Join us on Wednesday 12 June 2019 at noon Pacific for the Fusion 360 for 3D-Printing Hack Chat with Vladimir Mariano!
There’s no way to overstate the importance of the design and manufacturing tools we now all use on a daily basis. What once took a well-equipped machine shop and years of experience to accomplish can now be designed using free software and built using 3D-printers and a host of other CNC tools, all right on the desktop.
The number of doors this manufacturing revolution has opened are uncountable, and through his popular Desktop Makes YouTube channel and other outlets, Vladimir’s mission is to help people navigate through this world and discover their inner maker. He co-founded the Fairfield County Maker’s Guild in Connecticut and founded the CT Robotics Academy. From 3D-printing and design to electronics and programming, Vladimir teaches it all. He’ll join us for the Hack Chat to discuss the desktop manufacturing revolution in general, plus answer your questions on his main tools, Fusion 360 and 3D-printing.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday June 12 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.
You can save locally (at least now)… Finding another program that may be able to open you fusion360 files is another issue… (i export to step and open with inventor, it would be great if there were some ability to adjust any design and features created from one program to another)
I don’t like the cloud, and being tied directly to autodesk servers/required internet
Except you can save locally. It defaults to the cloud but you can easily save to your computer.
I don’t use it for anything but CAM for our lathe. I use Inventor for modeling. Trying to switch to Fusion was an exercise in frustration as the way Fusion goes about assemblies is way different from Inventor.
https://www.google.com/search?q=use+fusion+360+without+cloud&rlz=1C1GCEU_enUS822US822&oq=use+fusion+360+without+cloud&aqs=chrome..69i57j33.2863j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#kpvalbx=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=172&v=EdwK-1bhgvc
It is really hard not to understate how overused this cliche is in recent HaD articles.
You are wrong. F360 does allow local file saving.
Which is not going to help much if the only thing that reads those files is a cloud-based app you have zero control over.
If that disappears you may be waiting a while for some other entity to come up with an import mode for another CAD program. And that would assume your local saved model file is not encypted or locked, in which case it could be longer.
Fusion is great in some areas, and a horrific unfinished mess in others. It’s super easy to 3d print – but a pain in the ass to produce a decent mechanical drawing. You can run a vibrational mode analysis with a few button presses, but the program still freaks out about redefining sketch planes.
I still miss the mechanical drawing functionality in Inventor… So much nicer! It’s really the only thing I still miss. Fusion 360 has caught up to it in a lot of ways, and even surpassed it in some.
I learned how to use Fusion from Vladimir’s Udemy course. Really the best course for someone who is an absolute beginner to CAD. All of the other videos I found on Youtube would say “absolute beginner”, but assume that you have a decade of experience with SolidWorks or something.
Add linux support and i’ll try it. It’s strange to make a tool that hobbyist use and not supporting linux.
I paid to learn inventor in 2010, and have current training in 2017 and 2018 inventor, as well as Solidworks 2018. Ive used Fusion 360 briefly, and it was easy to make a gear, something occasionally a pita.
Heres the thing- I’m not only a “maker”, I’m a tool and die machinist for a living. I make stuff with serious CNC, and we use 3d printers as well at work to create setup parts.
I wanted so bad to just buy a damn copy of inventor, but since Autodesk got rid of even the option to buy a perpetual licence, if you have the $ (outside of 2nd hand european market), I refuse to even entertain the idea of even working with Inventor anymore. To hell with all the training I’ve built up, I’d rather support FreeCAD and others, even if they are subpar in aspects, because at least there will be a real community of people who care about keeping the code localized and not locked into some proprietary model that forces me to save everything to some other companies’ cloud, totally at their whim, unless I keep paying them every year.
Current software is all rented? To hell with that model. Id rather have less functional control over something than full control over something that can take years to learn, and be held hostage forever by some schmuk’s business model.
This pretty much says it all. Because they can.
https://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArticles/ArticleID/16583/Autodesks-Licensing-Transition-Who-Knew-It-Would-Be-So-Hard.aspx
Autodesk will have no part of my actual machining business workflow anymore.
And please, enough with the damn hyperbole. A program that posts basic gcode and lets you print in plastic is not even close to replacing any real part made of metal except in simple circumstances, exotic filiments included. You are grossly oversimplifying actual mechanics of usable accurate part creation. I expect more from this place.
Autodesk is releasing good CAD tools, but after experience with they filosophy release good free cloud based SW and turn the cloud off later!
I strongly recommend ignore it! Did you remember on Catch123D, ReMake or Meshmixer.
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/remake-forum/unhappy-with-discontinuation-of-autodesk-catch-123d-and-remake/td-p/7019420
Autodesk import/export for their DWG/DXF formats is well know hell.
If i will have many 3d models designed in F360 and will be discontinued in 10y or soon.
i may design my models again … f… it …again fu.. the online based SW! Another story is SW must connect to licence server in defined
period and what happend with SW when they decide turn off licence servers and reactivation will be not possible – patch/crack?
3D community should start working on fully opensource and offline 3d modelling SW – clone Invertor or SolidWorks.
“3D community should start working on fully opensource and offline 3d modelling SW – clone Invertor or SolidWorks.”
Check out FreeCad.
Other than that i use the purchased but completely neutered version of Solidworks and HSMworks I have from 2016. I say neutered because it lives on an image as the only installed program in windows 7 with no networking or communication drivers (i went through the windows system files to delete the drivers and then used the hosts file to black hole everything just as a backup).
Hi Mike,
I think LibreCAD, FreeCAD or others are not alternative to NURBS based modelikng SW SolidWorks/Rhino .
I am testing BricSys Shape free version now. I think DesignSparkMechanical is quite good free and offline modelling 3d sw. For 2D exist also SolidEdge but there is also required refreshing licence after 1y.
FreeCad is like KiCad drawing filosophy is different than SW(Nurbs) or Sketchup (polygon only)
FreeCAD is powerfull but drawing is pain like in Blender :P compared with commercial SW.
FDM is not capable print nice curves but DLP is capable from this reason I am looking for nice curves (organic shapes) in modelling SW. For “makers” who need only draw box
or small case for Arduino is Sketchup enought. but try design any part for car or human body
polygons are limiting factor. or for example molding and casting form.
That’s my experience ;)
Its all good, i use freecad when i need to do something really quick and cant be bothered to spin up my vm or reboot to the other partition (with windows and solidworks on it)
ive been using freecad 0.18 and while the drawing is rather cumbersome, it is workable, i find the real limitation comes in working with assemblies but ive read that is supposed to improve with version 0.19
That being said, i have no need for splines at the moment so NURBS spline generation is a non issue for me. The reason i will keep trying to use freecad is that I think that it is the best open source option out there and while i dont have the resources to add code to the project i do have the ability to write bug reports and help the project through educated feedback. You can get to the end of the journey without starting somewhere and there really is no point in starting a new open source cad program when you have a mostly working one to build off of.
If Solidworks had a maker/Inventer version (couple hundred bucks) capable of parts, assemblies and drawings, that would sell like hotcakes. Leave the toolbox, rendering, simulation, group server (PDM) and integrated PCB design as optional add-ons. I’ve been using Solidworks for over a decade, and gave up upgrading in 2014 because it does exactly what I need for prototyping. Most productive CAD/CAM (HSMWorks add-in) software I’ve ever used, and I’ve evaluated quite a few for their trial periods.