I made a small piece which will be part of a kit to make mousetrap powered cars in school and used VarSet instead of the Spreadsheet and at first I like. It’s easy to use and if setup so the name is your ‘short-name’ and the long name is the tooltip no problems. I made the mistake of setting up my variables reversing the naming and wanted to edit that but could not find a way except for deleting the variable and recreating it.
So the way to use it is to create a VarSet and if you are going to create your list of variables like I do when I start a design, then you check the box “add another” above the tooltip input field so that when you hit ok to finish a variable the VarSet window returns cleared for another variable to be created.
Using the VarSet variables in the design is as it was before, when you set a dimension you click the little globe in the input field and then enter “VarSet.[your variable name]” similar to the Spreadsheet variable usage.
The 1.0 release didn’t implement renaming because it didn’t yet implement fixing up all references through the document on a rename. Someone wrote a macro to do that, but at almost the same time I learned about that macro, VarSet parameter renaming was added to the development versions I use. FreeCAD 1.1rc1 is now out and has the parameter renaming feature implemented. There are a few blocker issues inhibiting the final release, including one that impacts me #25720, but generally it’s in good shape.
Do note that the “Prefix group name” feature was deprecated in 1.1 because of several issues. (However, if you put GroupName_ at the beginning of a parameter, it will act as if the box had been checked, in order to provide backward compatibility with older documents.)
If I have only one VarSet for all my parameters, I tend to rename it P or Params or something like that, which is quicker typing in the formula box.
The = key is the hotkey to get into the formula editor. (This feature is shared with at least one commercial CAD package.) Makes it a lot faster to use.
What a PIA doing expressions is now. Trying take a hole count(holeCt) variable multiply times a hole ID and it won’t let me because the holeCt is not in mm so it’s complaining about unit mismatch.
Figuring this out… each Variable Set has a definition for the type of variables stored in it.
So for lengths and sizes of things, in mm, have one VarSet which I should name Pmm and for counts of things like number of screw holes, number of padded parts in a polar pattern, etc I should name the VarSet to Pct or something like that. There are lots of different types of VarSets:
Yup and I thought the type was restricted to a single variable set but it’s not, I can mix types in one variable set. So still figuring it out.
Had fun working on parts for a kit to use for Mouse Trap Cars at the school. Hoping this is a basis for kids to create their own parts and gearing systems.
