FreeCAD News

Spot­ted over on Mastodon, we thought Alexan­der’s (AKA @PistonPin) PCB hold­er design was an excel­lent tool and a great exam­ple of func­tion­al 3D print­ing and FreeCAD. Chat­ting with Alexan­der it’s clear he is an expe­ri­enced CAD user with lots of pre­vi­ous projects under his belt. 

“I switched from Fusion 360 to FreeCAD a few years ago, when Autodesk decid­ed to cut back on fea­tures from the mak­er license. This was a much-need­ed reminder of the impor­tance of open source and tru­ly own­ing your cre­ations, so I’m very thank­ful to Autodesk for this deci­sion!”

Alexan­der has main­ly used the Part­De­sign work­bench and tools to cre­ate this use­ful design and he also used some incor­po­rat­ed some ear­li­er project parts that was also built around 2020 alu­mini­um extru­sion. To draw the extrud­ed alu­mini­um pro­file Alexan­der used the Sketch­er tools to cre­ate just one of the extru­sions slot profiles. 

With the sin­gle slot pro­file sketched and con­strained he then used the PolarPat­tern tool to cre­ate the oth­er 3 iden­ti­cal slot pro­files. Adding a sim­ple cir­cle for the cen­tre bore and some cham­fers to the cor­ners, Alexan­der could then extrude the design to match the length of alu­mini­um he planned to use. 

Draw­ing the legs and the posi­tion-able PCB hold­ing blocks, Alexan­der has made use of the XY plane and added oth­er Datum planes to sketch on to. He has used the A2plus work­bench as a sim­ple way to check the fit of each of the indi­vid­ual sec­tions onto the extrud­ed rail. 

To make the knob that will lock the PCB clamps into posi­tion Alexan­der used a pro­file sketch on the XY plane and used the Rev­o­lu­tion tool to cre­ate the basic geom­e­try. Then adding a sketch to pock­et the ser­rat­ed grip, he final­ly added some fil­lets to smooth out the grip sections. 

The results are excel­lent. The hard­ware, apart from the alu­mini­um extru­sion, are all M5. Alexan­der men­tions he has spent a lot of time mak­ing sure that the required tol­er­ances for the M5 parts are cor­rect mean­ing that every­thing should adjust well with noth­ing being too tight or too loose! The result­ing tool looks excel­lent and should suit a range of PCB projects in terms of size and in terms of work­hold­ing for SMD or through hole assem­bly and sol­der­ing. If you want to print one of these Alexan­der has uploaded the project, excel­lent­ly includ­ing the FreeCAD project files over on Print­a­bles.