Useful Stuff

Reverse Engineering of a Keypad in FreeCAD

2016-06-10 10:18

4. Finally FreeCAD (Ver. 0.16)

Fruit of all the labor is, that we now have a CAD object of the Keypad, that should be good enough to design around.

As a simple test lets simulate making a keyboard case.

We load the Keypad model into FreeCAD and save the file under a different name.

In the Sketcher workbench we create a new sketch, with an offset of 0.5mm,

so it sits flat with the Keypad's base.

For the test we draft an arbitrary rectangle.

We

• close the sketch
• change to the Part workbench
• extrude the sketch to 1mm in negative Z direction

We select

1. the new Extrude
2. the keypad

and use the Cut tool of the Part workbench to cut the Keypad out of what will become the keyboard case.

In a perfect world the keypad should fit in this case like a glove.

Remembering how we got here though, I would be more tolerant (probably 0.25mm on each edge?).