Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Well, I bought a 3D printer. Fear not, I’ll review it shortly. But I realised that although I can download a myriad of things from websites, I really should learn how to make my own things. Enter the wide world of CAD (Computer Aided Design). There are, quite literally, dozens of CAD programs out there, but I settled with FreeCAD. It runs quite happily in Linux and, as its name suggests, it’s free. Disclaimer: this brief series is just to show you the basics of FreeCAD. I’m far from being an expert in it. Installation I’m using Ubuntu 22.04 (as of writing) and have removed the snap nonsense. I hate snaps, but that’s another article I could write. Anyway, in the repositories, it shows version 0.19, but the latest version is 0.20. So, to get that version, visit the FreeCAD website: https://www.freecadweb.org/downloads.php and download the appimage file for Linux. Double-click the appimage and you should have FreeCAD up and running. If it doesn’t run on a double-click, you might need to right-click on the appimage file and choose Properties. In the window that pops up, choose the Permissions tab. At the bottom of the window there’s a checkbox for executable. Make sure that’s ticked.
Getting Started On the first run you’ll see a page on the right with three tabs and some examples. A lot of people get right into the settings and configure the starting page, colors, measurements, etc.. We’re just going to get right into making something. Let’s start a new project. Click File > New menu. Now we have a project to work on. The first thing we need to create within this project is a ‘body’. Think of this as the thing you’re going to create. But first, we need to swap workbenches. At the top of the screen is a dropdown menu that currently says ‘Start’. Change that to say ‘Part Design’. There are two ways to create a body. Either through the icon that’s below the dropdown, or (as we’ll do) click the Tasks tab on the left panel. Think of this as a basic wizard to help you.
Click ‘Create body’ there. It’ll then change to say ‘Create sketch’. Click ‘Create sketch’. Wow! Things have changed a bit here. Basically, it’s asking us from what angle we’re going to create this sketch. The sketch is going to be your drawing that we’ll make into a part. Pick the XY plane. You can use either the left or right panel to choose the plane. Think of this XY plane as looking down on top of the piece. The red dot is the midpoint. But look up top at the workbench dropdown. It said Part Design, but now it’s changed to ‘Sketcher’. This Sketcher workbench is where we do our technical drawing (as we called it when I was at school). Your layout might look slightly different depending on version and screen size, but you can drag and drop the groups of icons using the little vertical dots. The pointer will change to a hand icon and you can drag them around. We’ll describe the icons as we use them, but think of the all red ones (shown above) as constraints. These will lock your drawing in space.
The icons with the red dots and white lines (shown second from top) are ones we’ll use to draw with. Let’s get something on the screen and we’ll end part 1. Click the down arrow beside the Rectangle icon and choose Centered rectangle. Now click on the red dot, move the mouse, and click again to place the rectangle. Beside the mouse pointer are the coordinates and a red rectangle. The red rectangle is to show that you’re still placing rectangles. Either right-click or press Escape to come out of rectangle mode. Now click the Close button on the left panel. Now we’re back in the Part design workbench. Have a look on the left panel again. If you’re still in the Tasks tab, you’ll see a list of things we can do here. For the moment pick Pad. Boom! We have a rectangle that’s 10mm thick. How do I know it’s 10mm? Because the options on the left panel tell me. Feel free to tinker with that for now. Ok, it’s not the most interesting of things, but we’ll add more to it next time.