FreeCad Project Box Tutorial

hey everyone uh today's video is going to be on pre-cat and freecad is just like a sounds it's a free open source software package that will allow you to design things for your cnc router or any other type of machining that you're going to do or for your 3d printer i use it a ton for my 3d printer it does have a bit of a learning curve but i'm telling you it is worth every minute that you're going to put into it you get so much back from it and freecad's been around for quite a while now and it's very well supported so it's not like it's just going to come and go like like some of the other software packages that were out there and let me tell you this thing is capable of designing about anything i mean i've used fusion 360 before and i really really like freecad so what we're going to do today is we're just going to do a quick uh design i'm going to show you some of the toolbar some of the functionality of freecad and then we're going to design a project box because we use these project blocks a lot in electronics holding arduinos things like that so we'll design the the box itself and then we're going to design the lid and show you how to put those together and i'll even make it a little assembly thing to show you how you can snap those together but to make sure you get a good fit on it now you're not going to learn everything you you want to know about free cab but this will help you stick your toes in the water and see if you want to invest more time in it and what i did i found this very beneficial i went and got this book free cad off of amazon and it's very helpful it has step by step instructions in it i know there's a lot of other videos out there very good videos on freecad out there but for any of you to follow me uh i just want to give it a big thumbs up so without further ado let's get into pre-cat so let's jump right in shall we we're going to click on here and we're going to open up our our freecad and uh we want to create a new file here so we'll click on create new and then you'll see up here where it says start you want to click on that and you want to come to part design you'll see a lot of different options in here and you'll get as you get more advanced you'll be able to use these but for the purpose of our tutorial here and just even for mostly general designs you're going to do you just click on part design now we need to uh create a sketch and you can see i can come up here and this gives me a lot of different options and i could do the creative sketch there and it's also on this toolbar here so let's create a sketch and we need to have a plane and by and large we're going to use the xy plane so we'll click that and now we have our grid here now i'm going to be designing this in metric i use metric uh most generally but you could if you really wanted to use edge you could come into edit and preferences and in the units you could change that to imperial but we'll just stick with our metric and we'll go over the toolbar here just briefly uh something you can study later this is like for greeting a point a line your arcs your circles uh polylines rectangles hexagons there's so many different features down here this is uh for creating a fillet trimming and we'll go over this explode button here later this is for doing the constraints and that is a very important and powerful function of freecad so what we're going to do we're going to make our utility box and these are great little uh project boxes and you can modify them but once you you've made a utility box you can use it for so many different projects so why don't we uh just click on the rectangle here and we'll start up in this corner and we'll click on that and just let off of there and hit that left click button now i'm going to hit the right mouse button to deactivate that and i want to get this centered up and add a constraint to it so i'm going to click on this and this one and then the xy origin i'm going to come up here where this bar says and create symmetry constraint click on that and now that is perfectly lined up there so let's make our utility box we're going to make this um 125 millimeters by 80 millimeters so i'm going to click on this one and i'm going to come here and for the horizontal one i'm just going to end it right in 125 millimeters and then i'll just scroll to reduce that you just pull back on your middle little scroll button and now i'm going to come here with the vertical one and hit that and i'm going to make that 80 millimeters now you see that this has become green this becomes green is because it is constrained i'm going to right click on that now i need to close out of this and i could do that here leave the object and i'm gonna go over to this magnifying glass and it fits the whole content because you're not seeing it click on that and then i'm going to come over here so i get the isometric view now i want to make this and give this some some depth i'm going to come to pad and on that i want to make this 50 millimeters high and there we go and i'm going to click ok while i have this here i want to get my thickness so i'm going to click on the very top of this and i'm going to go thickness and i'm going to enter it in i want those walls to be three millimeters thick and the mode skin is fine versus arc you want to put this at intersection and click this make thickness inward we're going to click ok and there we have our box but we're going to want to put something we're going to make a pocket in here and we're going to put a corner we can't just put these holes in here it'd be too close so what we need is some fillets in here our chamfers so let's do this let's go to the draw style and make this a wire frame from there i can see these inside corners i'm going to hit my control button click that corner that corner and now to rotate this i want you to push your middle scroll button and your right mouse button at the same time and you'll be able to scroll that so again that's your center mouse button uh the scroll wheel and the right uh right mouse button hit control again click on that hold ctrl click on that and i could come and hit my isometric field and i'm going to go to my chamfer and i want to make that six millimeters that's going to give me plenty of meat in there we're going to hit okay and now i want to turn that back on so i can see that let's go to flat lines there's our flat lines so we're good so now i want to work on this surface here to put these holes in it so i'm going to click on that and i'm going to go create sketch again and now this part's really important you want to make sure you do this you want to come over this is that explode button is what it is creating an edge to link for the external geometry so click that and make sure you hit the outside lines of this right here right click on that now i'm going to um hit my my circle button and i want center and rim point and let's zoom that in and i just did that by the hitting scroll wheel to zoom that out and just get these anywhere located in there and in here right click so we need to get our constraints so we're going to make this circle here and this circle here equal so come up to this equal and it creates an equality restraint now i want this one and this one i'll constrain that this one and this one so what that does when i want to set my size i can just come up here to constrain the diameter or constrain the radius hit one of them and i'm going to say i want this at let's say three millimeters we're going to change that later when we do the threaded hole but we'll just put three millimeters in there so now what i need and we'll right click off that i want to zoom in here and i'm going to give it a horizontal and vertical constraint so let's do the vertical at that center point and that center point and let's put this at four millimeters down and we'll have it at four millimeters in as well and just pan up and in order to pan push that scroll wheel on your mouse hit that and that four millimeters pan over that and that four millimeters again and again four millimeters now let's do um