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The big one that stands out / common mistake people seem to make is, modelling threads in holes. The main issue I've encountered is that most machine shops tend to only support source files from one or two 3D CAD suites, if you don't use the same tools as them, you end up having to just send them a step file and if you need holes tapped, special requests etc. you also need a marked up drawing. Unfortunately, I haven't encountered a company that will take FreeCAD files for machining, so in the end there ends up being no difference between creating a dress-up feature using a dress-up tool or creating the geometry in any other way, because they'll just end up asking for a step file. This has thankfully worked out for me so far, even with designs that are destined for injection molding, so either CAM tools are just getting better or I have really, really annoyed many operators who have had to deal with my designs. I do hope that either an open file standard that includes all operations rather than just geometry gets universally adopted or FreeCAD files start being accepted by manufacturers (I won't hold my breath for that), and then we will have to use the right tools for the job.

@@BrodieFairhall Yeah I didn't even consider Commercial the compatibility issues. Well the could do it the same way Solid Works did it, go proprietary, charge 10's of thousands of dollars a year for a license and then a couple decades later offer a cloud version at $50 a year. that way its use will explode and you will find solid works cad files all over the place. lol

@@armastat Can't forget to lobby to universities to make it part of their curriculum and give it to students for free!

@@BrodieFairhall That one I can't argue with. otherwise no one would know how to use it since only multi-million dollar companies could afford the license fees.On the Plus side - universities are public and they share their science and designs. if u know how to find them/ I have Full Cad models right down to the nuts and bolts for all sorts of things, Space telescopes, gravity detectors all sorts of projects and NASA stuff. My best find was the entire Atlas Collider Machine at Cern. Over 2 million parts in cad form! Almost as wonderful was that the entire assembly may have taken long time to load to my laptop but once it did I could rotate and zoom on the model with no issues. Good software that.

No, but then yes. If you look at how I make the electrolyte in my other plating video (th-cam.com/video/HWBwebWAT9c/w-d-xo.html), you'll see what I mean.

Is it that it looks bad or do you believe it is bad to use? It has changed a fair bit since this ancient video came out (0.22 is bringing some more significant changes) I'll agree, it's not the prettiest, but I think it is well set out for being fast/efficient (which is the opposite to what I find with Inventor and Fusion), especially for keyboard shortcuts.

I still have the electrolyte from this video. I run it through a coffee filter to take out debris and add more distilled water to dilute it as more copper dissolves in it and it gets darker. As long as it doesn't get contaminated with other metals or chemicals, it could last year's.

It just takes significantly longer to make. My second electroplating video has a different method that doesn't require heating that might work better for you. th-cam.com/video/HWBwebWAT9c/w-d-xo.htmlsi=lZEF6iYOrrJdYzeh

thanks for the immediate response @@BrodieFairhall I tried it without heating it up , it kinda worked.

one more question if you dont mind , I used graphite spray paint on a plastic piece but it didnt work. I tried it on a metallic piece and worked fine. could it be the paint or the power supply ? I used a charger with variable voltage @@BrodieFairhall

I now use a conductive nickel paint made by MG chemicals. It bonds much better and you get way more for your money

It's not really "changing" the ID's and when you look into how it works, it's a little more complicated to do than it initially seems. The issue is that every time you make a change, it rebuilds the object from that point and the ID's are created each time this happens. My understanding of how the Topo naming fix works, is before a change is applied, FreeCAD works backward through the nodes and notes which actions rely on geometry that was previously created and when it rebuilds, it tries to ensure the same ID gets applied to each piece of referenced geometry.

@@BrodieFairhall Thanks for the explanation! I wonder how other CAD software handles this …

th-cam.com/video/Yp6cIMA7LsI/w-d-xo.htmlsi=n8gcYfSqONBai86v This video (rather long, but it was a presentation rather than a tutorial) may have some of what you're looking for.

