Book Image

FreeCAD

By : Brad Collette, Daniel Falck
Book Image

FreeCAD

By: Brad Collette, Daniel Falck

Overview of this book

FreeCAD is a general purpose platform for CAD development. It can be extended to use different workbenches to solve different problems. Targeted squarely at the engineering community, FreeCAD is an open source design application built to be extended. Python, the powerful scripting language, is woven deeply into FreeCAD's DNA and gives users unprecedented power to automate and invent. "FreeCAD [How-to]" is a lean, fast tour of FreeCAD's major workbenches and design philosophy. The reader will get a hands-on introduction to several modeling techniques and learn how Python makes macro automation and design possible. FreeCAD allows users to design in a variety of ways; from drawing 2D designs as lines and circles to combining primitive solids into complex 3D shapes. Objects can even be created or modified by code you write in Python. FreeCAD even allows power users to extend the application itself with new dialogs, panels, and scripts. This book will not only show you how to get started using FreeCAD in a traditional GUI mode, but will teach you how to harness its powerful scripting language for more power.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Creating a drawing of a part (Should know)


The Drawing workbench lets us create 2D views of 3D objects for presentation in formats that are ideal for printing. In this recipe, we will create a drawing with three views.

Getting ready

Select a 3D object in a document and open the Drawing workbench:

How to do it...

  1. Select the Insert new drawing icon:

  2. Pick the Insert an orthographic projection icon:

  3. A new task will pop up in the Task panel. Select a Primary View:

  4. Select Secondary Views:

  5. Click on the OK button in the Task panel.

  6. While the Page icon is selected in the Project tree, click on its Data tab.

  7. Double-click on the button that has ... as its label.

  8. A text dialog box will popup. Edit the values, putting in your name, the date, and so on:

  9. Click on the recompute button to see the results:

How it works...

FreeCAD uses algorithms from the OpenCascade CAD kernel to calculate 2D projections from 3D objects. FreeCAD takes advantage of this and inserts those projections onto a SVG canvas. This canvas is actually a template that was imported during step 1.

The Orthographic Projection dialog in the Task panel creates different projections at set angles, scales them, and spaces them in a consistent way.

The text dialog helps us edit SVG editable texts and fills in the text information in the bottom-right corner of the title block.

There's more...

If you want to give your drawing to someone who doesn't have FreeCAD, you might want to export it as a PDF file.

Export a PDF file from your drawing

Select the Page object in the Project tree. From the top menu, select File and then Export PDF. Give your file a name with a *.pdf extension and select a directory to save it to.