Intermediate Online FreeCAD course?

[Linear3000]

Hi There,

I've been using FreeCAD for a couple months and I've gotten most of the basics of sweeping, lofting, boolean operations between basic shapes, creating constrained sketches, etc. BUT now I want to accelerate my abilities to become more productive in mechanical design...i.e. streamline my workflow so that I can make fairly complicated geometries without spending hours trying to figure out how to do things, endlessly reading forum posts and videos for only small advances in technique. The forum is nice but it would be nicer to be able to discuss this stuff out loud on a video call, and fill in a lot of gaps in knowledge.

Perhaps we could get together maybe 5 or so interested learners who are at a level similar to mine, and 1 fairly advanced expert (who has a verifiable online presence/reputation on the forums and/or has made videos ie some evidence that they are an expert, and that they have a breadth of knowledge and ability to communicate effectively, or have taught a freecad course before etc. )

-We should limit the number of people on the call to 6, so that we can keep a good connection latency and give everyone a chance to participate in a group discussion.
-We could use teamviewer, skype, or google hangouts to do verbal/video chat and do screenshares during the session
-We could have 1 "tryout" no-commitment, no payment session from the expert where we all just see if we can show up at the same place and time (and on time) that would last about 10 minutes and where we can evaluate whether we think it's going to work out, and the expert give a short demo
-After the 1st session we could have a series of three 1-hour sessions where each of the learners could contribute maybe $10 or so per lesson, so that the expert earns ~ $50 for each 1-hour lesson (Thus a total of $150)

Anyway, please post publicly if you are interested (so we can have a group discussion) and let us know if you are interested in participating as a learner or an expert. (and if you're an expert please tell us a way that I/we can verify that)

PS I'm in the timezone USA - EST, i.e. UTC−04:00

[chrisb]

I have split your post from a previous topic.
Your approach sounds reasonable; in the german forum there have been held some jitsi meetings, which were a success. They had rather been an exchange of power users and newbees, but the approach was similar.

[Linear3000]

Ok, thanks, no problem. Hope something can come together in english!

[oomgoshcd]

Sounds like an interesting concept I might be interested. I'm assuming we'd pick a workbench and a concept or a build?

Might want to think about something like zoom, it supports a lot more simultaneous attendees and is bar the most stable I've used.

[Linear3000]

Hi oomgoshcd!

I'm glad you're interested!

I'd be open to Zoom as well. I assume it's free for a purpose like this?

I hadn't necessarily thought about picking a specific workbench or thing to build, though I'm certainly open to having those things covered if you're interested...

I find I'm usually using several workbenches, mostly Part, Part Design, and Sketcher. But maybe I should be using others.

What I'm interested in learning is how to:
-make designs quickly and efficiently
-make the designs easy to alter, without having to redo tons of little things when you make "one" change

I think I want to use the phrase "parametric design" but I'm not totally sure if that's what I mean.
I have used spreadsheets before to assign values to certain dimensions, which seems to be sort of the seed of what I'm interested in learning to do, but perhaps in a better and more efficient way.

My goal is to be able to iterate more quickly on my designs. But I don't have a specific thing in mind to work on. I'm happy if the things that get built in these sessions are things that you're interested in, I'm just interested in learning techniques, tips and tricks, etc.

I know there are many ways to do things in freecad, but I'm interested in learning what are the better and more efficient ways given a certain goal.

I realize that's very general. But that should leave things somewhat open so that other things can be covered and still fit into that framework.

Did you have particular concepts, builds, or workbenches in mind?

[HarryGeier]

Still relevant ???
If yes, please contact me.

Harry

[johnwang]

Here is a good "parametric design" example.

https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 85#p381085

[onekk]

The better way to make the things parametric, is building them based on a set of rules, that could be achieved using scripts and accurate parametric building.

It may seem and old and antiquate approach, but if you have say calculate some solids with a bunch of holes, and then for some reason yoou have to change the hole sizes, say for only 50 holes, setting a rule that state the distance fron center equal to 2.5 radius, and the apply this rules to calculate all the centers, is only a matter of redefining the radius all the calculation ad all the 50 objects, (holes) are recalculated on the lfy. (if your machine is discretly fast), having to redefine them by hand, involve to change not only the radius, yes, you could copy one object for the hole but how to manage the distance between the center of adjacent holes?

Regards

Carlo D.

[kisolre]

but how to manage the distance between the center of adjacent holes?

Expressions? Sketch for some geometric calculations?