[feature request] Migrating FCgear and the future FCgearbox to assembly4

kcleung commented 4 years ago

Given the development of the assembly4 addon, which adds assembly support to FreeCAD in a low cost way, it will make sense to migrate FCgear and the future FCgearbox to use assembly4.

I guess Assembly4 will also facilitate our implemetation of FCgearbox.

Is it a good time to make a fork, where FCgear and FCgearbox will be implemented as assembly?

This fork will depend on Assembly4.

looooo commented 4 years ago

I am not sure if asm4 is the way to proceed but if you think so, feel free to share your thought on how to do it. I don't have much time for such things right now.

stefan123t commented 3 years ago

Here is a step by step video from MindScraper detailling the steps to construct a gearbox usign FCGear and Assembly 4.

It shows how to parametrize the cog wheels
as well as the shafts added to the gears
and then takes the critical step of constructing the diametral pitch circle
then assembly4 is used to describe the layout of the pieces and their dependencies
it even creates the gearbox side walls with bearings (maybe add some slack)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYXXfDFg6LY

I think the previous video did not show the calculation to turn the second wheel for the angle of 1/2 teeth (180/teeth) to make them align with interlocking teeth. This is shown in part 2/6 of Evgeniy Ivanov tutorial using Involute Gear (not FCGear sic) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMhDR3_oeEc

Another honorable mention is the following two videos from Jacques Favre showing how to construct it with FCGear and assembly 4 workbench and in the second part even animate it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4qlmS25Mk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLTrfCl2OG4

@kcleung how would you implement such an FCgearbox plugin / workbench making use of both FCGear and Assembly 4 and generating a set of gears and the matching constraints ?

Also see #33 for a possible entry form used in geargenerator.com to input the list of gear wheels and the resulting constraints.

jacprog commented 3 years ago

Hi thanks for including me here I made this clock: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=55567 7 pair of gears in XY plan in 6 Z plans, not sure any assembly could help I think the gear workbench is great as is

looooo / freecad.gears

[feature request] Migrating FCgear and the future FCgearbox to assembly4 #42