Designing a Robot Chassis in FreeCAD
We’ve been talking about building a robot, but how do you make a chassis? How would you design one simple enough for a first build? Making a custom chassis takes more work than buying ready-made ones, but is a skill worth learning.
In this chapter, you will see how to use FreeCAD to make 3D designs for a chassis, its parts, and its frame. We’ll consider the material we’ll use and what adjustments we’ll need to make to it.
You will then take this CAD design into the real world, making printable drawings that we’ll use to cut our robot parts in later chapters. You’ll be learning and using design skills for making robot designs.
In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following topics:
- Introducing FreeCAD
- Making robot chassis sketches in FreeCAD
- Designing the caster placement
- Modeling chassis parts from sketches
- Making FreeCAD technical drawings
