FreeCAD News

Recent­ly we ran our first FreeCAD Com­mu­ni­ty Design com­pe­ti­tion. Our idea was to chal­lenge peo­ple to use FreeCAD to design some­thing use­ful for anoth­er open source com­mu­ni­ty. We chose the theme of Open Sci­ence and part­nered with LabCrafter who iden­ti­fied that numer­ous open science/open hard­ware projects would ben­e­fit from a low volt­age pinch valve design for automat­ing the flow of gasses and liq­uids. As such we designed a brief and offered some cash prizes.

Tak­ing 3^rd place and $100 is Lau­ra who utilised a very afford­able and com­mon 9 gram RC ser­vo as the actu­a­tor for their mech­a­nism. A well thought out design which led to a very afford­able solu­tion. In 2^nd place (and it was incred­i­bly close between 1^st and sec­ond place) is mikeven­tor, mikeven­tor sim­i­lar­ly used an RC ser­vo but went with a high­er spec 25kg rat­ed ser­vo and again this actu­at­ed 3^d print­ed PETG com­po­nents. The all up cost of mikeventor’s design called “Ser­vo­Quetsch” was a lit­tle high­er but includ­ed some nice fea­tures includ­ing a bypass capac­i­tor and a diode for polar­i­ty pro­tec­tion. Mikeven­tor will receive the $250 prize. 

We are delight­ed to announce that Design­weaver is the win­ner of first place net­ting the $500 prize. Their design utilised the, com­mon in hob­by robot­ics, N20 geared motor in the worm dri­ve vari­ant. This meant that the result­ing design, again using a small amount of 3D print­ed parts, could hold a closed/pinched posi­tion with no pow­er indef­i­nite­ly. They did exten­sive field test­ing of the design estab­lish­ing accu­rate tim­ings for open­ing and clos­ing of the assem­bly and, like all the 3 podi­um placed designs, showed their work in great videos and documentation.

You can check out each of these entries via this com­pe­ti­tion forum post and each entry has the repos­i­to­ry linked, some video of the FreeCAD Design and test­ing process and all the designs are licenced under the CERN OHL V2 licence.

Final­ly, a mas­sive thank you to the team at LabCrafter for their help set­ting up this com­pe­ti­tion and we’d also like to thank all those who took part and those who talked about and shared the competition.