FreeCAD Useful Tips and Awesome Tricks with @WayofWood! |JOKO ENGINEERING|

i have had the privilege of working with a channel called way of wood they're an amazing channel that has not only free cat tutorials but many other things especially related to carpentry we've worked together to each make five useful tips and awesome tricks videos for free cad so give wave wood a view give them a subscribe they have five more awesome tricks in free cad let's get started i'm here in free cad and in a lot of platforms it can be challenging to generate involute spur gears or other types of gears and know that they're going to mesh properly because a lot of these models even if you get them from you know suppliers can sometimes not have the correct envelope profile freecad provides a really elegant solution for this and is found in the gear workbench now if you don't have this which freecad doesn't have this by default you simply come to tools add-on manager and you come down here to fc gear select that click install and then restart free cad and you'll have the gear workbench you have all kinds of gears right you have rack cycloid crown gear worm gear i mean just about anything you can think of is here if i click on spur gear it just generates a spur gear that has the correct dimensions to mesh properly now if i click on this gear and click model over here in the history tree i have a series of properties that i can adjust this gear with the big ones are going to be module and modules right here and of course if i change my module then i change my gear size no if you're familiar with module it is the inverse of diameter pitch and that's to say the inverse of how many teeth you will have per inch along your pitch circle diameter the pitch circle of course is a circle that represents the diameter of the gear itself in pure rolling motion so as long as your modules are the same between two gears and your pressure angle is the same it is highly likely that the gears will mesh so again module here and we should have pressure angle right there right another common pressure angle is 14.5 in an involute gear if i rebuild that you can see the pressure angle change in the tooth profile but i like 20 20 is kind of a magic number so i'm going to go back to that you can also adjust the number of teeth which of course is where you get your ratio from so we can give this 50 teeth if we wanted to and make it quite a large gear it is a really brilliant gear generator and we can also adjust clearance so if we have a fit issue and we want to have more teeth clearance i can say 0.75 perhaps and notice now we have some more clearance for meshing so there's a whole huge menu to choose from on how to work with these involute gears and freecad makes this incredibly easy as well so i hope this was a helpful quick tip if you're downloading a file from thingiverse you could be lucky and you have a file that has the extension.cat this is an openscad file and if you don't want to use openscad on your computer the files can most of the times be directly opened in freecad here we look at a small 3d print to convert a ruler into a mocking gauge it is important that the openscad import depends on the python module in ubuntu linux you can install the package with sudo apt-install python 3 minus ply as an alternative you can install the package via the python package manager by typing in the following on the command line pip install ply this should also work under windows after importing the model in freecad you can even directly edit the parameters of the openscad model let's for example change the diameter of the cylinders that make up the holes for the axle if we delete a boolean operation we can change the individual parts of the assembly one thing that i use freecad frequently for is to add a fillet to my openscad models as this is quite a pain in openscad itself but for most models you will only get an stl file like this cable mount after importing the stl you have a mesh file in freecad you can't modify the mesh as you could do it with a cat file so we have to convert it go to the mesh workbench within the mesh analyze and report menu we find a toolbox that can help us fixing problems with the mesh in this case we are good and there are no flip normals holes or similar problems usually simple models that come straight from another cat program will have less problems more organic models such as this miniature here will often have more problems that you discover when running the analyze function i will usually apply them one by one and see if they damage the model but honestly this kind of model is most likely better repaired in the free software mesh lab first and then modified in blender so let's go back to our cable mount after running any necessary repairs we harmonize the normals now we have a mesh but not a form that could be manipulated in order to get a shape we switch to the part workbench and select create shape from mesh this creates a shape but the new shape is not very friendly to use as the mesh is not optimal at the top of the form for example there is not a square but it's made up from two triangles it would be quite hard to work with that shape so we go to the part workbench create copy refine shape this is going to result in an empty shell with convert to solid we finally have a form we can work with we can for example add a cylinder then we cut a hole in the larger cylinder and after adding a small fillet we have a mount that could be screwed to a surface rather than gluing it although 0.19 has been in pre-release for a while i'd like to cover some of the new things that are available in the drawing environment this is a pretty amazing update from the last tech draw and i was impressed with the last tech draw so this is pretty darn cool so here i have a bill of materials with an assembly that's been imported and one of the new features in fact i think the one that i'm most excited about is now this button to add balloons and annotations