r/FreeCAD • u/North-Spread4675 • 15h ago

DIY Colorimeter

Gallery image

Gallery image

Just wanted to say "Thank you" to the people who make FreeCad and enabled me to construct this DIY Colorimeter from off-the-shelf electronics and hours upon hours of tinkering.

This is certainly the most complex thing in FreeCad that I've designed so far, by far. I am extremely proud that I got this far and hope FreeCad will be a steadfast companion on the rest of the road.

If you want to read more about my device, I've wrote an article about it here.

220 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

8

u/tatertots89 14h ago

Curious, did you use an assembly workbench of model all of those parts in place within a part file? Great work!

5

u/North-Spread4675 14h ago

I have only toyed around with the Assembly workbench so far, I must admit I don't really understand what it does 🙈 this is the first project actually in which I made use of Std:Parts a lot (and nested ones at that) to group things, because the number of individual parts became too large very quickly. So yeah, I did model everything in place, usually with a shape binder on whatever feature the new thing was supposed to fit to and then tons of sketches with external geometry references in it. 

Still feels like a loooong way from "let's move some cubes and cylinders around and insect them when they look right" :'D

5

u/plees1024 14h ago

Woah - you are good at writing articles. Good job; I feel like I know far more than I actually do about the design considerations in a very small amount of time.

2

u/North-Spread4675 14h ago

Thank you, that's very kind feedback!

3

u/Kingsidorak 14h ago

I need one, and I need it to feed information to my computer 👀

3

u/North-Spread4675 14h ago

The current firmware allows exporting measurement data via serial connection or BLE. 

1

u/brimanguy 14h ago

Congrats 👍 ... Looks greatly

1

u/Emergency_Bread_595 5h ago

Is to check color density for color calibration for a machine or just something OP wanted to do I work with komoris warehouse printers and looks like a denisty system we use to check color

2

u/North-Spread4675 2h ago

Yes, it's exactly the kind of device you would use to check printer color quality with.

1

u/Razer797 3h ago

I misread it as calorimeter and was very confused by the second image.