Tomato Support Frame
Designing a simple tomato truss frame connector, with FreeCAD
I bought a tomato plant that said it would grow to 1.3 meters tall, it may then be unsurprising to hear that it did in fact do just that. To stop it from falling over and breaking itself I bought a cheap truss frame kit with three posts and a handful of connectors to make a nice support structure.
However, arranged in a triangle, the connectors are too long for the posts when placed into the pot I have the tomato plant in, placing immense strain on the connectors, as well as the posts (which are pushed out at uncomfortable angles)
Among all the plants in my backyard, my tomato plant is the most visually impressive. At over a meter tall and sporting over six swelling trusses of tomatoes, it towers over the spindly thyme and floppy coriander
Anyway, I nearly have an engineering degree (at time of writing) which statistically means that I have a 3D printer and at least some knowledge of how to use it.
As one of my first actual uses of my 3D printer for purposes beyond university projects or replica lightsabers, and because my Education License for Inventor Professional was soon to expire, I thought that now would be a good time to embrace the open-source CAD software FreeCAD and begin learning how to use it.
Safe to say that coming from 5+ years of practice in a single environment with a well curated workflow, the experience could be summed up with two quotes; "I can totally figure this out" and about 30s later "I can't f*****g figure this out".
Never the less, and after having spent some time watching the veritable goldmine that is MangoJelly Solutions for FreeCAD, I was able to