horizontally same thing and one more time and when you see this is going to turn green and that is because it's constrained you need to have that turn green or any project that you're working on or any function that way you know all the the features are constrained we're going to get out of this again click this up up arrow here and now we want to uh we're going to like i say we're going to 3d print this so let's go to this whole function and the profile i want it to be a metric um thread and i want this threaded and i want a right hand thread so i want a 2.5 millimeter thread that i'm going to use in there and my depth i want the um that's just a class of thread and the depth let's make sure you move that over and i left i i clicked on that and then i left clicked until i got that value in there let's make that 15 millimeters deep and the uh hole cut type will just leave that a straight thread for now that's all we're going to do so it should look just like this right here and we're going to click ok now that when that prints that will print a threaded piece in there all right so now what we want to do is create a pocket because we're going to drop that lid in there so we need to go back in here and click until you get this all highlighted there we go and we're going to create a sketch again again we're going to have to come and explode that highlight that right click and we're going to need another rectangle and just put it anywhere there now we're going to make this all symmetrical again pick those three points just like i did right there and hit that and now we can give it the value we want now because this is going to be 3d printed you don't want to make something size on size so i want this to have a little gap in here so instead of making it a millimeter thick i'm going to actually make it 0.9 so i'm going to come and constrain this and this and make that 0.9 millimeters and then i'm going to do that vertically and make that 0.9 millimeters and you can see that it's green so now i'll be able to create a pocket so i'm going to close that and i'm going to come to pocket and you can see that already put that value in there so how thick do i want that lid i think four millimeters is going to be thick enough on that so let's go four millimeters and that part is ready to go now i can put some some radiuses on here uh just like i did the the phyllis let's show you how to do that really quick let's go to um this and let's go back to the wireframe and i can click like on this outside and again the center scroll wheel and the right mouse and hold that control and then let's go with it fill it let's just go and make that oh maybe um point uh one five just a little break on there so it's not razor sharp and then i'm going to go here and hit flat lines and hit my isometric view and so we're good we're good to go so let's save that we're going to go file and then save as and we're going to give this a name we're going to call it box 25 just arbitrary number and we'll save that in our free cad i wanted me to close that before i can save it i have to close that one more time so now i can come in here and save that okay so now we can close that out and we're going to start a new one we're going to make that lid so we're going to create new and again hit our sketch button in our x y plane click ok and we'll do a rectangle right click this shut that down click that one this one and the center it is symmetric again so now i want this to be able to fit into that pocket so i want 0.9 i'm going to make this a millimeter shorter on each side so if i had it at 125 millimeters long i want it to be 123 millimeters so it's going to fit so let's give that a vertical dimension and we're going to go 123 millimeters and we'll scroll down to shrink that and we're going to hit that one and we're going to give it a vertical value if that was 80 millimeters we want a millimeter on each side that's going to be 78 millimeters click ok now we are fully constrained and we're going to close that click on the fit all and the isometric view and now we want this this pad we want this to be four millimeters thick that's how deep our pocket is now i'm going to click on this and create a sketch and so um from here i'm going to do the same thing i did with the other one i will explode that view that gives me um these edges as a reference point there we go so now i want to do the same thing is put a hole here center rim point right click again click fat and this make them equal this and this and make them equal and this and this and make them equal now let's constrain that and we're going to make a countersink there so it doesn't really matter we just want them to fit i'm going to say that that's going to be three millimeters and it made them all three millimeters right click uh to escape let's do our vertical one so now if we're coming in and we know that there's a millimeter off each side that we want to do that instead of being four millimeters um this needs to be at three millimeters so we're going to click that center and we got that highlighted and that make that three millimeters this one three millimeters and again right click let's do the vertical all right they are highlighted green means we're ready to go we'll close out of that and now what we want to do is we want these countersinks in here so we're going to go back up to the whole feature and the profile we're going to go it's a metric course thread and leave the threaded off of there and what size is it we decided we're going with 2.5 millimeter um screw size so we can either put in a counter bore countersink we're going to do a countersink in here and there you go you can see that'll be ends up being just right for us we'll click ok now that lid is ready to be uh printed so we'll close out of that leave the object now we gotta give this a name and file save as and we're just going to go lid 25 and we close out of that and now i can see if it's going to fit this is something you can do with that you can create a new file here and if you don't have this loaded on here you'll have to to populate your your bar here with this a2 plus is an assembly so i just put it in the assembly mode and i created a new file now the what i want to do is go save as and i'm going to go say project box 25 and then assembly so i'm going to bring in those add a part from external file we'll do that and i want um i want box um 25 i see that down there and we'll open that i know i want to bring in my lid and this is just a you don't have to do this this is just a double check it uh for fit 25 and i'll place that up there so what i want to do i'll click on this feature here center mouse or center scroll and right click on that hit control click on that again here are my planes and so i want to create a coincident plane restraint right on this one right here and i'm going to want to offset that by 0.15 because that's the difference i made in that that move that over and now i want this that scroll button and uh right at the same time control hold that go to this plane and i want this .15 okay now i'm going to pick this bottom and hit control and with that center uh wheel scroll wheel in the right mouse that's how i'm rotating that now i'll hit the control again and i'm going to pick this and i want that to be coincident on that so i click on that and there you go we'll accept that and i look at that and that matches up just fine so that's it it's kind of a quick tutorial uh nothing really fancy but it gives you an introduction and see you can see the power of free cad and there's just a lot more features on that and hopefully i'll be able to get to make some more advanced uh videos for you here and i'm going to try and uh well i will make a video showing you how to do some 3d printing off of this and create them using a cura and my creality cr-10 printer so that's all i have for today thank you so much for watching you

Channel: Tim Wilson

Views: 23,489

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Id: FrpYGerVJJw

Length: 25min 6sec (1506 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021