FREECAD, FUN!

At first, Freecad was extremely confusing and difficult to work with. By the end of this assignment, it was a little less confusing, but still preeeetty difficult to work with. The first portion of this assignment was simply completing the tutorial for freecad. Unlike every other tutorial I have ever completed in my life, this tutorial was super hard. But, with professor Von Hollen’s help I was able to complete it and make this shape:

The next task for this assignment was to create an object that could clamp onto a desk and hold a wire of some kind in it. Using the measurements of the desk I obtained in class and a Mac charger wire, I was able to construct the body of the object that clamped onto the desk.

However, after completing this step I ran into some issues. After flipping the body around to the back and creating a new sketch, I sketched an object that would go on top to hold the cord. this cord holder would constructed in an L shaped fashion. However, Freecad was giving me issues and I was unable to complete this step.

As you can see from the images above, even after fully constraining my sketch and creating external geometry on the back face of my clamp and coinciding my fully constrained sketched object onto my clamp, when I would attempt to pad the sketch it would give me the error message seen above. I was unsure how my sketch had “multiple solids” as I only created one poly-line sketch and made sure to fully connect it. I even tried making different shaped in my cord holder such as a simple square or circle but the multiple solid error message persisted. I also tried creating external geometry on all 4 corners of the back face and coinciding my sketch to all 4 corners like professor Von Hollen did in class. Unfortunately, after my best attempts at this step, I was unable to complete this step as Freecad was not working with me. If it would have let me pad my sketch, I would have proceeded to set the pad of the cordholder as “through all” so that it would cover the full length of the clamp.

For the third and final part of this assignment, I created a hook-like structure which fits together perfectly. The idea is that the pieces fit together and either way they are held, the bottom piece would not fall out.

All in all, I actually enjoyed using Freecad as it was a challenge. I enjoy taking on challenges like this and usually would not stop until I was completely finished, but after hours of trying to solve the error message in part 2 and finding no online resources as a help for getting rid of the error, I was unable to finish that part.