Exploring 3D CAD Programs

For this week's assignment, I designed and modeled the frame for the box in my final project. I used 3 different CAD softwares to get a feel for each of them and decide which one I liked best. For each of the CAD programs that I explored, I modeled the same part as to highlight the key differences between them.

Autodesk Fusion

Fusion360 has recently been renamed to Autodesk Fusion. No features are affected.

I decided to first model my design in Fusion360, as I had prior experience working with Fusion and was pretty comfortable using it. When I started out with Autodesk Fusion, Kevin Kennedy's Fusion tutorials were a massive help.

I first started off with a rectangular prism to act as the main body of the design.

Next, I filleted the box to round out the edges.

I then created a sketch on the top of the box, where I created six circles. These 6 circles represent the holes where I will put metal pins into that can pop up and down depending on what needs to be represented.

I extruded the circles downward as holes. This creates the actual space where the pins will be placed.

Finally, I used the pattern feature to repeat the sketch and extrusion across the top of the box. This created a total of 5 evenly spaced sets of 6 pins. With each set of 6 pins representing a single braille character, one iteration of pin setups can represent five letters.

FreeCAD

The steps that I used to design my box in FreeCAD were essentially the same as the process used in Fusion. With the exception that a few tools were renamed and slightly modified in FreeCAD, it serves a similar purpose to Fusion360. However, FreeCAD's GUI is not very user friendly and overall is difficult to use. To start designing in the first place, I had to navigate through a series of hoops before I could start my modeling. Additionally, FreeCAD's tools are not very organized and are just thrown together in a toolbar at the top. FreeCAD's view cube also does not allow for free rotation and only supports preset viewing angles. During the design process, FreeCAD continuously generated error messages, ranging from being unable to load a previous save of my file to telling me that my wires were unconnected, in a design that didn't have any wires or circuitry. To me, FreeCAD overall gave off the appearance of being an outdated software that while being functional, was far more difficult to use. Although I was able to design my part in FreeCAD, I do not think that I will continue using FreeCAD.

OnShape

The process for designing my box in OnShape was also similar to that of designing in Fusion. Overall, OnShape is a very well made program that has lots of functionalities. The main qualm I had with OnShape was its web-based nature, which made it somewhat difficult to create and export files. OnShape also places a heavy emphasis on organizing designs in Parts, something which I initially found confusing since this was my first time working with OnShape. Much like FreeCAD, OnShape's view cube also only has preset view angles, albeit with a much greater range of positions. Aside from those minor details, there really aren't any major critiques I have about OnShape. In my opinion, OnShape's UI was easy to navigate and the designing tools were placed in an intuitive location and organization. I really liked working with OnShape, but I will not be using OnShape extensively due to already having experience working in Fusion.

Conclusion

Out of the three modeling softwares I chose to experiment with, I would only really choose to work with Fusion or OnShape. FreeCAD's convoluted UI and litany of errors made it near unusable for me. As much as Fusion and OnShape have operate similarly, my previous experience working with Fusion as opposed to being brand new to OnShape made the choice obvious. Additionally, the web-based nature of OnShape made it difficult to modify and save files on a local directory, something I believe will be important in later weeks.