FreeCAD Tutorial - Path Module - Geometry setup (PART 1)

hello and welcome to another freecad tutorial with me andrew today i'm going to be showing you how to use the path module within freecad where we'll be able to create the component you can see on the screen now you'll be able to post this in gcode to computer numerical control or cnc machines so in part one i'm going to show you how to set up the actual job itself so this includes things like setting the part within the stock geometry the origin point and the different types of tools we'll be using and how to set those up in part two i'm going to show you how to create at the different tool paths which will then eventually create our parts and i'll then show you how to post into g-code using different processors so without further ado let's jump into it so the model you can see in front of me i'm going to post that up on grab card hopefully with a link in the description so if you would like to follow along uh with me then go ahead and download that if not and you'd like to use your own model then that's absolutely fine as well hopefully that should everything i do should apply in exactly the same way so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to select the drop down and i'm going to click on path which i've already done up here i'm going to click on this icon up here which is going to create a new job and i'm already collected i've already selected the job that we've got now template is set to none i'm going to click ok this thing going to bring up this side box over here i'm going to click on the general tab now in here you can edit the label of the job if you'd like to so for me i'm just going to set it as a simple sort of number like so model we've already got selected and you can set a description if you wanted to uh template export is something that i'm not entirely sure about at the moment so i'm not going to go too much into that today i'm going to click onto the output tab i'm going to set the processor to linuxcnc i'm going to put my output file as sample model dot gcode like so it's about completely wrong once i've said that i'm going to go over to the setup tab and i'm going to start changing the stock geometry for the part so as you can see at the moment it's selected to extend models bound box as you can see it's got a mill going the entire way around the border as well as on the top and on the bottom so what i want to do with this is well first i'm going to show you what we can what we can actually do with this so we've got create a box which basically just creates the overall size of the actual stock of the actual part we want to machine now you can actually obviously adjust all of this but i don't think it gives you that much flexibility you can create a cylinder so that will create a cylinder around the actual part and use existing solid basically uses what you've already got and i believe that basically leaves you with things like the pockets the holes and for us the 3d pocket so today i'm going to be using the extend models bound box which is the third one down in the list i'm going to set the extended zed the one on the left to eight millimeters and that's going to extend the top as well so i'm just going to go back over to the right i'm going to set that to one millimeter so as you can see we've now got eight millimeters at the bottom so that we can hold on that in our fixture in our vise i've got one millimeter on either side i've got one millimeter on the top so i'm going to set myself back to isometric and i'm going to click on this point up here i'm going to click down here and set the origin now what that's going to do is when i put the stock into the machine to be milled i'm going to probe on the x on this side on the x and i'm going to probe on this side of the y and then obviously the z on top of the stock now the reason why obviously we want to probe the stock we don't want to probe where the parts going to be we want to put the stock because we want to get our part out of the stock material that we're actually putting into the machine so that's where we set our order so now we can actually move the the part around if we wanted to so if we wanted to move it upwards left to right and we can also move it diagonally as well but for me i'm just going to leave that exactly where it is in the center of our stock so now we're going to go over to default values so default values we're going to leave those where they are what i'm going to do is i'm just going to set the safe mode to five millimeter as well offset and i'm going to go over to the tools tab now for this i'm going to add a few different tools now as you can see i've already added those tools and i'll leave again the setup for those tools uh in the description down below so basically i'll show you how to create these tools so what you'll do is you click on new tool you would name that tool so let's call it just a 10 millimeter endsmile like so it doesn't have to be in capital layers you can do it however you want the type is set to end mil but as you can see you've got a few variations of tools that you can use which will come through quite a few of those later on so for this one it's going to set to end mill so when it comes to material it depends on what tools you have available to you but for this i'm going to set it to carbide uh the link box offset i'm going to set up to 150 so 150 is basically uh from where the spindle starts down to the bottom of the actual tool itself so i'm going to set the diameter to 10 mil because we've got a 10 millimeter end mill and i'm going to set the height or the h which is the cutting edge i'm going to set that to about 25 millimeters i'm going to say okay now what that will do is that will actually add our tool um to the list if we if we want it um and so what we can do is we can actually edit and change that however we want so i'm going to delete that because i no longer need that one because i've already got my 10 millimeter 10 millimeter in in the list already and delete you just have to click the box and click delete so what i'll do is i'm going to add these to our actual jobs i'm going to select all of these tools like so in the tick boxes and create tool controller i'm going to say okay down the bottom here now