#FREECAD LESSONS DOWNLOAD#

You can download this macro here.įor the pocket operation we select a ZigZagOffset pattern that will clean up the bottom and then also follow the profile. Selecting multiple areas or edges can sometimes be a bit cumbersome – I therefore wrote a small macro that helps to select all faces that have the same size. The first operation we want to create are the pockets for the dice.

#FREECAD LESSONS UPDATE#

The addon produces a good starting point for the feed and speed of your job and we can directly update the toolbit parameters.Īfter setting the speed and feed for the tool when cutting we also have to change the feed rate for the moves in between cuts. This overview from Sorotec is a good starting point (in German). The chipload and the surface speed that you can get from your tool manufacturer or generic reference tables. In order to get the right values just select another tool before going back to the original one you want to work with. It has a small bug when you locale has a comma as the decimal separator. The Path Feeds and Speeds Addon is a very handy tool that you can download from GitHub. We can then add tools from the tool dock to our job. Lastly I change the parameters of the tool like diameter and length. I select the shape of a tool on which the new tool will be based, and then choose a name for the new toolbit. I have all the tools that I need for this job already in my library but let’s quickly create an endmill to show you the process. You can now hide the original model and work with the copy of the model that the path workbench created inside of the job.Īfter creating the job the next thing is to create a tool.

I had to write my own for the board I am using – which was also not a big deal. For common solutions such as GRBL or LinuxCNC there are post processors available. In the output tab you have to select the post processor that fits your machine.

#FREECAD LESSONS FREE#

My stock extends the model by 1 mm in X and Y direction on each side – which doesn’t matter that much as I will anyhow cut the piece free at the end. In the new job task pane you can set the origin to any point of your model or your stock. Now comes the CAM part and for that we switch over to the Path workbench. Looks good – we could create dice games as large as we want. Before moving on to the CAM part let’s check if the model also works with other parameters. With these steps we are done with the CAD part. The length of the array is the arraywidth variable minus the width of a single dice. We then apply a MultiTransform with two LinearPatterns. The depth of the pocket is as deep as the recess variable. The size is dimensioned according to the dicewidth variable and the first recess is placed frameseparator away from the corner. The size of the pad corresponds to materialthickness.Įach of the four corners gets a 5mm fillet according to the radius variable.įor the recess we create a new sketch in the XY plane. We start with a sketch in the XY plane and make the square as wide as calculated in our variable framewidth. With all the dimensions set the actual modeling is quite simple. After all the aliases are set we can calculate the width of the array and the width of the entire frame so that we can use these variables later in the model. Have a look at this video that that explains the necessary steps in detail.

#FREECAD LESSONS INSTALL#

You can install this macro in the tools menu. I use the alias macro to set all the aliases at once. When I am modeling something in FreeCAD I always create a spreadsheet that contains all the necessary parameters – so that I can easily change these later.įor this model we need the width of a dice, the width of the wooden separator between two dice, the width of the frame around the game, the amount of dice in one row, the radius of the corners, the thickness of the material we are going to use and the depth of the recess we create for each dice. I recently got a new CNC – a more detailed article on the machine will follow soon.I this article I will machine this simple dice game on the CNC and go step by step through the necessary operations in FreeCAD. In this article, we make this simple dice game in FreeCAD, run the CAM part and cut it on the CNC machine.

Freecad lessons