Front pannel - place and combine objects

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Splash
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Apr 26, 2017 1:57 pm

Front pannel - place and combine objects

Post by Splash »

Hi,

I am new to FreeCAD and CAD design in general. I want to design a front pannel with some terminals mounted on it. Later I want to manufacture the front panel. So in the final step I need a drawing with all mounting holes and cut outs. I am not familar with the general workflow for such a task. I started with designing the speaker terminal which should later sit on the panel multiple times. I created a second file with a simple rectangular panel and imported my previous created speaker terminal. Now I don't know what and how to do the next steps.
  • How can I place my speaker terminal multiple times on top of the panel? Should I reduce my terminal to a single object or keep the pads and pockets?
  • Do I have to manually place them with the placement tool or is it possible to make constraints between multiple terminals and my front panel (distance betweem them, distance to the border, ...)?
  • How can I "extend" the holes in my terminals so that the panel has a hole at the same point? I tried to do it manually but the function to make a relation between the new sketch and the holes in my terminal does not work
I have attached the CAD file with a single terminal and my "front panel". I am using version 0.16.6706.

I hope you can give me some advices!

Regards
Attachments
comb.png
comb.png (9.27 KiB) Viewed 845 times
combined.FCStd
(51.11 KiB) Downloaded 26 times
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Willem
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Posts: 1852
Joined: Fri Aug 12, 2016 3:27 pm
Location: Lisse, The Netherlands

Re: Front pannel - place and combine objects

Post by Willem »

Hi, welcome to the forum,

making holes in the same positions is done with expressions. You give the dimensions you want to reuse in a sketch a name and in another sketch you can recall that dimension with expressions. If you look in sketch003 you will see the name given to dimensions and in sketch006 they are reused. All dimension in sketch006 are automatically changed when the design is changed in sketch001 or sketch003
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