Parametric enclosure with FreeCAD

Rather than design an enclosure for the next electronic gadget you suddenly can’t live without, wouldn’t it be nice to just automate the process? After being hit with this problem so many times, I decided to do just that. This lead me to the study of parametric programming. I now have such a file in which you drop just four dimensions, length, width, box height, and box lid height. In roughly one minute, your finished model drops out ready to send off to your 3D printer. I have a YouTube channel, “BcastLar”, on which I created a multi part tutorial describing, in detail, just how to create a file like this for yourself. The title of the video is, “Crazy Simple 3D Printed Enclosure with FreeCAD 0.18 Parametric Design Part 1 – Part 7”. Yes, I’ll eventually upload the file to this thread, but my current aim is to acquaint the maker community with parametric programming. Creating files like this are surprisingly easy. Besides, once you learn how, there are many many more CAD projects the Linuxcnc community could share to automate repetitive tasks. In Part 7, the final part which goes up this weekend, you’ll notice that I heavily filleted the inside. So, instead of sending this off to your 3D printer, you could use the FreeCAD, “Path Workbench”, to create the G code to machine a fresh casting you just created. Anyway, check it out. Either leave a comment here, or on my videos. If you really like what you see, do subscribe. There are more parametric videos in the pipeline that relate to CNC and robotics.

To begin, Andy, Tommy, Steve, and pulper, a big thanks for the thank you. Tommy, thanks for providing the link back to my channel. It’s likely the link I provided on my video also drove traffic to your site. Since the viewers on my channel are makers, it’s likely they also discovered linuxcnc, and will take an interest in your project as well. Again thanks.

i started to look at FreeCAD after the last surprise from Autodesk's Fusion360 personal use setbacks. seem fusion no longer will post rapid moves and programs with more than one tool. so i have spent the last 2 or 3 years getting comfortable with software that is more trouble than it's worth to use now. i'm not a fan of the subscription model to milk money out of you on an annual basis. and when i first started off with fusion the price was reasonable but it has more than doubled in price the time i have been using it so god only knows how much it will go up in price over the next 3 years?

i think i might have seen these video's already i just have not had the time to watch that series of them. FreeCAD looks a lot like fusion on the modeling end i am curious about the CAM end of it. i have not had a ton of time to play with it yet but plan to dig deeper into it.

I'm just starting wirh FreeCAD, never had more than a cursory look at Fusion, and after a bit fumbling, I'm starting to get into it. Lately I've been using it to create model to 3D print.
The first model & print I did was a template to do the "3 bolt mod" on my BF20 mill.

After seeing most of the video series I can see some really good stuff. Thanks for putting them up.

The only question I have, I use 0.19 and can export directly to stl, is that possible in 0.18 or are there advantages in the way shown in the videos ?

If you use the latest editions of Freecad, the appimage, it's really a nice program.
It took me a week to learn with the help of youtube instruction video's.

I designed my latest plasma machine with the help of Freecad.
The sheel metal module for press braking works perfect. I already produced a prototype machine designed in Freecad.

Freecad uses opencascade, a powerfull 3d cad kernel.
At the moment i am coding with opencascade to make a 3d viewer for a robot preview connencted to lcnc and ethercat and kdl kinematics. The kinematics code of lcnc is quite limited.

A sort of replacement for the lcnc TK window. The robot preview is so nice, and moves are so fast !
Also the current gremlin view can be replaced by opencascade, this for info.

raw.githubusercontent.com/grotius-cnc/mayo/develop/mayo.png

Remember Autodesk is a very rich company. They only think about the money.
Last year they suddenly deleted Draftsight for linux.

Yep that's what I'm using the 0.19 appimage.

Sometimes I find these things have a huge learning curve for myself. Unlike a lot of the guys here I don't come from a machining, other trade or "professional" background.

I can either wield a shovel or a traffic control bat, that's the limit my "qualifications" run to.

after looking into the CAM side of things it would appear to be pretty limited compared to the modeling side of the program. might be ok for some basic things but not 3D milling. this might be an option for me creating a solid model to import into something else for tool path generation but is far from what i am looking for.

"Remember Autodesk is a very rich company. They only think about the money.
Last year they suddenly deleted Draftsight for linux."

I suppose you work for free then and don't care about money? Companies charge for their products, development is not free, offices are not free, testing is not free. Take a look at the full range of what Autodesk produces, it is much broader than just F360. If ppl weren't in essence stealing the use of the free product for commercial use the license restrictions would not have happened.

And your facts are wrong, Draftsight is not Autodesk, it is Dassault. They dropped all of the free licenses at the end of 2019, not just Linux.

Good luck with FreeCad, it will be a while before it is generally useful. It will continue for quite some time to be hampered by poor documentation and training videos as is so too common with free software.