Parameterized phone stand

thingiverse

This is a custom phone stand with parameters set for Samsung Galaxy Luna Pro phones. The design was created in both OpenSCAD and FreeCAD. To adjust this design to match your phone, edit the spreadsheet in FreeCAD or the variables at the beginning of the file in OpenSCAD. I initially designed this project as a way to learn how to use FreeCAD. I started by creating it in OpenSCAD, where I figured out what I was designing while doing it. The code is not great because it's mostly manual geometry. It was a straightforward design, but I had to deal with some limitations. In FreeCAD, I already knew what I wanted to create since I'd done it in OpenSCAD. However, I faced issues with the tool and had to figure out how to avoid its pitfalls. The people at the FreeCAD forum were very helpful. At that time, FreeCAD was on version 0.17, which seemed stable enough to use. I must have started over in FreeCAD around 20 times due to these issues. As a result, the final design is more polished than the OpenSCAD one. Things I learned in FreeCAD include: Bodies can be rotated and translated, but boolean tools ignore rotation and translation. You cannot translate or rotate previously done work on a body. Reference planes can be created that are rotated and offset from the default coordinate system. Objects can be built with parameters in a spreadsheet, but not all operations update when parameters change. There are multiple workbenches with different available operations. Objects designed in one workbench may not be usable in another. In this design, I did most of the initial work in the "Part Design" workbench. However, I needed to do a loft that was only available in the "Part" workbench. The loft can use a face or a sketch, but if you have a body from the Part Design workbench, you cannot select a face on it and use it as a face for the loft. Instead, you must create a clone of the object, go to the Draft workbench, select the face you want to use, and then go back to the Part workbench. The sketch tool has some issues that need to be known about. It does not always catch when an object is over-constrained. If there are problems with a sketch, it may not let you edit numerical constraints to fix them, and you must delete some constraints before re-adding the corrected ones. FreeCAD also has some architectural issues. Whenever the number of edges in an object changes, they are arbitrarily renamed. Later steps may be linked to the wrong edges due to this issue. Version 0.17 added a workaround by allowing sketches to be linked not to the object but to reference planes. However, fillets still have trouble when their edges overlap. Boolean operations also have trouble with tangential surfaces. If you want to do a boolean operation on two objects that share a face, it is very likely to fail. The workaround is to offset faces so they overlap or don't touch. It can sometimes be difficult to find the offending face or edge. FreeCAD does not allow adding comments to sketches; the only place comments can be added is in the spreadsheet.