Create a pocket following a letter's silhouette

[Electheo]

Hello!

I'd like to sort of "carve" a path in a letter for a project. It will be used to plate a led strip inside. So the entire "path" needs to be x millimetres wide, let's say 4 mm wide. I've added some photo's showing the path on a letter (roughly lol) and what this would look like as a section view. Excuse me as I might use the wrong terms here and there!

I've thought of multiple theoretical ways to do this:
- copy the text and shrink the thickness (a problem would be inconsistent thickness as it always needs to be 4 mm). This could be used to create a pocket in an existing text
- manually trace the letter with a spline, then sweep a 4 mm wide and deep sketch along the spline to create a pocket the shape of the letter (this would take too much time because I need to do this often)
-... your suggestion??

I appreciate any thought, help or tips given, thanks in advance!

Theo

PS: I use this font https://www.1001fonts.com/great-vibes-font.html

[TheMarkster]

If you can find a font you like that is really thin, then you can perhaps sweep along one of the edges. Search for "hairline" style fonts.

[heda]

do not think there is a way to do this automatically as it is right now,
some of it could of course be coded, but there are a lot of edgecases to care for
that will turn out to be really tricky to get right (just not worth the effort imho)
one could settle for coding something halfway, i.e. does not care about edge cases,
but still would do part of it.

brute forcing by hand is always possible though
assuming that one is willing to put in the time.

principle:
- create midline
- create / position sweep section
- sweep
- cut

draft, draft/snap, draft/move, draft/rotate, edit/alignment are your friends here

attached a file with one segment sweep where the construction geometry is still there

Snip macro screenshot-b438b2.png (72.72 KiB) Viewed 879 times

btw, if you have extruded in part, there is not much point in creating bodies/sketches in pd wb.

rough workflow
- take one "outer" contour, make lines - snap endpoint on outer contour segment, and perpendicular on inner contour segment, do this segment by segment
- make a bspline on snap midpoint for each segment line created earlier
- make a rectangle, position it at an endpoint of the spline, extrude it (in this case the perpendicularity to the spline end tangent is eye-balled - but you can use construction lines/snaps to get it done properly)
- use the just extruded rectangle to put the rectangle in z-direction with edit/alignment (if you don't know how to use it read up on the wiki, there are alignment macros one can use as well if that is preferred)
- do a part/sweep & part/cut
- done

[freedman]

I have zero experience with Path or CAD/CAM but it looks like something a programmed router bit would do.

[chrisb]

As Thickness is most likely to fail, you can experiment with 2D and 3D offset from Part workbench.

[Electheo]

Thanks for the replies! I haven't had time to try out the suggestions yet.

But I wanted to update you with an idea a friend of mine had. He suggested using single stroke fonts. So I did some digging and found this: https://k40lasercutter.com/product/tiny ... line-font/ This should be much more useful than the standard fonts as this is made for CNC.

Even though I know this font is much better by intuition, I don't know yet how I will undertake this in FreeCad.

BTW, important note: I'm modelling this for my 3D printer thus I can't use a path or CAM (as far as I'm aware).

[Electheo]

do not think there is a way to do this automatically as it is right now,
some of it could of course be coded, but there are a lot of edgecases to care for
that will turn out to be really tricky to get right (just not worth the effort imho)
one could settle for coding something halfway, i.e. does not care about edge cases,
but still would do part of it.

brute forcing by hand is always possible though
assuming that one is willing to put in the time.

principle:
- create midline
- create / position sweep section
- sweep
- cut

draft, draft/snap, draft/move, draft/rotate, edit/alignment are your friends here

attached a file with one segment sweep where the construction geometry is still there
Snip macro screenshot-b438b2.png
btw, if you have extruded in part, there is not much point in creating bodies/sketches in pd wb.

rough workflow
- take one "outer" contour, make lines - snap endpoint on outer contour segment, and perpendicular on inner contour segment, do this segment by segment
- make a bspline on snap midpoint for each segment line created earlier
- make a rectangle, position it at an endpoint of the spline, extrude it (in this case the perpendicularity to the spline end tangent is eye-balled - but you can use construction lines/snaps to get it done properly)
- use the just extruded rectangle to put the rectangle in z-direction with edit/alignment (if you don't know how to use it read up on the wiki, there are alignment macros one can use as well if that is preferred)
- do a part/sweep & part/cut
- done

Woah that model looks exactly how I would want it! I'll have to dig into your workflow as I haven't used some of these features yet in FreeCad. I'll update

[Electheo]

I have zero experience with Path or CAD/CAM but it looks like something a programmed router bit would do.

Yeah, you're right. A router bit would enforce a constant thickness of the pocket for a led strip.
I'm planning to make this with a 3D printer though, but once I know how to create a track using the letter's silhouette I can also try the CNC router. Thanks for the idea!

[chrisb]

...

Please don't quote whole posts, but only those portions you are directly referring to. Otherwise people following a topic have to read the same over and over again. It is always possible to follow the small uparrow link to get to the quoted post.

[kisolre]

the small uparrow link

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