FreeCAD News

There’s a great phrase about edu­ca­tion used in var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties “Each One Teach One”. Fun­ni­ly enough I first noticed the phrase as it got used in the FreeCAD Twitter/X account as a hash­tag. It’s root­ed in African cul­ture and ini­tial usage was amongst enslaved peo­ple in Amer­i­ca who, denied any edu­ca­tion, would share what skills they had with their community.

Whilst cer­tain­ly not as vital or poignant when applied to teach­ing FreeCAD, it’s a great con­cept that nudges us to show oth­er peo­ple what we know. Luck­i­ly this week I got the chance to deliv­er some work into a small project in North Wales UK called GISDA. GISDA works with lots of groups of young peo­ple on all man­ner of issues, and won­der­ful­ly, has a cre­ative team who deliv­er all man­ner of art and mak­ing projects. They’ve recent­ly had some fund­ing for some fan­cy 3D print­ers (a Prusa Mini and a Prusa MK4S) and were want­i­ng to upskill some of the staff team, and in par­tic­u­lar Lyn­wen, in FreeCAD.

Lyn­wen is a vast­ly expe­ri­enced art prac­ti­tion­er, new to CAD, but on the first day of train­ing told me that her father worked with CAD (Auto­CAD) so she was hop­ing it was in her genes! For those total­ly new to CAD I tend to look at the Part work­bench first using CSG approach­es to make parts out of com­bi­na­tions of prim­i­tive shapes and boolean oper­a­tions. We then moved on to using Part Design and Sketch­er work­ing through how to map sketch­es onto faces and per­form oper­a­tions like extrud­ing and pocketing.

We looked briefly at some oth­er oper­a­tions, such as fil­lets and cham­fers and also using the revolve tools to cre­ate cir­cu­lar parts. Along­side and inter­spersed we worked with the 3D print­ers explor­ing not only how to export from FreeCAD and slice to print, but basic machine oper­a­tions like chang­ing fil­a­ment and fault diag­no­sis and main­te­nance. Keen to also explore small­er ideas for work­shops Lyn­wen worked on a blank keyring design and then used Prusaslicer to add embossed text and a fil­a­ment swap to the design result­ing in the “Cwl Dwd” keyring. “Cwl Dwd” is the Welsh spelling of, yes you guessed it, Cool Dude. I’m reas­sured the use of Com­ic Sans is a post iron­ic meme in the space, but either way, it’s great to see peo­ple get­ting good results as begin­ners in CAD.

Speak­ing of which, the day after our train­ing Lyn­wen sent me some photo’s of a Can­dle Stick hold­er design she had cre­at­ed and print­ed. Whilst I’m not 100% sure a PETG can­dle­stick is the best idea, it’s bril­liant to see some­one apply­ing their learn­ing and enjoy­ing FreeCAD!