A FreeCAD workbench to estimate material quantity
This frankenstein's monster of a workbench for FreeCAD has been somehow sewn together to work almost as expected.
You can display the volume or expected weight of a selected object at the push of a button. Both display with the decimal precision as set in FreeCAD's settings, but will always be rounded up to be on the safe side, as the output enables you to estimate or calculate the necessary amount of material for additive manufacturing (@100 % infill, ignoring support structures).
Some common 3d-printing materials are supported by default, but you can always select the weight calculation with a custom selected density in g/cm³.
Note: I am quite new to FreeCAD and creating workbenches but nonetheless excited.
The workbench has been developed and tested with FreeCAD v0.19 and v0.20.27422 pre-release
Select an object, part, group or body and at the push of a button of the workbench the desired output is displayed in the report view panel.
Two toolbars are available:
Scale
- Select the desired output for the volume in mm³, cm³ or m³
Estimate
- The first option returns the volume of the selected object
- The second option prompts you to provide a decimal density to return the estimated specific but custom weight
- Any other option returns preset material weight estimations (currently ABS, NYLon, PA12, PolyCarbonate, PETG, PLA and TPU)
Thats all. Basically the workbench reads the objects shape.volume-property provided by FreeCAD, which is conveniently returned in mm³. So any output will be in metric units and i won't bother optionally recalculate to imperial because science.
This workbench is available via the FreeCAD Addon Manager.
Expand for directions to manually install this workbench
This workbench can be installed manually by adding the whole folder into the personal FreeCAD folder
- for Linux
/home/user/.local/share/FreeCAD/Mod/ - for Windows
%APPDATA%\FreeCAD\Mod\orC:\Users\username\Appdata\Roaming\FreeCAD\Mod\ - for Windows as portable app
wherever_stored\FreeCADPortable\Data\FreeCADAppData\Mod - for macOS
~/Library/Preferences/FreeCAD/Mod/
Occasionally rename from estimateWB-master to estimateWB if downloaded as zip from github
If you want to change standard materials you can do so by editing the materials.json-file and add a respective named icon to the ressources-folder. The list of buttons will update itself. If you are unsatisfied with the default densities you are free to edit these within the file as well.
Different languages according to user settings are technically supported - but actually restricted to english by default and german due to my own limitations. This might be more proof-of-concept than actually useful but feel free to contribute :) Since one does usually not switch languages by the minute I did not bother finding out how to update during runtime yet, so FreeCad has to be restarted to have language-changes take effect on this workbench.
Please report bugs to the issue queue and ping the dedicated estimateWB FreeCAD forum thread to discuss said issue or feedback in general.
estimateWB is released under the LGPL3+ license. See LICENSE.