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This semester has wrapped up pretty nicely with all but one of my projects coming to completion. My lamp shade had a small issue with the lights that sounds to have more to do with court board flats than maker error but the important part of 3D rotational design was a complete success.

In the end, I made two complete boxes with one of them having a nice variation on the finger locked design. I incorporated my 3D design skills in Fusion360 to add in fabricated corner joints and a thicker wood material. I had some trouble working through the Trotec machine software for my much more detailed etchings but with a little patience I was able to get it cut deep enough and burn in enough to show clearly when I stained the wood. The end result was two boxes that I really enjoy and feel will last.

My copter project was a pretty big success and I’m super proud of how it tuned out. Because I was able to get it done early I had the opportunity to try different air frames for stability. I cut one from lightweight birch wood but that one broke after just a few flights (and small crashes), a 3D printed one which was a bit better but also was flimsy, and finally a milled one that held up the best. I went through a few hiccups with soldering (mistaking the LED spots for motor leads).

Conclusion: what did I learn? Well a hell of a lot. I think the biggest gem of my education here was with the Fusion 360 software. Being able to prototype and create a complex object in 3d space first, with several different components with their own individual designs, was very rewarding. Being able to take those designs and create them out of a place of theory and bring them into reality was another very rewarding experience. It allowed me to see how the natural world is very different than just what’s on a computer screen. Little offsets make a huge difference, material composition changes the end product in great ways, subtraction vs additive creation makes a big deal not only to the time it takes to create something but also in figuring out if a project is actually viable in the end or not quickly. Picking the right way to bring a design into the real world makes a very big difference.

Michael

I built the motors,

the mounts

and the copter itself Finally got an extrude.

I’ve decided to try and make my box unique. I’ve bought 1/4 inch oak which changes things from the 3/8 inch balsa wood that’s used in class. I’m still going to create the class box but this, alternate box, I want to not only change the wood, but also put etchings on it as well as a radical design change… create 3D printer corner locking pieces. I had to rearrange a lot here. Namely I had to take out the thickness and center the sides. Then rebuild the extrude for the sides and the top sketches. Once I had that I put squares in the corners, filleted them out and used a conical curve with the trim tool to get the shape I wanted. Then it was just a matter of applying the cut extrude to the corner pieces  that I used for the sides. This worked out pretty nicely with, what is hopefully a strong center column and joints to glue the wood too.

For this project we’re going to be creating a small drone copter. It’s about 6ish inches wide and we were given the dimensions in the picture above and then left to our own devices as to how to recreate this in Fusion 360. When I looked at the design I decided that I looked for repetition that I could duplicate; patterns. This way I could utilize the mirror or rotate tool to simply my work. As you can see the four “legs” of the copter are the same and the central section has several places it can be mirrored.

A few new tools that I discovered in this project were the fillet tool and the trim tool. These became invaluable to make curves and  to turn things like boxes and circles into half circles and divots. The first outer leg wasn’t terribly difficult. Create a few construction lines off of the central axis to get my guiding lines and then all I had to do was properly dimension out rectangles and circles. Below is what my finished leg looked like.

Once that was done it was just a matter of selecting the leg components, the central origin point, and then using the circular pattern tool to loop it around the core. The center section took a lot more thought and consideration. Here’s where I used the trim too and a few dimensioned out rectangles. My first thought was to simply mirror it across to the top half until I realized I couldn’t because it wasn’t just mirrored, it was flipped. In the end I figured it was just easiest to rebuild it by hand.

The final bit was the notched section at the top. This wasn’t terribly hard once I figured that the assigned dimensions didn’t include radius’. This meant I could just create a C shaped rectangle and then fillet it all out to make it rounded.

Since this was just the initial sketch I felt pretty happy with the outcome. i was also able to learn a few new tricks and this project also let me take my lessons and turn them into practical application. I’m planning on creating my own project soon so having the initial dimensions in a sketch helped a lot. I think when I do my own I’ll start with some predetermined and set dimensions to start off with like I did here. New up is to create the box that this thing will be stored in.

So this week we’re moving from making an item my subtraction on the laser printer and moving to additive creation with the 3D printer. I’ll also be starting off with a simple design process of making a flat object and then using the revolve tool to make it a fully 3D object in one swoop. My first step is to make a sketch on the vertical plane and giving the item a two line, 90 degree vertical height of 100 mm and a 50 mm width base. Easy enough.

