Back to Blender with CAD Sketcher

By Robert Russell

- 2 minutes read - 216 words

My most recent designs used OpenSCAD. Before that I was using FreeCAD for a while. I think I’m coming back to Blender now. I love all these open source tools and I’ll get around to each one again.

Blender was my go-to tool for a while to create models for 3d printing from 2017-2020. Here are the kinds of things I designed back then.

Beezus Warthog (my second robocar iteration) was designed in Blender Blender screenshot of DIY robocar frame Beezus Warthog robocar

So was my next one, Henry Technical. A lot less frame and a lot more hardware. Screenshot of Henry Technical design in Blender Henry Technical in foreground, Beezus Warthog in the rear

FreeCAD makes a lot of sense for doing CAD work. For example, I made a few more ways to hold down a PCB like this little tray. FreeCAD screenshot of flat, H-shaped model RPi mounted on 3d-printed H-frame

Precision modeling in Blender meant typing a lot of numbers to get dimensionally-accurate results. I expect I’ll be doing more of that. But the new thing I’m adding is the CAD Sketcher add-on. It lets you make a sketch to express constraints on relative locations of features. I found some good example videos that demonstrate how it works from @Keep-Making on YouTube.

The downside is that I won’t have a simple source file to share my designs like OpenSCAD. Maybe using Blender for CAD will mean I finally get around to doing some motion tracking or animations too though.