I believe it is February 2024 and the plan is for it to be both online (like last time) and in person. I've got what I think is a very interesting presentation planned. I'll post updates when I have details.

Instead of the paint in the video, I'd recommend a nickel based conductive paint (MG Chemicals makes a really nice one). It's far cheaper and I find using the spray version gives me a much better result that the silver paint

@@BrodieFairhall I am open to anything that makes my part conductive not had any luck so far

@@1937Brett This is what I use mgchemicals.com/products/conductive-paint/conductive-spray-paint/shielding-paint/

I know there are companies who do printing and companies who do metal plating, but I don't know of any who do both. I'm sure they exist.

@@BrodieFairhall its so hard to find ugh😂😂

@@julmjur3752 you could do it in 2 parts, get a service like shapeways or pcbway to print the item. When you receive it, send it to a company who specialises in metal plating. It's a bit of extra work and shipping, but it might be a lot easier than finding a vendor who can do both.

There is a lot of talk of the UI being completely redesigned, which will be fantastic. Fusion's large icons with text, is fantastic for beginners, but having to open a dropdown to get to a lot of tools, paired with the lack of context based shortcut keys can become very frustrating when you've been working with it for a while. Something in-between would be fantastic. Something you might like is the Modern UI Add-on, it adds a ribbon style toolbar, all icons are accompanied with text and you can customise almost every aspect of it.

It sounds like you're talking about 2 different issues here. 1. The limitations with full width chamfers and fillets in the Open Cascade Modelling Kernel (OCCT, which FreeCAD uses) 2. The other issue, which sounds like the main one you're having, is the Topological Naming Peoblem (th-cam.com/video/6p2vqEEmWq4/w-d-xo.htmlsi=e86N33xLW8MYe7pv) Both of these limitations have solid work arounds, but require you to become pretty familiar with FreeCAD to use it effectively. You may want to try using Realthunder's Linkstage Fork of FreeCAD, which can be found here (github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/releases/)

Copper acetate is definitely blue, try it yourself, perhaps you're thinking of nickel acetate? The very deep blue is because I'd been using that electrolyte for a lot of plating while getting footage for the video and it became far more concentrated. If I was going to bother faking something like this, I'd at least use some dye to make the colours the same. The "industrial container" is just the 2L container the cleaning vinegar I purchased came in. I'll admit, it's a terrible video, but nothing in it was fake. I'm happy to answer any questions you have about it.

It would be really great to have that, even if it was just a pop-up dialog like the step export one if it can't be included in the save file dialog. Or at the very least, extend the import/export preferences for collada files to work for all mesh exports.

When you pad (extrude) an object, just above where you enter how much you want to pad, there is a drop down. By default it will say Dimension, if you want to do both sides, you can select "Two Dimensions". This will give you a second place to enter another extrusion length. Hopefully that all makes sense.

Good idea. Those nested ternary expressions can form really nice tables when put on multiple lines.

OpenSCAD is perfect for this kind of thing! Thankfully FreeCAD has support for OpenSCAD built in, as well as being able to directly manipulate anything with Python and nicer front end tools like Configuration Tables. Doing this the same way I did in the video wouldn't be great in production, but it was the most direct way I could think to demonstrate it quickly.

You'll be pleased to know there is a lot of development work going on in that area.

That is unfortunately not something that the sketcher is intended to do. There are some hacky ways to do it that I might look at putting in a video. Generally though, the "correct" way to do something like that is by creating one hole and using a part design/draft array tool to replicate the holes in the places you want.

@@BrodieFairhall The array tools in the sketcher could be modified to accept equations, but for now, they only seem to allow constants. It makes some fully parametric designs impossible, or at least really convoluted and hacky to implement. This kind of thing is much easier to do in OpenSCAD.

