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Dave is a rocketeer!

Based in Cana­da, Dave was very inter­est­ed in mod­el rock­etry as a young­ster and returned to the hob­by lat­er in life becom­ing very active­ly involved in larg­er high pow­er rock­etry. Along the way Dave also got inter­est­ed in 3D print­ing in his rock­etry designs and, as a by prod­uct, inter­est­ed in CAD.

Many rock­etry types, beyond sim­ple off the shelf kit build­ing, are lured into 3D print­ing as a method of cre­at­ing accu­rate nosecone designs which can be chal­leng­ing to cre­ate accu­rate­ly using oth­er means. Dave ini­tial­ly utilised Open­SCAD to cre­ate para­met­ric nosecone scripts for many dif­fer­ent types of nosecone geome­tries and released his scripts out into rock­etry com­mu­ni­ties. Mov­ing beyond “sim­ple” nosecones Dave began explor­ing FreeCAD as it enabled him to cre­ate incred­i­bly detailed scale mod­el designs for 3D print and indeed Dave has some excel­lent tuto­ri­als over on his youtube chan­nel.

Dave majored in Physics with a minor in Com­put­er Sci­ence and has spent most of his work­ing career as a solu­tions archi­tect across a vari­ety of indus­tries and gov­ern­ment depart­ments. Dave has also worked as a tech­ni­cal train­er deliv­er­ing all over the world. Every­where Dave has trav­elled and worked he has pro­mot­ed rock­etry and tells great sto­ries of bring­ing rock­etry into South Africa and more. Trav­el­ling a lot, Dave was drawn first to Open­SCAD and then into FreeCAD as it met his CAD needs whilst not need­ing ubiq­ui­tous con­nec­tion to the net.

Pri­or to all his work on FreeCAD Dave cre­at­ed a real­ly use­ful for rock­etry nosecone gen­er­a­tion script in Open­SCAD. Hav­ing exten­sive­ly worked with C++ and Python Open­SCAD pre­sent­ed a pret­ty straight­for­ward route for Dave to get work­ing with 3D mod­els for 3D print. When Dave start­ed explor­ing FreeCAD it was pret­ty straight­for­ward to port the Open­SCAD nosecone gen­er­a­tor to work as FreeCAD Macro.

Dav­e’s involve­ment with FreeCAD grew when com­mu­ni­ty mem­ber “con­crete­dog” (who also coin­ci­den­tal­ly is the author of this blog post) start­ed a thread on the FreeCAD Forum sug­gest­ing that a Rock­etry Work­bench could be an inter­est­ing and use­ful addon. In the glob­al rock­etry com­mu­ni­ty there is anoth­er excel­lent open­source piece of soft­ware for rock­etry “Open­rocket”. Open­rock­et enables users to design and sim­u­late rock­ets and doing a lot of the heavy lift­ing around cal­cu­lat­ing cen­tres of pres­sure and cen­tres of grav­i­ty, as well as flight dura­tion and char­ac­ter­is­tics. It’s an excel­lent piece of soft­ware, how­ev­er it is main­ly focused on sim­u­la­tion of designs and has no real mod­el out­puts to cre­ate real com­po­nents. Dave was already an Open­rock­et user and with his atten­tion cap­tured, he began to cre­ate a rock­etry work­bench in FreeCAD which makes it triv­ial to cre­ate rock­ets and their com­po­nents for fabrication.

The rock­et work­bench has numer­ous prim­i­tives for nosecones, tubes, fins, fin cans and more and, won­der­ful­ly for the rock­etry com­mu­ni­ty, Dave has made the para­met­ric inputs sim­i­lar to Open­rock­et. This makes it more acces­si­ble for those new to FreeCAD but used to Open­rock­et. Open­rock­et calls on a large open data­base of com­mer­cial com­po­nents and Dave has utilised this open data set with­in the FreeCAD rock­etry work­bench so you can quick­ly call up a part that you can buy in the real world. Some rock­e­teers are also inter­est­ed in up and down scal­ing com­mer­cial designs so the Rock­etry WB in com­bi­na­tion per­haps with the draft work­bench is incred­i­bly useful.

It’s fair to say, at this point that Dave has con­tributed enough, but no! Dave is real­ly inter­est­ed in how FreeCAD’s capa­bil­i­ties in FEM and CFM can be used in con­junc­tion with rock­et designs. It’s com­plex stuff but Dave is work­ing towards hav­ing fin flut­ter and oth­er analy­sis with­in the Rock­et WB. One chal­lenge is FreeCAD’s mate­ri­als sys­tem, in Open­rock­et com­po­nents can be assigned to be made from dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als as this obvi­ous­ly effects their weight and there­fore the flight char­ac­ter­is­tics of the rock­et air­frame. Dave is cur­rent­ly work­ing on a mate­ri­als man­ag­er and data­base that will be applic­a­ble across FreeCAD as well as tex­tur­ing and oth­er mate­r­i­al relat­ed capa­bil­i­ties. It’s a long road project but once incor­po­rat­ed it will open up a heap of pos­si­bil­i­ties in and beyond the Rock­etry workbench.

As if all this isn’t enough, Dave is pas­sion­ate about out­reach par­tic­u­lar­ly around tak­ing FreeCAD into rock­etry com­mu­ni­ties. NARCON is the largest rock­etry con­fer­ence and Dave has giv­en extreme­ly well attend­ed and pop­u­lar talks on the Rock­etry WB and more. 

Dave is hop­ing to attend the North Amer­i­ca FreeCAD Day this year in Illi­nois between the 15^th and the 18^th of August. If you’re attend­ing make sure to say hel­lo to this fan­tas­tic and ded­i­cat­ed contributor.