FreeCAD Macro MakeGrid

I needed to make a grid for a LED project that will probably never happen, you know how it is ... So while I'm at it, I finally published this FreeCAD Macro in a usable form.

This release allows you to create a curved grid, from these parameters:

Matrix:
    - Horizontal cells
    - Vertical cells
    - Width (mm)
    - Height (mm)

Grid :
    - Horizontal angle (mm)
    - Depth (mm)
    - Left side width (mm)
    - Right side width (mm)
    - Upper side height (mm)
    - lower side height (mm)
    - Horizontal spacer width (mm)
    - Vertical spacer height (mm)

The cells are "square" but conform to the curvature of the grid.

Installation

Copy GridDrawer/ folder and Makegrid.FCMacro in ~/FreeCAD/Macro/, then run FreeCAD.

Usage

• run FreeCAD
• go to menu "Macro"
• click "Macros ..."
• select "User macros" Tab
• double click "MakeGrid.FCMacro"
• now you can fill in the form with your parameters, click "OK" and wait for the grid !
  more cells you need, more time is required to compute the grid object. (1024 cells require 8 minutes on my computer)
• you can follow the creation process/parameters in "Report view" window (usually bottom left).
• WARNING : Currently, there are no form validation, so conflicting parameters may produce crash or strange objects from deep space.

Development

This Macro has been coded and run with FreeCAD 0.19 daily for Ubuntu and Python 3.8.
This is my first Python development so please be critical and constructive so that I can improve this macro.
This probably run on other linux system but need your collaboration for Windows.

I used :

• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
• FreeCAD-daily 0.19 PPA
• Python 3.8
• JetBrains PyCharm
• freecad-stubs : https://github.com/CyrilWaechter/freecad-stubs
• PySide2
• Qt Designer
• FreeCAD documentation and many videos and documentations from community :
  • https://wiki.freecadweb.org/
  • https://pythoncvc.net/
  • etc
• git/gitlab.com

Examples

Future

You may collaborate to do or complete the following features :

• accelerate computing time by creating punch tool with basic FreeCAD API (vertices, edges, faces, etc)
• adding punch shapes (cylinder, triangle, hex, user defined, etc)
• adding punch patterns (hex, etc)
• adding punch shape rotation on axis
• adding base grid shapes (cubic, spheric, etc)