Arch Panel

[yorik]

Good idea, I added those 2 MDF entries (and fixed the plywoood). Thanks!

Pretty cool wind tunnel! I'm still hesitating at how to develop the workflow with arch panels further, what would be good ways to work with them, etc. Don't hesitate to give some ideas

[bitacovir]

Don't hesitate to give some ideas

Hi. Well, I wrote the different stages that are part of the workflow that we use to works with laser cutters. I hope this was useful to get some inspiration.

The process have the following stages:

1) Drawing the parts
- Drawing the components
- Stretching the profiles to create the 3D components with a specific thickness (3mm, 6mm, etc)
Note: an interesting approach is to generate automatically a laser cutting file like the popular waffle structures:
http://blog.ponoko.com/2010/11/11/slice ... ercutting/
http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topi ... -for-laser
http://www.123dapp.com/make
http://rhin.crai.archi.fr/rld/plugin_details.php?id=615

2) Assembly the parts
- To put all the parts together to see if they fit perfectly.
Note: in this stage is where we go with many changes in our design. That means drawing and stretching many times to create new components.

3) Enumerate, classify
- To count how many parts our model has.
Note: This part can be very complicate and require a lot of time. If our model has so many parts, like this one: http://cita.karch.dk/Menu/Research+Proj ... %282013%29 with different thickness and different dimensions, to count them will take a lot time. An automatic method of classification of parts and count would be very useful the create list and tables of components.

4) Templates
-To arrange all the components on the MDF or plywood sheet to be cut.
Note: this stage takes a lot time as well (to move and put manually the elements into the sheet template). There are several considerations:
To arrange considering the best position of the elements to save material as much as be possible.
To save time in the laser cutter or CNC machine, deleting overlapped lines. If the shapes of the parts are regular and straight we can attached the geometries to each other and delete the overlapped lines, so the laser cutter only needs to pass once.

5) Export format file
- to export with a format to be used or easily imported in a laser cutter program (adobe illustrator) or CNC machine.

[yorik]

Interesting... Slicing a solid object and get a series of 2D profiles is already possible in freecad, you can then easily turn these profiles into sketches (provided there are no splines), then create panel objects from each of them, and, if they are sketches, edit them later easily. That part is easy.

Enumerating the parts is something I already thought about, not really implemented, but there could be a number of ways to do that. That's a bit the idea behind the "Tag" property that all Arch objects have, in the case of panels, we could gather these panels by tag, and have the tag be engraved on the panel.

Placing the cut paths on a sheet is something I want to do with the Path module. The path module can already generate the toolpath, and, even if the panel is "in position" in the 3D model, the toolpath can already be rotated and placed horizontally on the XY plane.

The hard part would be to "compose" or fit the different toolpaths on a single mdf sheet. I haven't found a library that can do that automatically. In a first time it's always possible to do that manually of course...

In any case I think this workflow is perfectly doable.

[bitacovir]

Interesting... Slicing a solid object and get a series of 2D profiles is already possible in freecad, you can then easily turn these profiles into sketches (provided there are no splines), then create panel objects from each of them, and, if they are sketches, edit them later easily. That part is easy.

This method allows producing very beautiful structures automatically. The process is:
- to create or import the solid object
- to define the axes, angle and number for the slices. In general this structure is formed by slices that are intersected in two directions like in a grid.
- to define the thickness of the slices. The intersection of the slices must generate slots to interlock the slices. The thickness provides the width of the slot. This structures are generally done for cardboard (1, 2 , 3 , 4 , 5mm), MDF (3 , 6mm)
- to generate and display the 2D profiles of all slices. So, the user can arrangement them in the MDF or cardboard sheet.

The hard part would be to "compose" or fit the different toolpaths on a single mdf sheet. I haven't found a library that can do that automatically. In a first time it's always possible to do that manually of course...

In general we do manually. I've seen some programs doing automatically. But they are commercial programs. I think they probably use a genetic algorithm system, where the algorithm takes the slices and tests different positions, following simple rules. Probably it is not difficult to do for people with experience in genetic algorithm, but I do not think FreeCAD includes a GA module, yet

[yorik]

Interesting... We could try to implement a waffle script at some point... It shouldn't be hard...

[bitacovir]

Another example. This model was built here for a colleague. It does not use slots to interlock, they are parallel slices or layers. The results is a solid body, but is heavy and expensive (it uses a lot of material).

P1020421.JPG (315.86 KiB) Viewed 4134 times

[microelly2]

Some examples how I use slicing

http://freecadbuch.de/doku.php?id=blog: ... -schneider
http://freecadbuch.de/doku.php?id=blog: ... ammenbauen
http://freecadbuch.de/doku.php?id=blog: ... _erstellen

[Renato Rebelo]

speaking of interesting ideas.
This method (slices) could not be used to create contours terrain in FreeCAD, it's just an idea ...
thank you,
Renato

[yorik]

This method (slices) could not be used to create contours terrain in FreeCAD, it's just an idea ...

there are several tools to do that already, look at the "Cross sections" tool in Part workbench, for example.

[Robocut]

Global variables would be really helpful to fine tune for material thickness. I've thought about designing things like this by slicing to cut with my CNC router, but if they are being joined with slots and tabs you need to able to easily adjust them.