Design

Is Fusion 360 Really My New Favorite CAD Tool?

Posted by Josef

Spoiler Alert: Yeah, I think it is.

I’ve been forcing myself to solely use Autodesk’s Fusion 360 for my personal projects for almost 2 years now and I’m starting to kinda fall in love with it. I say ‘force’ because it is so easy to give up on a new tool and go back to what you are comfortable with. When it comes to CAD, for me, that is Solidworks. It’s used everywhere, is great for high part count assemblies, and has amazing add-ons. It is the default. But for a number of reasons, not the least of which is cost, I decided to give Fusion 360 a shot and see if it could become my go-to CAD software for my personal projects. I figured, I would take it as far as I could and if it left me needing more, I would abandon it and go back to my trusty Solidworks (courtesy of an employer-provided license).

Over a year and change later, I have yet to be roadblocked by my decision to use Fusion 360. In fact, I have been pleasantly surprised at the pace of development by the Autodesk team. Fusion 360 updates roll-out regularly and the patch notes are transparent and useful. Somewhat recent additions, like merging in Eagle functionality, are huge undertakings that really improve the workflow of an Engineer like myself. I’ve been a longtime user of Eagle (way before Autodesk acquired them), and have been impressed with where that project was heading, but to then have that functionality pulled into Fusion 360 as well is incredible and really increases the value proposition of a Fusion 360 license.

To really get a feel for Fusion 360, I had to do as many apples-to-apples comparisons with SolidWorks as I could. I knew the workflow was different, so I didn’t let that tarnish my experience as much as I could avoid it. It’s true, you have to shift a little bit, but I actually found it far easier of a transition than some online commenters made it seem. I took a couple assemblies I had created in SW and re-created them from scratch in F360. One of them was a model of my favorite pen, the Zebra F301. And although, I still had a lot to learn about Fusion 360, I was able to get to a reasonable level of detail in my model in a fairly short amount of time.

  • Best. Pen. Ever.
  • Close Enough.

I set myself a few other tasks to do some more forced learning of the various tools available in F360 and watched a decent number of the free tutorials on Autodesk’s website. Soon, I was feeling pretty confident and was able to tackle some actual design projects. So, I started working on an idea I’d had for my son’s crib. I wanted to make a baby mobile that used a camera and a neural net to determine when my son’s eye’s were open and activate it’s own motion. So, basically, eyes open, mobile spins. Eyes close, mobile slows to a stop. I’ll create a more detailed post on this project later, but suffice to say, Fusion 360 was up to the task. Is my baby mobile beautiful and perfect? No, but I was able to create what I had sketched, 3D print, assemble, and functionally test the project in a very short timespan thanks to Fusion 360.

All-Seeing Eye Baby Mobile

In the year or so since, I have designed around 50 projects of wildly varying complexity in Fusion 360 and have been incredibly happy with my experience. I even undertook a One-A-Day challenge (separate post to follow) and the ease of the Fusion 360 workflow really helped me churn out new designs each day even when they were terribly uninspired. When I was looking for an excuse to not create something, Fusion 360 gave me no friction and I found once I sat down and started sketching something, F360 just got out of my way.

So, would I never look back? Am I forever done with SolidWorks? Naw. If I’m given a license or easy access to a workstation, I would still be happy to use SolidWorks. I still love it (not the cost or Windows-only). Buuuut, I gotta admit, Fusion 360 is my new favorite. It is easy to be productive in it, the integration with Eagle is great, the cadence of updates is awesome, CAM tools are wonderful, cost is attractive, and cross-platform availability is a huge win. If you are a Mechanical Engineer, an EE who want’s to make your own enclosures, a maker, or a student, I highly recommend giving Fusion 360 a shot. I think you might start falling for it as well.

I’m in a commercial!

Posted by Josef

Here it is. Our first connected product is being launched into the world. Introducing, Glow! Proud to have worked with such an amazing team on this product. So much fun to see early prototyped interactions turn into a full fledged product.

The first connected product for Casper

It’s The Simple Things In Life…

Posted by Josef

Like many engineers, I tend to dive deep on technical matters and get a bit lost before coming up for air and realizing that maybe a simpler solution would’ve been the right approach after all. As I’ve grown older, I’ve also gotten better at noticing this tendency and steering myself away from it whenever possible. Sometimes I succeed, other times I fail. However, I have slowly started to appreciate the simplicity of a less designed solution. 

“Maybe we should add a few more tires… for redundancy.”

One way I try to practice this simplicity is by going through my list of “Problems in Need of Solutions” (this “need” for solutions is highly subjective as you’ll see later) on a regular basis and forcing myself to create as simple a solution as possible. Often times, I’ll take the first thing that comes to mind as a potential solution, lightly review it for feasibility, and then begin the process of making a next solution with the only additional challenge of having to be easier to implement than the previous idea. 

