So be systematic in making up your names. Like programming good names can really help you keep track of what you are doing. It is often useful to tile your workspace so you can see the spreadsheet and the model as you enter formula. I normally also type the alias to the left of the column with the data, so when I look at the spreadsheet I can see both the name and the value ( some macros, see below, help you automate this process ). If you do not do this the cells have non-informative names like B5. I find it most useful to give each cell a name or alias. Then put you important dimensions in a cell. Use the spreadsheet workbench to add a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet can also do some calculations like changing radii to diameters and vise versa. You can just look at a table of values, their names, and perhaps some notes about them. The parameters may be stored in many different locations in your model but I find that a spreadsheet is the most useful. Plan to move out of sandbox soon.įor me the point of a parametric model is that measurements ( and sometimes other features ) can be changed by changing the value of an input variable or parameter. On a wiki things may never be finished, but until I get comment I am pretty much finished with this. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.This is a draft of what I imperfectly understand as best practices ( and tips, and gotchas ) for parametric modeling in FreeCad using SpreadSheets. Excel does not show that a cell has been named making it easy to forget to name a cell which is then not available for use in the FreeCAD model.Functions may have different numbers of parameters causing an error to occur.Function names are imported in uppercase causing an error to occur.Spreadsheets are not linked to the model meaning that any change must be made in all models using the spreadsheet.Models can be easily created from the spreadsheet.Component dimensions are consistent between models.You would probably be better off modelling all the details in these situations as it will provide more information to the manufacturer. It was a bit painful to have to fix the imported spreadsheet each time but it was not an insurmountable problem.ĭesigning the joinery without much detail may not be appropriate if you are modelling components that are going to be produced by a third party or on say a CNC machine. Overall the design process worked well, the limitations of the FreeCAD Spreadsheet Workbench not withstanding. Excel seems to deal with it correctly, but FreeCAD doesn't always. I have seen mixed results with the BIMDAS rules in FreeCAD's Spreadsheet Workbench so I explicitly insert parentheses in every formula when I have mixed multiplication/division and addition/subtraction operations. A better option would have been to simply model the top, bottom, and sides as a solid board and leave the placement of the dovetails to the construction of the cabinet. For example, I modelled the dovetails used to join the sides of the cabinet to the top and bottom, but this consumed a fair bit of time. I chose to design most of the detail that goes into the construction of the cabinet to understand the time required to do so, but I discovered that most of the components do not need to be modelled to that degree. I didn't want to design one-off components so I chose to design a cabinet that is relatively simple in appearance but has a lot of design elements from in practice. I wanted to explore how the Spreadsheet Workbench could be used in my furniture design workflow because it may help to increase my productivity. A small cabinet would give me a sufficiently complex project to understand the pro's and con's of this method. I wanted to understand the extents to which I could use an Excel spreadsheet in FreeCAD before it started to become too unwieldy. This is a follow-up article to my Designing with spreadsheets in FreeCAD article. This article will describe how I used Excel and FreeCAD's Spreadsheet Workbench to design a small cabinet. The spreadsheets can be imported and exported allowing them to be shared between projects and models, allowing reuse and consistency between designs. FreeCAD incorporates a spreadsheet workbench that allows you to create a spreadsheet of design parameters that can be used in your models.
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