FreeCAD News

One of the most fan­tas­tic things about FreeCAD is the con­stant flow of peo­ple mak­ing bril­liant add on col­lec­tions of tools. One work in progress that has caught our eye is the FreeCAD DFM Workbench. 

The Design For Man­u­fac­ture (DFM) work­bench aims to per­form analy­sis of your FreeCAD mod­els against user con­fig­urable sets of rules to iden­ti­fy poten­tial prob­lems in man­u­fac­tur­ing. It cur­rent­ly con­tains analy­sis for injec­tion mould­ing where draft angles and over­hangs and sharp inter­nal geome­tries may cost a project dear­ly if these issues get through to the fac­to­ry and production.

It’s real­ly intu­itive to use select a mod­el and click the DFM analy­sis tool icon. You can then select the man­u­fac­tur­ing process and the mate­r­i­al and then set the “pull direc­tion” (the direc­tion in which mold sec­tions would sep­a­rate) and click “run analysis”. 

After the analy­sis is quick­ly per­formed you get a details list of poten­tial errors and issues which you can expand and view in a file tree view. Aside from the DFM analy­sis tool the only oth­er tool icon is the Process Library icon. This tool when launched is a library man­age­ment tool allow­ing you to cre­ate and cus­tomise your own DFM process­es for analy­sis. Again it all feels rea­son­ably intu­itive and we look for­ward to this valu­able work­bench being devel­oped further.

One way that the com­mu­ni­ty can help is that the cre­ator of this project Ryan is real­ly keen for peo­ple to test the WB and report back on their expe­ri­ences. One thing to note is that this work­bench is not cur­rent­ly includ­ed in the addon manager. 

To install this you need to use the ” Edit ‑Pref­er­ences ” drop down option and then select the “Addon Man­ag­er” tab. Click the green “+” sym­bol to add a cus­tom url and add the work­bench repos­i­to­ry url in full https://github.com/ryankembrey/FreeCAD-DFM-Workbench then type “main” into the branch. Click “OK” and then “apply”. Then you can re-run the addon man­ag­er and you’ll find the work­bench list­ed for install. can now find it in the Addon Man­ag­er. Click “Tools — Addon Man­ag­er” and search for “DFM” and you will find it list­ed. Click “install” to begin to explore this great workbench. 

Mas­sive thanks to Ryan for choos­ing this project as their uni­ver­si­ty cap­stone project. It’s going to be an incred­i­bly use­ful FreeCAD tool.