Trying FreeCAD for the First Time

in this video we'll be making this tablet stand in fusion 360. depending on where you've been for the past week you should have heard about autodesk changes to the personal license for fusion 360. as of the 1st of october there are a number of changes to what functionality that will be available in the application as a result we'll be taking a look at another CAD application to see if it's worth the switch in this video we'll be making this tablet stand in freecad like fusion 360 freecad is capable of dealing with 3d printing laser cutting and cnc workflows in addition freecad is available on windows macintosh and also linux so any good project starts off with a bit of measuring so first thing we want to do is take the measurements of the tablet its height its width and also its thickness we also have to consider what is being mounted to so the post also needs a quick measurement taken once we have all of that we can do a quick sketch of approximately what we're going to design in the cad application so once you've downloaded and installed freecad it looks vaguely familiar but not at the same time now i've been using fusion 360 for a couple of years now i would consider myself a reasonable user and competent to the point where i can complete the tasks that i need to for my projects when you're going into freecad the first thing you need to do is to go into part design which is drop down in the middle and then create a new body once you've created a new body you are able to start creating sketches that define that body. In the center of the sketch window you have your primitives so you can create all the different sorts of geometry types that you need for sketching. on the right hand side you have all of your constraints all the sort of stuff you would see within fusion 360. one of the problems i found with freecad is that you had to fully define the object before it would allow you to extrude now that was problematic because when you start trimming some of the dimensions and some of the constraints start to delete from the sketch or they become detached from the sketch so there's a sketch analysis tool which helps you find these sorts of problems but it's not necessarily that intuitive from an end user perspective but ultimately we were able to sketch out a base section and a top section for the tablet stand now i would imagine engineers are probably quite used to fully defining sketches but from a hobbyist perspective fusion 360 is a bit more tolerant to you not fully defining your sketch which i suppose is a positive and a negative as is fully defining your sketches. So i was able to sketch out the geometry that i needed to create the cuts to create the slots that will receive the tablet on the lower section and on the upper section i was also able to create the geometry to create the pockets for the nut and bolt and then it was just a simple case of exporting the final files ready for 3d printing right well there we go one tablet stand made using 3d printing and freecad so we're all about ready to jump ship and leave all our autodesk products behind well not exactly using freecad it made it abundantly clear that autodesk has spent a lot of time and effort into the user interface making functions within sketches within extrusions within boolean operations really really simple so in this project we've only demonstrated a simple sketch and extrude example we haven't gone into complex things such as designing threads for the use of functional bolts that on my sort of research looks a little bit more complicated and for full disclosure the time lapse that you just saw that was actually my 4th attempt at trying to get the sketch geometry working with dimensions to fully define the sketch it was very infuriating to get to that point but i had to drive through to ensure that the project was completed so freecad is a viable option certainly for creating models for 3d printing definitely. I'm definitely be using freecad alongside fusion 360. in the future autodesk may restrict the functionality within fusion even further so it's always worth having a backup option for me now it's not the time for freecad to become my daily drive hopefully you like this video and if you did hit the like and subscribe button until

Channel: IQ Workshop

Views: 46,702

Rating: 4.5857143 out of 5

Keywords: freecad, freecad tutorial, free cad, 3d printing, 3d print, 3dprint, autodesk, fusion, fusion360, fusion 360, laser cutting, guide, reprap, freecad free download, howto, how to, how to make, how to make a tablet stand, how to make a tablet stand with freecad, freecad vs fusion, freecad vs fusion360, freecad vs fusion 360, freecad tutorials for beginners, freecad tutorial for beginners

Id: xyVC6AshAG4

Length: 5min 59sec (359 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020