How can I make an array of shapes on a sketch?

[NormandC]

Unfortunately using Draft Downgrade destroys the history of the model.

Here's something I hacked together. It's not very elegant, but the model stays fully parametric.

I maintain a whole workbench aimed at arraying, Lattice workbench.

I'm used to figuring out CAD tools by trial and error. Sorry, but I have no idea how to use your workbench, and there is no explanation anywhere that I can see.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gh4h04dps3y1z ... fcstd?dl=0

[DeepSOIC]

I maintain a whole workbench aimed at arraying, Lattice workbench.

I'm used to figuring out CAD tools by trial and error. Sorry, but I have no idea how to use your workbench, and there is no explanation anywhere that I can see.

Well, there is Lattice2 wiki, but it isn't very exciting. For many of the tools, if you click them with nothing selected, a message box is displayed with a brief explanation of what the tool does..

[jmaustpc]

By the way, Abdullah created a rectangular array tool for sketcher that works on a sketch's elements within the sketch. It only creates regular rectangular arrays so you would still require two sketches at least, to do this. This has been in master for some considerable time now, but post 0.15 so you would have to be running a 0.16 version of FreeCAD.

So what version of FreeCAD are we talking about in this thread?

[renatorivo]

Unfortunately using Draft Downgrade destroys the history of the model.

Here's something I hacked together. It's not very elegant, but the model stays fully parametric.

copied from yours, but a little different

arraysimilarnormandc.FCStd

(65.37 KiB) Downloaded 27 times

arraysimilar.png (16.87 KiB) Viewed 1121 times

[ehrichweiss]

I maintain a whole workbench aimed at arraying, Lattice workbench.

I'm used to figuring out CAD tools by trial and error. Sorry, but I have no idea how to use your workbench, and there is no explanation anywhere that I can see.

Well, there is Lattice2 wiki, but it isn't very exciting. For many of the tools, if you click them with nothing selected, a message box is displayed with a brief explanation of what the tool does..

Just a note. I found that the official instructions in the FreeCAD wiki on where to install Mods may not work for the system-wide install. I couldn't get my system to recognize Lattice2 at all until I installed it in my ~/.FreeCAD/Mods folder and then it worked like a charm(almost made me cry when it appeared).

I'm having trouble figuring it all out at the moment but hopefully that'll change soon.

[DeepSOIC]

Just showing what Lattice can help with this problem.

Lattice has a feature called CompoundFilter. It can do a collision-test with a stencil shape, and remove children of compound based on that. Since a Draft Array outputs a compound, it can be used to filter a Draft Array.

Here's an example:

compoundfilter-demo.FCStd

(68.48 KiB) Downloaded 26 times

Yes, arrays in Lattice are difficult to set up.

[NormandC]

Really cool example. It does exactly what is required here. Thanks for showing a use for Lattice.