Hello,
being new in FreeCad I wanted to perform some simple tasks. I wanted to create spiral stairs with FreeCAD. I saw some macros but I wanted to find out how it is possible to do this with the standard features (not coding). So far I was not successful but got to some interesting questions.
First attempt:
I thought that it should be possible as in Sketchup: Creating a stack of segmented "cakes" and pick out the relevant pieces as shown in following video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TB2l01hhV4
Creating a segment and distribute it in a polar arrangement was no problem.
But the resulting Array-Element is treated as one block. So I got stuck with the problem that the segments are not treated individually.
Q1: Is there a feature to create individual objects out of the Array?
Q2: In Sketchup there is a Feature they call "Component". Changing one component will automatically change the components in an array. Is there a similar mechanism in FreeCAD?
Second attempt:
Creating a segment and replicate it along a helix with "Creates copies of a selected object along a selected path" in Draft-Workbench. When choosing "align" in this function the Segments get inclined as in the screenshot.
Q3: Is there a replication feature that would keep the segments horizontal?
Q4: Could one create a relative transform consisting of a rotation followed by a translation? So if I'd apply this transform on each copy the stair grows.
Q5: When deleting the Array the whole drawing gets corrupted. Is this a bug?