i select a line or face that i want to add a balloon to click the wound the balloon button and now i have a drawing that i can start to bubble my parts on i mean that's amazing in addition if i choose another part of my drawing maybe down here i can not only add in a balloon but i can come down here and adjust my text for it to be if i can say like weld here right now normally you'd use a weld symbol oh yeah that's available in this version now too and we're going to be covering that so i can say none and now i have a straight annotation that i can make things i can use a triangle an inspection hexagon square i mean you name it freecad has got it so this is an incredible addition uh and i i mean it's incredible just all by itself a freak had to be able to do this from one version to another but it gets even better so we can add balloons and annotations we have now leader lines in addition i can add rich text and this is pretty cool i select this right here and as i do i can start the rich text editor and look it's like a little word processor almost i can say you know test notes come down here i can do a strikethrough and that's helpful if you want to show revision control or things that have been removed i can bold things with the strikethrough still on apparently i can underline and i can choose colors right so i can make a green text as part of my drawing you can't see the text very well there but i do have green text i can make a bullet point right and i can change the text back to black as well as making it green i mean this is one smart text editor so then i can click the save button those are my those are my notes i can show a frame around this if i want to and that black thing is my frame that i can remove or take away so this is great for adding like a drawing note or even things to the title block right so you have this rich text editor that's really powerful and way more powerful than it has been in the past revisions that's really exciting if i move into this next in fact maybe i'll even uh come into here right so i've got this little part it's a it's pretty simple right just a pad and if i come into this drawing let's say you'll notice that this is not the highest point right the highest point lies somewhere on this arc so if i wanted to have an overall dimension that'd be very difficult to do however if i select this face and then i come over here and choose vertical extent notice freecad automatically knows that i want to show the vertical extent dimension of this part it chooses the lowermost point and it adds its own uppermost point that's pretty powerful so i can do vertical and horizontal extents very easily horizontal there we go i also in tech draw now have the capability of adding my own midpoints and quadrants so what if i have to reference the middle of this straight line for some reason well i can come over here and say add midpoint vertice and a midpoint vertices shows up if i want to get rid of it i come over here to this button called remove cosmetic object and it gets rid of that cosmetic object just as easily i can also add in a series of four points right so if i have a circle i can put a point in every quadrant of the circle or if i want to have four evenly spaced points across this line for some reason then i can do that and in order to do that i would say add quadrant vertices and there are four lines if i do it over here it'll get way too crowded but you should get the idea right i have four points now what if i need to reference an arc center point maybe i'll do this arc or just as a another reminder i can select all of these points just hold ctrl and remove them if i need to highlight the arc center point for some reason the center point command works on the arc as well and we can add an endpoint or midpoint vertices you can also add your own virtual sharp it's not a straightforward if we say as add cosmetic vertex you can choose to type in your x and y coordinates and place it that way or you can visually do it but there's this isn't dimension related so i wouldn't trust it for correct dimensions but you can add a little point picker so if you need to do a virtual sharp for some reason you can just by typing in the coordinates to that sharp relative to the center of your view so that would be adding cosmetic points again very very powerful now if i come to this drawing what if i want to add a center line through the middle of this well that would be quite difficult until this version i select my view which you can see i have selected and if i wish to add a center line i come over here and say add center line to faces i want to add a horizontal center line and i say okay and my center line is added easy as that again very incredible i can also make a vertical center line in the view as well i can add a center line to this face and we'll make sure it's vertical right just very incredible ability to do this and i think this really increases your ability to do good tech draw work you can also add center lines in between two points or in between two lines doing the same method next i can add in welding symbols so there's nothing in this view that i want to weld but i can add a leader line as before right so i choose the point so i pick my points first and then i create a nice leader line over here and i say okay and then i with my leader line highlighted i come over here and it says add welding information to leader line and i can add in like a nice fill it well this is the aws style and i can add in you know a number here and there's my welding information i can always double click here and you know add an all around or an alternating symbol or whatever i like and if i want to add the little carrot that is pretty typical of welding symbols or if i want to edit my leader line after the fact i double click on my leader line i can edit my points alright so i can move that one bit closer and then say my n symbol i can use the typical welding fork if i have more information that i