  • Step 1 – Identify a problem
  • Step 2 – Write down / sketch anything that works
  • Step 3 – Make something simpler than the last idea
  • Step 4 – Repeat Step 3

I would love to be able to say that I am great at this and have opened up a wonderful world of perfect engineering and design that would melt your face like the Ark of the Covenant if you were to ever lay eyes upon it, but alas, that is not the case. But by consciously following this process, it has helped me re-evaluate my own approach to many problems. 

It’s so simple, so elegant! Aaaaaaahhhhhh!

Occasionally, by following this above practice, I end up with something that gets used frequently, disappears into the background, and elicits a smile every time I think about its minuscule contribution to my life. One such object that I’ve recently made and get far more joy out of than any human rightly should is a small C-clip that fits the neck of SoftSoap dispensers and restricts the pump travel. 

Behold… salvation!

Why does something so small, simple, and possibly stupid bring me so much joy? I think it’s partly due to it being some kind of intensely benign attack against our corporate overlords who foolishly think they can pull the wool over our eyes and steal our hard earned dollars through means of over-dispensing liquid soap containers. But also, it is something that just does what it does. It is simple. It fits properly, the height is dialed in for the right amount of soap to be dispensed, and it isn’t a permanent modification. I started with much more complex approaches involving custom dispensers with monitoring abilities and feedback loops, then moved on to some adjustable universal clamp designs that could go on any kind of pump, but ultimately, I settled on a dirt simple extruded C clip. And I couldn’t be happier.

So, go look at all the tiny little things in your life that annoy you and solve just one of them. Don’t be crippled by thinking your next design has to solve world hunger and don’t overcomplicate things. Design something simple and bathe in that simplicity. 

Want to print a Softsoap Pump Clip of your own?

Grab the STL over at Thingiverse:  https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2875359

Vacuum forming in the kitchen

Posted by Josef

Warning: Always make sure your work area is properly ventilated and know the materials you are working with.

NOTE: This is post from about 2013 that I am just now getting around to publishing. Please excuse any dated references. 

I wanted to experiment with some vacuum forming at home and found a great Instructable (Here) by drcrash that I used as reference. I won’t replicate those instructions here because once you understand the basic idea, you really can create your vacuum forming rig however you’d like.

In a nutshell, you want a frame that can withstand high temperatures into which you will mount a piece of thermoplastic. For your base, you want an airtight (as much as possible) seal between your frame’s bottom and the orifice connected to your vacuum source. You heat the thermoplastic up until it is soft and pliable, then you pull the plastic over your desired object while the vacuum is running. You push your frame down against your seal and the air is evacuated around your part. The soft plastic is suctioned around your part, it cools, and you are left with a plastic shell of your desired object. That is all there is to it. The rest is just details about material selection, distributed airflow, proper sealing, and master part design considerations.

supplies
Screen frame material, weather stripping, metal binder clips, & metal corners for the frame.

The materials are fairly inexpensive, I found the Instructable linked above to be fairly accurate regarding costs. Honestly though, you could make this rig even cheaper. Again, it is a simple concept that can be elaborated upon as far as your desire/pocketbook allows. Hack-sawing aluminum screen frame material is NOT the most ideal way to miter your corners. Mine came out pretty sloppy and if I were to make more frames, I’d use a band-saw with a jig.

metal frame
Metal frame all ready to go.

Regardless of the pain that was my hack-sawing adventure, the frame still came out fairly good. Not a perfect frame by any means, but it pulls just fine in the final rig.

Full assembly of vacuum forming rig
Vacuum forming base on stands with vacuum hose attached.

This is the entire rig fully assembled in my garage before it made its way into my kitchen for the actual vacuum forming process. I have a sample piece of plastic loaded into the frame ready to go. The hose coming out the bottom leads to my shop vac.

Vacuum forming base
Vacuum forming base with small, 3D printed shape over which the material will be pulled.

The photo above shows the small 3D printed part I prepped to be pulled. I was using this small dome for an LED enclosure of a small lighting project I was working on. The part is stuck to a small platform with some putty and this small platform is then resting on some folded mesh screen material. This allows the air to flow all around the part. The vacuum port is located beneath this mesh.

Thermoplastic in the oven
Thermoplastic in the oven

Ahh, the smell of fresh plastic in the oven. I keep all windows and doors open while I’m doing this to make sure my kitchen is properly ventilated. When the plastic starts sagging uniformly, it’s time to start the pull.

 

Final Verdict

If you don’t mind the smell, or have a spare oven lying around, this method works quite well. I wouldn’t suggest this for any production parts, but for roughing out an early concept or just validating a design before you pay to have someone else pull it for you, this is a very easy to do project at home/in the lab. Everything comes down to how good your seal is and how much vacuum pressure you have. My parts came out decent enough for the molds I was working on, but there was definitely loss of detail in some finer features. I recommend any hobbyist / professional designer have this skill in their tool belt. It doesn’t have to be perfect, sometimes, you just need a vacuum formed part today.

