FreeCAD News

It’s a won­der­ful thing when you see a very cool open­source hard­ware project and then a fur­ther delight when you see that the tool­chain to build the device is also com­plete­ly open. 

Using FreeCAD, KiCad and oth­er open­source projects like Python and GRBL this XYZ micro manip­u­la­tor is fas­ci­nat­ing in mul­ti­ple aspects. 

First, it has an excel­lent com­bi­na­tion­al design of a ball joint with flex­ures that cre­ates a fab­u­lous joint with smooth move­ment using tiny ball bear­ings and 2mm brass tub­ing. We have to con­fess it’s built so well that we imag­ined the tubes to be much larg­er when we first saw them.

Then there’s some very clever explo­ration of using mag­net arrays to emu­late a sin­gle rotat­ing mag­net­ic field to cre­ate a very accu­rate encod­ing sys­tem using a large 3^d print­ed part attached to a com­mon step­per motors.

The motor dri­ver boards are rea­son­ably com­mon mod­ules hooked up to a RP2350 Rasp­ber­ry Pi Pico2 in turn all mount­ed and rout­ed on a cus­tom, KiCad-cre­at­ed PCB. A bespoke firmware is sup­plied over on the repos­i­to­ry, and there are some exam­ple python scripts for hom­ing and cal­i­bra­tion and more.

So what can it do? Well, look­ing through the excel­lent video over on YouTube the device is extreme­ly capa­ble of accu­rate posi­tion­ing and there some bril­liant exam­ples with the device set up mov­ing a stage and an IC sil­i­con sam­ple under a microscope.

There’s also a fun sec­tion in the video where the device trav­els the paths to draw a scale cross sec­tion of a “Benchy”, at just 20um across!

It’s superb work, and it’s won­der­ful to see screen­shots of the design assem­bled in FreeCAD 1.1 on the project repos­i­to­ry.