@@douglaspeale9727 yeah, probably the easiest way to make sketches do things like that is to use a python macro or the openscad workbench. It would be great to see sketch arrays turned create a new type of array object rather than just replicating the sketch elements, so they could be used in a proper non destructive workflow. I think the sketcher would require a lot of changes to do this though, eg, you create a rectangle and it's not shown as a rectangle in the sketch elements, it becomes 4 lines. The element list would likely have to have a tree allowing those 4 lines to be grouped as a rectangle and this would allow for the creation of other groups, like arrays, which could have their own parameters. I'll bring it up with sliptonic when we have our next monthly meeting and see how much work it would be and whether it could be added to a feature road map. The easiest hacky way I can think of to make a variable number of sketch elements to cut the number of holes specified in a spreadsheet is to create a whole lot of them and add an expression on the construction geometry parameter that will set it to 1 or 0 depending on the number in the spreadsheet (the same way I show and hide the planet gears in the assembly in this video).

I have a whole bunch of videos planned, finding time to actually make them is the challenge. Not likely to get many done in the next 6 months.

@@BrodieFairhall ok, Im looking forward. Do you use the standard Free Cad or the RealThunder version?

@@Gabs_Labs I use the official FreeCAD releases for anything serious, but I do play with the realthunder version occasionally just to keep up with the changes.

It feels like metal to touch, but it's missing the weight of a solid metal object.

​​@@BrodieFairhall Sweet perfect for making a shifter knob for my Logitech H shifter. Does it wear off if you touch it too much?

@@antjones2281 it will eventually wear, both because copper is very soft and through the acids in your skin. You can just plate it for a longer period of time to build up a thicker coating. If you look at my other playing video, it also shows nickel, which will last longer with that kind of use than copper. If you do decide to do it, instead of using graphite, I now use a nickel conductive spray paint (most commonly the one made by MG Chemicals), it gives a much, much better result and it's far cheaper than the silver paint.

There absolutely is, you can use FreeCAD in headless mode. I've not done much with it in the last few years, but there is plenty of information in the documentation

Not going to argue with the rough edges and missing quality of life features limiting the use cases and uptake of FreeCAD But the raw power FreeCAD has also puts it ahead of so many other professional tools. Keep your eye on FreeCAD over the next 2 years, Ondsel has full time paid developers working on a lot of the QoL improvements (like topo naming) and the FreeCAD association has made it much easier for companies to come on board as sponsors

It's actively being merged right now. It's a massive change to a lot of code, especially since the versions diverged so much. An open core company called Ondsel has some paid, full time Devs working on getting the topo naming fix merged and ready for action. You can check it out here github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/tree/development/toponaming

@@BrodieFairhall This might be the best news I've read this year

@@henrymach the next 12-24 months for FreeCAD are going to be very significant, there is a lot happening.

With this electrolyte, I'd start with around 2.5V to 3V and increase it if you need to. I also recommend using a nickel conductive paint now, instead of the graphite or silver paint. MG Chemicals makes a nice conductive Nickel spray paint, which ends up being much cheaper by volume than the silver paint and it works so much better than the graphite.

@@BrodieFairhall Thank you so much!

TH-cam lets you adjust the video playback speed to suit your needs. FreeCAD Academy, Mango Jelly, Andrew CAD and Joko Engineering, all make wonderful introduction to FreeCAD videos which might be better paced for you.

You can absolutely plate larger parts! I'd practice on smaller ones first. Also I recommend using a conductive nickel spray paint made by MG chemicals now instead of graphite, it works so much better and is much cheaper than the silver paint

You're probably entirely right, I have no idea how undo is handled, it might revert the sketch normally, but in this case I'm pretty sure the sketch remains broken because it is only undoing the changes in the spreadsheet, then updating everything. I guess it didn't count the sketch as having changed

Snapshot undo - where the entire state of everything is recorded at each step would work, ,unfortunately thats a memory hog. However it does allow immediate undos without need for recalculations. Instead they just 'undo' the last command and allow a recompute. Unfortunately if the action borked other states in the model it cant repair it.