 

Projects on the move!

Posted by Josef

I’m currently in the process of moving all of my projects over to posts in WordPress. Stay tuned for more nerd eye candy.

In the meantime, enjoy this picture of a block of machinable wax I was machining on a Sherline bench top CNC mill. This was the master that I then used to create a silicon mold and cast some clear resin shapes for a project I’ve been working on.

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And here are some of the molds and castings.

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Hand-bent curved acrylic housing for Sherline

Posted by Josef

IMG_0216.JPGI was recently working with our Sherline desktop CNC mill and got fed up with the ancient PC Sherline provided with the unit. I decided to upgrade the rig myself and quickly located a usable and fairly modern PC. Using the linuxCNC live image, I was able to get the system up and running fairly quickly, but now needed to deal with how to drive the mill’s stepper motors. Sherline provides a stepper motor driver assembly that is housed within the decaying PC tower I so desperately wanted to upgrade from, so I gutted the tower and excised the driver board with the 24V power supply they were using to power it. The stepper motor driver uses a parallel port and since those can’t be found on a modern PC, I had to locate a PCI card that would work. Luckily, a local vendor had one in stock. I installed that bad boy and it worked like a charm under Linux. A quick test with the powered driver board showed this was going to work, so I turned my attention to housing the driver assembly in a new case.

I’ve been working with our laser cutter for a while now and felt confident I could design and fabricate a chassis that would bolt together using some kind of joinery technique. I sketched a couple designs on paper, but I wasn’t loving the look. Wanting to make it more of a challenge, I wondered if I could make a curved surface design of some sort. I hadn’t worked with shaping acrylic yet, but knew it was a thermoplastic and figured I should give it a try. I grabbed my trusty heat gun, some scrap metal and a vise or two and gave it a go. After a couple test runs, I was confident it could work. The hardest thing about bending acrylic is controlling exactly where the bend occurs and not stretching the material so much as to throw off your dimensions.

The images below show my final attempt. I was able to house the driver assembly inside a curved acrylic chassis. Though the dimensions aren’t perfect and there are some alignment issues, it is a completely usable housing. What I learned after this project is that bending against a form yields far more accurate results than the rig I was using to get these bends. I look forward to trying this again soon.

 

IMG_0217.JPG

 

Making a custom iPhone stand… WITH LASERS!

Posted by Josef

PRO LF CO2 Laser from Full Spectrum Laser
PRO LF CO2 Laser from Full Spectrum Laser

Recently, my access to a laser cutter has gone from hopeful, to occasional, to every (laser filled) day! We picked up a brand new Pro LF Series 36×24 CO2 Laser from Full Spectrum Laser here in Las Vegas. The build quality is solid and installation and calibration was a breeze.

After some initial requisite etching of Einstein’s face onto acrylic blocks, I decided to turn my attention to something more practical. I fired up Solidworks and used the specs provided by Apple for the iPhone 4S. I wanted to be able to prop up my phone while using Facetime, but not obstruct the screen. Using clear acrylic, I cut out a shape that allowed me to slide my iPhone through a precisely measured slot… Almost.

Laser-cut iPhone stand
iPhone 4S stand made of Acrylic. Designed in Solidworks and laser cut using the Pro LF Series CO2 laser from Full Spectrum Laser.

 

As it turns out, this was my first lesson in the challenges of laser cutting. Namely, the problem of the laser kerf, or the width of the beam as it cuts. This is directly analogous to the kerf width of a saw blade when cutting wood. Basically, you need to determine this width for you laser and the media your cutting, then adjust your vector paths accordingly. For internal, closed paths, you want to reduce (subtracting the kerf from the radius of a circle, for example) and for perimeter paths, you want to expand your design by the kerf width.

After some fairly simple adjustments, I was able to get a perfectly fitting iPhone 4S stand made of clear acrylic that can be adjusted to any position along the iPhone body and stays put using friction alone. Not a bad way to spend 30 mins to create something useful.

Oh, and here’s Einstein!

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Testing out the Makerbot Replicator 2x

Posted by Josef

The Replicator 2X from MakerBot
The Replicator 2X from MakerBot

We recently added a Replicator 2X from MakerBot to our prototyping arsenal. I definitely like the more refined chassis of this 3D printer and the build area increase is fantastic. I selected the 2X because we often like to work in ABS and the Replicator 2 is only capable of printing PLA. To quickly test the printer, I like to use a chair I designed in Solidworks as a quick evaluation of quality. There are some subtle filets, chamfers, and overhangs that are often difficult to print correctly. With the exception of some warping due to a temperature gradient on our print bed, the chair came out great. I’m really looking forward to putting this machine through its paces.

3D Printed Chairs
The blue chair was printed using the Replicator 2X and the orange one was printed using a Thing-o-matic.