12 posts tagged with "assembly"

We’ve just released a bugfix update for the latest stable version of Ondsel Engineering Suite. The changes mostly affect users of the Assembly workbench, VarSets, and the Ondsel Lens addon.

Back when we did the user survey, the generation of bills of materials (BOM) was the next important thing after the ability to create assemblies. People don’t even need collision detection as much as they need their BOMs. Based on this data, Pierre-Louis Boyer (Ondsel) recently added a Bill of Materials tool to the Assembly workbench for the upcoming Ondsel ES v2024.3 and FreeCAD v1.0. It is already available in weekly builds of Ondsel ES and the upstream project.

Now that the basic assembly workflow is mostly complete and operational in Ondsel ES, we are beginning to add new tools. One of the features coming in the next release are exploded views.

We have just published our own build of FreeCAD with built-in Ondsel Solver and the new integrated assembly workbench. Now everyone can take an early look at the assembly workflow coming in FreeCAD v1.0.

The basics of an integrated assembly workbench in FreeCAD are now functional and will be ready for wider testing once another pull request is merged. This means you can play with it now in the development version of FreeCAD and when version 1.0 is out, you will be able to create or link parts, create joints between them, and solve the assembly — in just a few clicks, out of the box, without installing any add-ons.

We started this series with the assumption that there is a strong community demand for a default assembly workbench in FreeCAD. The community discussion that followed that article confirmed our belief. We then researched existing options — Assembly 2, A2plus, Assembly 3, and Assembly 4 — and even quickly studied related workbenches and macros.

Our research had a number of limitations though. We avoided exploring the earliest solutions such as the original workbench by Jürgen Riegel and FreeGCS because they were incomplete. We also decided against studying both Exploded Assembly and Animation workbenches because this type of feature deserves dedicated attention.

In the previous posts in this series we’ve already discussed reasons to create a default assembly workbench and then explored existing options: Assembly 2, A2plus, Assembly 3, and Assembly 4.

There are several more tools that provide a subset of their features, and these tools regularly come up in discussions on creating assemblies: the BodyBuilder macro, the Manipulator workbench, and the Part-o-magic workbench. Since none of them can realistically serve as a foundation for a potential default assembly workbench, in this review, we’ll focus on their interaction models to see what we can learn from them.

In the previous posts in this series, we talked about the need for a default assembly workbench in FreeCAD and reviewed Assembly 2, A2plus, and Assembly 3. Let’s talk about Assembly 4.

This is the fourth part in the series where we explore the possibility of creating a default assembly workbench for FreeCAD. We started out with a conversation about why we need a default assembly workbench in the program, then reviewed Assembly 2 and A2plus. Now let’s talk about the Assembly 3 workbench.

We’ve already talked about the need for a default assembly workbench in FreeCAD and reviewed Assembly 2. Now let’s get into the nitty-gritty of the A2plus workbench.