Then I used a new tool called a “spline” which is similar to the pen tool in Photoshop. It lets me make curved lines with modification points along the way. I though my lamp would have the design of a classic board game piece like in the game Sorry by Mattel. As you can see, my initial drawing wasn’t that close.

But since I can tweak the points and curves after the fact I was able to get something a little bit closer.

Now to make the whole thing filled in with a 360 degree swoop we use the really nice Revolve tool. It makes this flat shape fully 3D like this.

Nice. Now we have to hallow the thing out. This is usually done by simply selecting the bottom plane and then using the Shell tool. Unfortunately my game piece lamp has a small base and wouldn’t select just a flat surface.

So i decided to select it manually and then extrude up the thickness of the shell (1.6 mm). Then I could select the indented plane and cut the shell.

Now we have a hallow lamp ready to print!

Thankfully professor McKay spent some extra time in class going over this project and I decided to start the design over from scratch. Since I was able to follow along and take some good notes hopefully you’ll notice that everything worked out much better this go around. I still have some questions about projections (and I struggle in the design as you’ll see coming up) but I feel pretty good about this one.

The primarily issue i was able to fix was understanding not to finish a sketch until I’m done AND in order to modify it I have to go back into the edit mode. This little thing really changed design life here. Also it let me discover the dimensions tool that let me set all my sizes properly as well as set up the important constraints I needed. The pictures below will look like the ones in the last post but this time it was all actually the correct measurements.

Now I was able to work on the top now that I extruded my legs. A key point here that really flowed throughout the design was making sure these two legs were linked together. (Copied and not “added as new”). This way I was able to just worry about one leg and it was exactly replicated on the other side symmetrically. For the top, creating a new plane to work on was incredibly helpful and something I think I’m likely to utilize a lot in future designs. Again the dimension tool made me very happy. 😀

Making the holes turned out to be a bit of a challenge. The reason being is that I hadn’t properly extruded the legs and had somehow made them twice as thick as they should have been. I think when I extruded it I set each side of the leg sketch to be the Thickness parameter instead of just one. This was apparent when setting the dimensions for my holes sketch and utilizing the mirror function (with my newfound friend the construction lines) and the holes being set to the same thickness parameter were half the size of the leg thickness. I had to step back several times to fix this one. In the end the following picture made me feel good as all the dimensions fit properly. Extruding downward to carve out the joints in the left and holes for the top was tricky but good note taking helped.

With the top completed I was time to move onto supports. Since I learned a TON from the top board, this was pretty simple and let me use the lessons I learned from that part into this one. I used a new plane and had it offset from the back of a leg, set the dimensions of the support component, mirrored them with the plane, and then cut out the joints in the legs. I got through this part fairly easily and was happy with the result.

So I finally finished this one out. I beveled the edges and it looks really nice. I’m not sure how it’s going to export with those bevels but we’ll hope for the best and maybe modify to a more squared design if the laser cutter doesn’t play nicely. Overall I was pretty happy with this design. There was a LOT of not-so-user-friendly things still with Fusion 360 but hopefully those things will just become second nature as we move forward and get experience with the tool set.

The interface to Fusion 360, at first seemed bpretty intuitive. I was able to sketch the shape of my leg out according to the dimensions set out but modifying it wasn’t very intuitive. Just making changes were pretty difficult and I spent about 30 minutes just trying to modify angles. The oddest thing was realizing that to resize a line I had to first pull it down (shorten it) before I could push it up (increase height).

Once I finally was able to figure things out a bit (I’ll need to clarify some of this interface with my professor) I was able to get the angle I needed.

The next steps weren’t too bad and setting up parameters was pretty easy. I think this is one feature that will end up being very powerful. Having experience with program development I know how having the capability to add reference variables can be a game changer. Getting those parameters set up in the design phase is going to make a lot of the CAD work much easier. I utilized this first when I extruded the piece and was able to just punch in the preset thickness I had previously made.

Finally this one was a step backwards in understanding. Creating multiple objects in groups at the higher level and assembling items on joints was not intuitive at all. This is another step that I’m going to need clarification on. it worked correctly but the joint didn’t seem intuitive. Ultimately I was able to get the two lets set up but it wasn’t as clear who I would naturally get from the design to the actual product without the guide.