Can Freecad help me for an assembly?
Can Freecad help me for an assembly?
I have to design several wood boxes who will be bases for acrylic showcase boxes. They have all different sizes but the construction is the same and quite simple. So what I'm looking to do is to design a generic construction with constraints once, and then be able to change a few variables like the boards thickness, the thickness of the acrylic and the width height length of the box and I would get the dimensions of my wood boards to do the cutting.
I never used the assembly workbenches, can they be useful in my cases?
I did a very similar project. I was designing cabinet doors that all needed to look the same, but needed to be different widths. I did it before the update to 1.0 so the process is a little different now. I will say it wasn't that hard, and I definitely parameterized way more stuff than I needed just cause I was playing around with it.
There is now a default assembly workbench. You don't need it for this. It is mostly handy to verify your design.
Assuming endless possible values: set up a spreadsheet, define an alias (top right) for the relevant values, and use that in your sketches and extrudes.
You could model the various bodies in place in the right orientation and make do without any assembly as there are moving parts too. The new assembly workbench is nice to use though so it's worth trying it out.
Thanks. I just discovered the spreadsheet and aliases, pretty straightforward to use the values in the sketch. Now I have yet to find out how to create multiple parts.
That's great!
I'd create one body (the blue icon) per shape you want to cut. You can reference the same spreadsheet.
If you want to reference geometry from another body, activate the body where you want to use it (doubleclick in the hierarchy), select the face of the other body, and use the subshape binder (the green icon with red dots I think). Calculating everything from the spreadsheet is the more stable option.
Looking forward to see what you come up with if you choose to share it.