Am I in entirely the wrong place?

[ChrisXenon]

Hello folks.

I've installed FreeCAD and been looking at tutorials for hours (so many of which, bizarrely, have no audio") and I did not find my answer.
I believe there is a long learning curve for FreeCAD and I don't want to climb the ladder to find it was the wrong ladder.

I want a program in which I can lash together linkages and other mechanical components, see how they work, change them and iterate design in that way. I imagine I'd specify link arms, pivot points, connect things up and then "make it move" to see if it does what I want and what the issues are.

I have previously done this with cardboard and thumb tacs to gt an idea of how things might work, but it's far from ideal and I don't end up with drawings at the end of it.

Can anyone tell me if FreeCAD is that program?

Thanks,
Chris

[DeepSOIC]

I want a program in which I can lash together linkages and other mechanical components, see how they work, change them and iterate design in that way. I imagine I'd specify link arms, pivot points, connect things up and then "make it move" to see if it does what I want and what the issues are.
...
Can anyone tell me if FreeCAD is that program?

Probably not, sorry. FreeCAD even lacks an official assembly workbench.

But there is a hardcore way of doing it. It will involve a lot of expressions in placements, and maybe hacks to use sketcher as an assembly constraint solver. Then you can use microelly's Animation add-on workbench.

Also there is a robot workbench, probably very related to this, but I don't know the state of it, I've not explored it.

[NormandC]

I think the Assembly2 add-on can do this in a limited capacity.

hamish, before announcing he stopped maintaining his Assembly2 workbench, showed some limited motion feature. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg0OML-YNbQ

Some people have been very resourceful creating animations. There is an Animation add-on but I haven't really looked at it closely.

Also there is a robot workbench, probably very related to this, but I don't know the state of it, I've not explored it.

The robot wb simulates a 6-axis robot, I'm not sure it can do anything else.

Otherwise I don't know of any open source software that would do what you require. Possibly some commercial free CAD programs will do. Have a look at OnShape for example.

[NormandC]

I have previously done this with cardboard and thumb tacs to gt an idea of how things might work

I assume this means your linkages are all on a 2D plane? In that case you can at least start in the sketcher and do something schematic where your components and linkages are reduced to simple connected lines.

[bejant]

Also see here for inspiration (scroll down to the "Animations" section):
https://linuxforanengineer.blogspot.fr/p/test.html

[ChrisXenon]

So I AM in the wrong place.

Thanks for your replies.

[microelly2]

I want a program in which I can lash together linkages and other mechanical components, see how they work, change them and iterate design in that way. I imagine I'd specify link arms, pivot points, connect things up and then "make it move" to see if it does what I want and what the issues are.

For animation look at my animation workbench
http://freecadbuch.de/doku.php?id=Animation%20Wokbench

I have done some experiments to combine this and the assembly2 workbench too but assembly2 is not powerful enough to simulate complex movements like invers kinematics. Simulation is hard to code.

For simulation I recomment Open Modelica. see https://www.modelica.org/, http://www.openmodelica.org/
But for the moment there is no interface to FreeCAD.