This is a semi-organized pile of utilities and FreeCAD/CadQuery scripts with modest documentation. Most of them are meant to be run with the CadQuery plugin module.
For a quickstart on how to get those running, see below.
Some of the parts are meant to be 3D printed and used as-is in plastic, whereas others are meant to be turned into templates and jigs (mostly for metalworking).
My goals for this project are:
- Help me keep track of dimensional tweaks to my designs as I test and find that parts are too tight/too loose, etc.
- Eventually form some utilities that can be resused between designs (if nothing else, a library of standard measurements for clearance holes, etc).
- Maybe help some people with examples. This stuff is hard to come by and not necessarily intuitive.
I'll try and include photos of finished products here (yes, committing PNGs to a repo), with links to my Thingiverse for object files and my YouTube for stuff in action (because I'm not committing those to the the repo). That should give you an idea of where to look for code examples to help you build your own stuff. See other README files and script docstrings for those links. Note that anything you see outside this repo is prone to being outdated, with this repo being the current source. Consult these files, git log, and git blame for a better cronology.
For licensing, see the file: LICENSE.
caddyshack
├── caddyshack # Python utilities for reducting duplication. No stable API.
├── export # Default folder I dump STL or OBJ files to; not here, on Thingiverse.
├── gcode # Default folder I dump sliced gcode to. You need to slice your own.
├── scripts # Python scripts for generating export objects. Further categorized.
├── environment.yml # Might help you install all the software you need.
└── README.rst # You are here.I'm not going to bother with any standard development processes here. No branches, no releases, no "stable," just a pile of scripts. I'm not even making caddyshack an installable module for now, since I don't want to give anyone the idea that they should be using it in their projects.
If a script doesn't work because of an import error, see if it's one of my files, or a third party library. If it's third party, install it. If it's one of mine, check your sys.path to make sure it's looking in the right places. If the code executes but doesn't do what you expect, I might have updated a utility, breaking and older script by mistake, without knowing/fixing it. In that case, you can git log -p script_file_or_dir to find its last working state and checkout the code from that point in time.
If a script doesn't work because of some YAML (*.yml) file missing, then it's probably because I wrote a script and provided multiple sets of working dimensions for producing parts. In those cases, I use a symlink to the file to pick the dimensions I want to use, and I don't commit that to the repo (see the .gitignore files throughout the repo).
This is easiest if you already have the Anaconda Python distribution installed, since it lets you install a whole mess of software in an isolated system, and if you fuck it up, you can blow it all away and rebuild it without losing much.
With that, you can run:
cd path/to/caddyshack
conda env create --file environment.yml
source activate freecad
FreeCADAnd you should be on your way, with a reasonably recent and hopefully not-broken version of FreeCAD. The environment creation step takes a minute (and installs about 2 gigs worth of dependencies), but you only have to do that the first time. Browsing the menus to View > Workbench > CadQuery will add a CadQuery item to the menu list so you can open a script and run it (shortcut: F9 nowadays, but customizable). If you go to Edit > Preferences > General you can set it so the workbench opens automatically every time. If you're not seeing the CadQuery workbench, go to Tols > Addon Manager and install it there.
At some point I'll get around to figuring out how to run these things from the commandline directly (or better, while editing in vim), but for now, this works, and it's handy to have the 3D view to check your work.
Most of these scripts are going to be written for Python 3.6, FreeCAD >=0.18_pre, the CadQuery >=1.2.0 with its plugin, and to be used inside the plugin workbench. These designs are all very specific-use, so I'm not worried about other people needing to be able to run my code verbatim anyway. I'm just putting it up here for you to have examples - an addendum to those provided in the CadQuery docs.
Also, one super-duper pro-tip... FreeCAD can be finnicky with a few operations, particularly fillets. Things will crash occasionally - open source software, right? It's not professional, but you get a hell of a lot more than you pay for and it saves you from being shafted by ever-changing license requirements on SAS CAD products. Anyway, each time you run a script through the CadQuery plugin, a copy of the file is saved to /tmp. So, this line of bash will take the latest tempfile and put it into your clipboard, so when you reopen your script, you can just paste the contents over and carry on where you left off:
ls -tc /tmp/tmp* | head -1 | xargs xclip -selection clipboardAdditionally, if you find yourself making changes that break something in the course of a work session (where you don't have multiple commits snapshotting each change), looking to the tempfiles can help you track where you botched it up.
My prints are done with a Lulzbot Mini, usually with ABS. Most measurements are in inches, because: 1. 'murica. 2. Fuck you, world. It should be rather obvious when you load an STL or OBJ into your slicer whether you need to scale it by 25.4x or not. For a lot of the items generated here, the settings/dimension files should handle that automatically.
For the prints that are to be used as-is, I typically stick with fine settings, 4-ish shells, 30-50% infill, and zig-zag support. Yes, the prints are slow, but it makes them generally passable quality, and speed doesn't matter so much when your printer is networked and you don't need you laptop hooked up to it. If your printer is not networked, you should really fix that.
For my slicer, I use Cura Lulzbot Edition (an ungodly mess to compile from source if you can't use the provided Ubuntu packages). At some point I hope to take that out of the equation and call CuraEngine from the commandline directly, so it'll be easier to record exact printer settings with each GCODE file (say, in comments). For the time being, I'll keep human-readable, free-form notes.
As for the software to run the printer, a Raspberry Pi or equivalent SOC with a combination of ArchLinuxArm/SSH/tmux/pronsole.py works well for me. If you're less technically inclined, you might b better off with OctoPi, a purpose-built OS image for Raspberry Pis.
Some things are just things to help me make other things using other things. I think this is a pretty under-appreciated application of consumer-grade 3D printers.
It turns out 3D printers are a nice way to make jigs for marking cuts/holes, aligning parts for tack welding, or handheld plasma torch stenciling. Yes, even plasma cut stenciling. The workpiece stays surprisingly cool during that process, so as long as you build your stencil with some offsets, it should last for anywhere from 10-50 cuts, and when it's too melt-y, you can just print a new one. You likely won't have the same luck with oxy-acetylene.
The plasma cutting jigs I build are meant to work for the geometry of a Hypertherm Duramax drag-tip torch, so you can just run it along the stencil. Shouldn't be too hard to apply the same idea for other drag-tip torches. (There are much cheaper and adequate alternatives to Hypertherm today.)
Most of these I'll print at a higher speed with lower infill. Stencils still end up being 100% solid though, just by virtue of their thinness.
I guess some of this code could be modified for woodworking (eg. router rigs), if you're more of a dead-trees kind of guy. Really, you could even use FreeCAD to design templates, print them out on paper, and cut them from plywood or HDF with a bandsaw.
I'm hoping that once I get off my lazy ass and actually do my CNC plasma build that I can reuse some of this same code and skip the 3D printing part. Though more likely than not I'll end up having to start from scratch, because computers and tech stacks and programming sucks.