over here add reference select this corner and you can see we've got some nice round um inner edges there we'll press ok so now we've finished our bottom plate and we can get started on our top plate um this is going to actually be very very easy so what we'll do here is over here in our model tree so this is our first part and we're actually going to have multiple parts and so what i want you to do is come up here and use this tool right here it says create a new part and make it active so i think it misuses the word part this is should we make a new assembly so when we select that we've got this assembly it says it's a part but what what this really is is this tells freecad that you've got multiple parts that are going to be put together in an assembly not just a single body so what we want to do is we want to grab our bottom plate and we want to drag it into our part and so now we have our part and we're going to rename this we'll rename this to drone frame assembly and you can see that now our bottom plate is actually a child of our drone frame assembly so now to create our top plate i want you to select the bottom plate right click it click copy and then we're going to select our drone frame assembly we're going to right click and we're going to paste it but you can see that it actually didn't fall out as a child of our drone frame assembly so it's very important here that you grab this part that we just created and drag it into our assembly and make it a child of our drone frame assembly now let's do some housekeeping here and rename our bottom plate as top plate but where is it you can't see it and that's because it's been copied into the exact same place as our bottom plate so if we select our top plate and now come down here into our properties i think yours will probably all be um condensed like this but let's expand placement and then we're going to come here to position we'll expand the position and the z-axis you can see over here i don't know if it's a little too small but you might be able to see on your computer the z-axis is what's going straight up and down so we want our top plate now to come up 25 millimeters or 30 millimeters so we'll take that little z dimension and let's make that 30 millimeters and now you can see we've got two different parts inside of our assembly they're both exactly the same but that's going to be really easy to come back and edit so now let's make some quick edits to our top plate and make it look more like a top plate and not a bottom plate we can do that by expanding our top plate part here and this is why we've been keeping good track of um you know our features and are doing our housekeeping over here so we're going to come to the body and then we're going to come to the sketch for the body and we'll double click that now we can make some quick edits here the first thing we're going to do is send all of these to construction lines and basically what that means is that cad when you're adding a pad or a pocket feature these these will actually the construction lines won't be recognized by the function so we can click golf click all four of those lines and up here where it's got a red square and a blue dotted square we clicked that and you can see they turned blue if we were just to delete these we would open up degrees of freedom and then we'd have to start dimensioning i found that it's just easier to send these lines to construction instead of deleting them so once those are construction lines we're actually going to send this one up here to a construction line as well and then we're going to draw a line from here to here so we'll use our line tool and we'll connect these two vertices and so now we've got kind of the shape that our our top plate's going to be but we need to make this cut out still so let's grab our reference external geometry and let's pull out this vertice from the corner of our camera hole and then we're going to draw a line use our polyline tool and we'll connect these two vertices and we're going to come over here and draw another line and then the last thing we need to do is get rid of this but we can't send this line to construction because we need this edge still so what we can actually do is come and trim this line and you're going to see that that's going to open up a degree of freedom and that's why we try it out we try to send the construction as much as possible so come up here and grab the trim tool it's got the little t with the dotted line coming out the top and if we just click on this line it's going to know exactly where to trim it um but now we have to fix this we have to fix this point onto our axis because we opened up a degree of freedom so we'll click those two and click the fix onto constraint um and now you can see when we close out here that nothing has changed now the reason nothing's changed is because of our fill it features remember how i told you that the fillets are going to break if you try to edit anything that's exactly what's happened and it's keeping our model from updating so that's a quick fix all we got to do is just come here and delete these fillets and you can see once we delete both of them that the shape that we just created is going to uh pop up so the last thing we need to do here is correct this polar pattern so we actually don't need the polar pattern the polar pattern is broken um but it's actually part of our flight controller um an arm pocket so since we don't need those on the top plate we can actually just delete those two and all of the features that um were created for them so let's go ahead and yes we're going to create this or delete that excuse me we're going to delete the sketch that was associated with it and we're going to delete the polar pattern now what we can do is add some features to the top plate here i'm going to show you how to use another cool feature but first um freecad has left us in our sketching workbench if you're not on the part design workbench let's go ahead and navigate back to the part design workbench and then we'll go back into our model tab here so we can see our model tree and then let's clean up our workspace a little bit i'm going to hide everything except for what i'm working on so i'm going to hide the bottom plate i mean you can see that the master sketch and the bottom plate are hidden now and i'm going to go ahead and select the last feature on my top plate here and press spacebar so now all we're left with is the master sketch now i want to add a new sketch to my top plate make sure your top plate is what is active and create a new sketch and we're going to select the xy plane and click ok so i want to add some slots for for the the top here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to pull up the external geometry of my flight controller holes here and then once that's done i'm going to come here and use the slot tool and i'm going to select one vertice and i'm going to drag over now don't select this vertice it's going to do something weird and just make a line but just kind of select outside here and then you can put this point coincident onto this point here by using the coincident constraint and you can see we've got one degree of freedom and that's the radius of this slot so let's go ahead and we will constrain the radius or you can constrain diameter whichever one you prefer we'll do the diameter and we'll give it three millimeter constraint and press ok so now let's click our uh last feature in our top plate press the spacebar to bring it back we'll select the sketch we just created and we're going to come up here to the pocket function and again the same thing is happening it's going into the plane instead of up and out of the plane so let's just select reversed here and we will make this through all and press ok now what we can do is make a linear pattern of this slot and to do that we will select the pocket feature that we use to create it and we'll come here and select the linear pattern tool it's between the mirrored feature and the polar pattern so we'll use this linear tool or this linear function and there's a few things we've got to do so by default it's using the horizontal sketch axis so that's this axis here we want it to be using the vertical sketch axis so we'll come here and select vertical sketch axis and then you can say it's way up here now so what we want to do is make it a little shorter we'll we'll make 30 millimeters our length um oops don't press enter and then our occurrences we can increase the number of occurrences we have and it'll evenly space them between the first one and 30 millimeters so really quick cool way to make some some linear features and the last thing we're going to do to our top plate is add some fillets so make sure your top plate is selected or your top plate is active and come and select the edge here and we will use the fillet tool and then let's add some references here so we will add reference select this corner add reference select this corner here sometimes they can get a little tricky add reference let's select this corner add this corner we'll add this corner and then we'll come back and add these two corners and let's make these a little bit bigger you'll see if we try to make them four it actually doesn't make them four because then these two lines would actually be the same line and freecad has a little bit of an issue with that so we could make these 3.9 and they would be pretty close to 4 which is what our bottom um plate is but then you can see if we click ok we've got our nice top plate with nice rounded corners it was super easy to create it from our bottom plate i hope you guys really enjoyed this tutorial please hit that like and subscribe if you did i've got some more tutorials coming um again i i feel like if you want to make some changes to this bottom and top plate you already have the tools you can um feel free i'd love to see if you guys have some some cool changes or modifications to this frame let me know in the comments what you guys have done to to change it up and make it your own i'll see you in the next one guys

Channel: FPV Builders

Views: 4,695

Keywords: Free Cad, Freecad, part design, beginners, part design workbench, assembly, drone, fpv builders, tutorial, drone frame

Id: eQcDLkShC2k

Length: 24min 42sec (1482 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020