as you can see we've got seven tools here which is including the default tool which we'll delete in a minute we've got six tools that we're actually going to use within our job today next we're going to go to the work plan tab and as you can see there's nothing in here at the moment but in the second part when we start filling out our different paths such as the pocketing or the adaptive roughing and stuff like that drilling you know it will start to fill up this work plane here op defaults again i don't know what they are so i'm just not going to go into too much detail about them today so now i'm going to click ok and as you can see we have created our um our actual job onto the left-hand side on the tree uh we've got all of our tools here i'm going to delete the default tool just by clicking clicking on it and clicking delete saying yes and as you can see here we've basically got everything that we've created so far so we've got the stock and if i click on that and press the space bar it will highlight where our stock is so as you can see our part isn't actually within our stock mainly because the placement of the part the zero zero is actually on the bottom face here so if i hide that stock again it's actually the zero zero is actually about here um which we don't want we want it to be in the center of our stock so i'm going to go over to our filler over here so we're going to click on the actual part i'm going to click on placement and click on the three dots here and then going to set these so on the x i'm going to set that to 25 on the y i'm going to set that to minus 25 and on the z i'm going to set that to minus 21. now as we can see we're back to where we want to be so we've got a millimeter on either side a millimeter meter on the top and eight millimeter underneath and the same on this side a millimeter and a millimeter so now i'm going to do is i'm going to click apply and okay so now the part is within our stop material the origin is set onto our back left corner and on top and now we're going to start moving into editing the tools things like speed speeds and the general geometry so i'm going to double click on the 10 millimeter end mill i'm going to set the tool number to tall one so that's what this number is here and i'm also going to set the comment to tool one as well i'm going to change the horizontal feed to 29 millimeters a second i'm going to set the vertical speed to 16 mm second i'm going to set the spindle which is in rpm i'm going to set that to 9549 and it's in a forward which is a clockwise cutting motion rather than a counterclockwise cutting motion which depending on what tool you have obviously you can change that but if i was to use a right hand cutting tool and i put it into reverse it would rub rather than cut so there we've got that if i click on tool here it basically brings up what we set earlier so we've got the 10 millimeter end mill end mill carbide 150 millimeter long and we've got obviously our diameter 10 mil and our height there so we've got that as 30 millimeter cutting depth i'm now going to click ok and i'm going to click onto the second tool now if you look into the description as well i'll also have a list of all these speeds feeds and the geometry um but i'll just quickly show you this one so i'm going to set this to uh tool 2 and again i'm going to set the comment tool to i'm going to set the horizontal feed to 18 millimeter second the vertical speed to 16 millimeter second and i'm going to set the spindle speed to 10 000 rpm now for the ball noses i'm not entirely sure why the ball mills i'm not totally sure why but when you actually set the tool geometry or the tool data it doesn't actually save it unless you physically um edit it on the drop-down tree so if i set this this is a five mil i believe so we'll set that diameter to five mil we don't need to do the flat radius because there is no flat i'm going to set the corner radius to 2.5 because that's half of the actual diameter because the ball mill uh the point tip is 180 degrees and the cutting edge for this again we'll set that as say 30 millimeters and i'm going to set that as okay so i'm going to quickly go through and i'm going to finish off the rest of these and you can do the same okay there we have it we've now set our tool feeds and speeds and we've also set the geometry of the ball mill now for the six millimeter end mill i'm going to actually set the comment to six millimeter 1.5 r which basically it's a bull mill rather than an end mill so basically it's got a 1.5 rad uh on either side of the actual cutter um and basically what that does is when it actually roughs out the pocket for the 3d pocket for us instead of having a sharp edge in the corners it's going to have a slightly radiused edge and that will stop any scoring on the inside of the pocket when we go to finish it up later which should hopefully help out the ball mill and finish quality so there we have it that's the end of part one of the path module in the next video i'm going to show you how to create the tool paths which will then eventually create our part so in this video we've actually created the tools we've created the feeds and speeds and the tool geometries we've created the stock around the outside of our part as well as giving us plenty to hold on to at the bottom and we've also set the origin point and made sure that the part is in the center of our stock material as always if you liked the video give it a thumbs up if you dislike the video give it a thumbs down and don't forget to leave a comment uh in the comment section down below letting me know how to improve uh these videos and what you what you enjoyed most about them thank you for watching and i'll see you in part two

Channel: Andrew CAD

Views: 28,436

Keywords: Engineering, engineering life, FreeCAD, Tutorial, Learning, 3D design, design, 3D, Design engineer, design engineering, engineer, CAD, Quality, how to guide, create, how to, Path Module, CAM, Milling program, Gcode, NC Code, Adaptive path, Mill, Drill, Ball Mill, Spot Drill, Machine post, Setup, How to set origin, how to add stock, how to machine stock, stock, adding tools, milling tools, 3 axis

Id: 5Lj4wEmdOwQ

Length: 12min 24sec (744 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 24 2020