Tech Tuesday is a weekly blog that addresses some of the most common questions and concerns that I hear throughout the previous week from users of BobCAD’s CNC software. Both customers and future customers are more than welcome to leave a comment on what they would like to see covered for the following Tech Tuesday. If you missed last week’s Tech Tuesday, click here.
Welcome to another wonderful edition of Tech Tuesday. Today I am going to be teaching BobCAD users how to use the shape library & boolean add function. These time-saving functions allow users to make parts in CAD quickly & easily! Let’s get started.
For starters, I went to my Create 2D tab and drew a simple rectangle. The dimension of my rectangle is 6 inches long and 3 inches wide. Once I set my desired parameters for my rectangle, I go up to the shape library. BobCAD’s shape library has 40 common shapes to choose from. For this example, I am going to select the CAM Plate.
For the origin, I am going to input 1.75 for my X value and .75 for my Y value. That will put my CAM plate at the top right center of my rectangle.
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To duplicate my plate, I am going to select the “Flip X” box in my Parameters window. To get the CAM plate on the bottom right part, simply input a negative value for Y (-.75).
I am going to do the same thing for the left side and now I have all 4 corners of my rectangle with an intersecting CAM plate running through it. For my convenience, I like to see my entire model in one window. To do so, I can either select my graphics area and hit ‘F’ or I can hit the magnifying glass with the letter ‘A’ in it to get the same effect.
The next chess move is to go back into our Create
2D tab and select 2D Boolean. The 2D Boolean function in BobCAD allows you to add, subtract or intersect groups. In this case, we will be adding. To populate the First Geometry Group box, we are going to hit shift and left-click on our rectangle. As you can see, all 4 lines of our rectangle are selected and indicated via a red color.
Next, take your mouse and click on the Second Geometry Group box. Hold shift and left-click on the outside of all of the CAM plates until they are all selected and you see a bold line outlining your part.
As I hit OK to save my progress, you can see that the part updates accordingly and our part now goes from 5 individual shapes to one solid shape.
With BobCAD-CAM, drawing parts is that easy! Thank you for reading another Tech Tuesday; see you next week!
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