Use case

[NormandC]

Hello all,

it's been quite some time since parts were posted here. What are you people doing?!? Stuffing yourselves and enjoying your Christmas gifts?

I've done this part.

MendelMax HFS5-2020-420 Aluminum extrusion (420mm length)
This one is obviously not a printed part, but it's an important component in the MendelMax assembly. At first I tried to model this "in chunks", that is divide the modeling in easily manageable features: a first one for a 20x20 solid bar, then a center hole, then a cut-out on one side. But there is no Part Design pattern feature yet, I had to make copies of the sketch, rotate them, pad them and use a boolean subtract on the solid bar. I struggled with this, and in the end I succeeded, but I decided to remake it as Jürgen suggested, a single sketch for the profile.

Total number of constraints: 145 At the end, the sketcher was quite sluggish.

[NormandC]

I finished the MendelMax ZMotorMount part that I had started 2 weeks ago.



I changed the model so that only Part Design features are used. I cleaned up the model with the nice "Refine shape" feature added in the Part workbench (Part --> Refine shape menu, only in v0.13 development version). It works very well, but it is not parametric. So if one of the features is changed, it must be run again. I've been told that this feature will be seamlessly integrated into FreeCAD once it's tested enough.

[jriegel]

Really nice Norm!

[carlod]

it's been quite some time since parts were posted here. What are you people doing?!? Stuffing yourselves and enjoying your Christmas gifts?

I'm having fun now making parts from OSE project, but are simple parts and it's not an honour to post them.
What I want to obtain now is enough parts to test the assembly features when ready. When? When? When?

[NormandC]

I'm with you here!

Like kids in a car trip: are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet?

And BTW guys, last night I discovered yet another cool RepRap inspired project: Printrbot

Now that's a crazy story: their aim is to produce a really simple to assemble and small RepRap machine that anyone, even kids will be able to assemble in less than 1 hour and use. They registered their project on Kickstarter to get their funding, and their goal was to get $25,000... They got $830,800!!!

What's amazing, even if the machine is really small, the build volume is 152x152x152mm, more than a Makerbot Thing-O-Matic. For $544 you can get a whole kit shipped ($499 for US residents).

Once they start shipping in February, they'll publish their design.

[NormandC]

More parts!

MendelMax LowerVertex

Thanks to angow for his dimensions.

MendelMax RodLatch


MendelMax TopVertexX

[NormandC]

... Part Deux (the forum limits to three attachments)

MendelMax YIdlerMount


NEMA17 Stepper Motor


I believe there's only one MendelMax file remaining, the YMotorMount. And maybe rods and hardware to have all parts for an assembly.

Lately I "developed" a workflow for these: generate individual parts from the maxbots/MendelMax GitHub repository scripts, take dimensions with the Draft workbench to be able to remodel the part in Part Design workbench to exactly the same dimensions.

[logari81]

Total number of constraints: 145 At the end, the sketcher was quite sluggish.

sluggish, when you try to move nodes (== solver performance) or when you zoom in/out, pan, ... (visualization performance)?

Which one did you refer to?

With 145 constraints I think both would be sluggish but I believe that we should first improve the visualization perfomance by reducing the number of OpenInventor nodes. IMO the bad visualization performance affects the user experience more than the solver performance.

[NormandC]

Hi,

Actually I was talking about solving. I would add a constraint, and I'd see the sketch elements move before fixing themselves, and it was not instantaneous. For one of the last constraints the sketcher messages window reported that it was solved in 0.4 seconds but it seemed more like a second or two. Or maybe it really took 0.4 seconds, and the rest was poor visualization performance...

Moving nodes, I don't recall... When I have some time, I'll remove some constraints to check it out.

[carlod]

I believe there's only one MendelMax file remaining, the YMotorMount. And maybe rods and hardware to have all parts for an assembly.

Is this one?
BTW it need a refineshape