would like to display i'll save the changes to my leader line points we'll say okay so now i have a nice welding symbol again aws is below iso is above and i haven't really made this particular to anything because there's not even a weld going there but that is how you can do welding symbols if you wish the techdraw has new uh templates um particularly it looks like there's one for russian slavian and also a china template so there's a few other things like some formatting changes svg hatches and i think one big deal they've redone some of the dimensions and now they are fully compliant with iso or as me y 14.5 as me why 14.5 is by far my favorite standard i wasn't expecting that standard to come up but it has and i am incredibly impressed i mean every new version of freecad just exceeds my expectations and the drawing environment is a great example of why i hope this video was helpful and i hope this was a great quick tip i'll see you in the next one spreadsheets are a great tool to organize the parameters of your model however right clicking on each cell in order to give it an alias might be a bit cumbersome the alias manager macro is there for the rescue install it with the add-on manager in the tools menu after installation you want to go to tools customize macros and add a new button for the macro if you then go to the toolbar tab you can first create a new group in the spreadsheet workbench and then add the button for the macro if you are in a spreadsheet simply press the button and select the column that contains your values the names for the variables always have to be in column a then select the correct range and press ok and close the window you can now use the alias in all entry fields just enter the name of the spreadsheet use autocompletion and the name of the variable and you get a fully parametric model whenever you change the values in the spreadsheet the change will be reflected in the design a quick bonus tip sometimes i want to leave a note to myself about certain values or why i did some weird things in a model since version 0.19 this no longer requires a spreadsheet as all documents can have text files attached to them this feature can be found in tools add text document so on freecad there are some ways to modernize the appearance of the platform itself and i want to go through one way today known as the glass workbench this is something you can install that makes recad look a lot more updated i'm not going to do this myself for future videos i have too many people that don't use this that would benefit to follow along with more of a default look but this is great if you want to modernize the way that your cat looks so here i have free cad open i've got a model of a js 39 gripen i think that's a pretty cool plane a lot like the rafael that i model a little while back and if you're interested in getting your free cat to look better you can use the add-on manager now there is a current thing going on and i'm not sure what's causing this but when i go to tools and add-on manager all i have is 3d printing tools now if you're running linux there's a pretty easy way to work around that so if something called glass ends up on your add-on manager then just install glass from here if not which i don't have glass showing up i only have one workbench showing up then you can enter these lines of code into the terminal so i'll open up my terminal and we're going to say sudo apt get install git python numpy python pi side exactly is that and of course i've already installed that and then when we mkdir we do the little squiggly thing next to the one key on the keyboard slash dot free cad in fact i think that's case sensitive so we're gonna say free cad slash mod right and then we make that folder but i've already made that folder so i'm not going to hit enter and then we change direction change directory and now that we're in this directory we can input a command to clone from github so in this case i want to install the glass workbench now i found the glass workbench on github so i enter the command git clone and then ctrl shift v and there is the address to the github hit enter and now it's cloning glass so we should have the glass workbench installed and what i have to do now of course is restart free cad all right so now i have this workbench installed i'm going to say edit preferences and this is not necessary but i just like having a darker style sheet so apply that now i think well what's different right there's not much different about this appearance well how about i open up my step file again all right so with something open you can see that i have this new transparent toggle right here so what i can do is just close my combo view and i have a history tree on things right if i open up another file so i think this is a pretty good example because it has such a long history tree with a lot of features on this one and you can download this from my grab cat if you'd like to have a copy of this for yourself but the glass add-on does a wonderful job of presenting this in the way that you might see it in catia or even solidworks and it works you know the same way if i want to edit a sketch i just double click on it and i'm now editing whatever sketch that i made so it works the same way and it's a fantastic workbench if you wish to modernize the look of your freecad well i hope this was a helpful quick tip there's a few others in freecad that can help update your workbench as well one is called icon themes which maybe i can cover at some point as well i hope this was helpful and i'll see in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Joko Engineeringhelp

Views: 14,958

Keywords: joko, engineering, help, jokoengineering, engineeringhelp, ACADEMY, jokoengineeringhelp, tutorial, how, to, howto, engineer, JMT, EXPLAIN, EXPLAINED, GOENGINEER, KHAN, Tips, Tricks, way, of, wood, useful, awesome, and

Id: 0zxjOB2Cao8

Length: 25min 19sec (1519 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 23 2020