Computer Aided Design

I was most hopeful to try out OnShape, as it's something I've had a bit of experience using, and I like the fact that it is browser-based and free-to-use, both excellent things for an educator with limited resources. It was not my first time using OnShape, but it was the first time fully jumped aboard parametric modelling. It took some getting used to, but I eventually found a rhythm of drawing and dimensioning.

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Rough out the general shape before adding dimensions.

I noticed very quickly that dimensions would quickly get pushed around if I didn't add constraints and fix coordinates.

The concept of aligning things was very frustrating.

Sometimes I would get a magic guideline to link parallel measurements while drawing - other times it would not appear at all.

I had so many issues with radius measurements getting messed up because one part of the drawing was constrained. I wish the software would visually communicate a bit more.

But I persevered!

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I reflexively hit Ctrl+Z a lot while working and because there was no feedback - I had to redo the bottom port so many times.

OnShape does not make it clear to you what exactly you are undoing when you tap Ctrl+Z.

In other software - maybe your viewport would move - or the active selection would change - or you'd get some visual cue. In OnShape - nope - nothing.

Fully dimensioned - easy to edit

Except it was overconstrained haha

One thing I will say is that I do think the Dimensioning tool in OnShape is super intuitive. I like how quickly you can develop your sketch using it. However, again - there isn't a lot of information visually conveyed in this software. Whenever you've overconstrained a sketch and it cannot resolve, you get these red error squares. Wish I knew what they meant because when you mouse over them, it tells you nothing! A little tooltip would go a long way.

➔ OnShape

Overall Verdict: B-

Pros: Browser-based, accessible, free, clean UI
Cons: Very little visual communication to the user.

Next up is FreeCAD. This one made me feel like I was back in high school learning AutoCAD using only the command line again. I know this is one of Neil's favourites due to it's community support and open source license, but this one certainly feels a little more rough around the edges. To me, good UX does not need to be restricted to closed source companies. I share this gripe with GIMP as well. Powerful software, very poor user onboarding experience. Software with a low floor to entry can still have a high ceiling for its power users. They are not mutually exclusive.

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Rough out the general dimensions again

Trim edge tool came in clutch for getting the notch on the top right edge.

Overall, this felt similar enough to OnShape to get the hang of. I still had trouble over constraining my sketch. I liked the trim edge tool, that was helpful for getting the cartridge bump. Though, similar to my excessive use of Ctrl+Z, I also like to tap Esc a lot to reset my current tool and ensure my selection is null. In FreeCAD, overtapping the Esc key kept brining me out of the sketch, and a simple double click on the sketch did not get me back in. No, I had to go into a little menu every time.

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Using the extrude tool to extrude the sketch to the thickness of the cartridge

Had to click this button maybe 100 times

Getting the radius applied to each corner very easy with a click of a button

I'm sure there's a setting in here to hide dimensioning lines, but this was the only software that quickly got far too visually noisy, there was no way to manually set the dimensioning lines (or at least I wasn't able to do it on the first use of the tool), so my sketch became pretty difficult to read very quickly.

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There's gotta be a better way...

My completed monstrosity.

Also I understand that in parametric design, copy and paste isn't really a thing you want to rely on, since the coordinates of your sketch need reference points to be properly resolved, but there should at least be some kind of support for patterning using your clipboard. I had to manually remake the notches on both sides because I couldn't quite figure out how to mirror the sketch without including too many other features.

Tada!

➔ FreeCAD

Overall Verdict: C+

Pros: Open source and free, Neil recommends it, lightweight-ish, feature rich, good support and addons
Cons: Not a lot of attention to UX

I had never used SolidWorks before but heard a lot about it. My FRC robotics team back in Canada gets a license for it every year for free from FIRST, and it seems to have a strong following amongst my students in design.

Soooo..... if you're reading this, Runnymede. My apologies up front. I don't have many good things to say about SolidWorks.

First off. The registration and installation process is so antiquated and annoyingly proprietary. For software this expensive (insane that it costs thousands of dollars per year), could they have not brought forward their platform to the 21st century? I'm guessing it has to do with the fact I'm using the "3DEXPERIENCE" version of the software, but even then, why do they even bother having two seperate names for the same software? Just get with the times, Dassault! Anyways enough about my complaining. Here's some more complaining:

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Already frustrated not being able to properly get the sketch facing perpendicular to the camera - how is this not a simple click of the gimble?

Dimensioning tool allows you to constrain the lengths

Needing to type "mm" every single time is very annoying

The 3D navigation in SolidWorks has to be the least intuitive out of all of the platforms I tried this week. The gimbal in the bottom left corner was absolutely tiny, and did not respond well to clicks or drags. I found myself constantly trying to battle the viewport to show the view I actually wanted. Also, I found it SUPER annoying that I had to enter the units on every dimension. I'm working in mm, just remember my choice!

Again, I know that you eventually become comfortable and there are ways to do the things I'm asking, but I'm reviewing each software as a beginner, and as an educator. Your first impressions of a piece of software are very important, no matter the expectations of the end user or power user.

I did get frustrated enough with this software that it took me two sessions to complete the cartridge model. Needless to say, this is a very quick uninstall for me. My students will have a lot of convincing to do if they want me to reconsider haha.

➔ SolidWorks

Overall Verdict: F

Pros: ...
Cons: Frustrating and outdated UI/UX, awful 3D interface, antiquated installation, insanely expensive (???)

Now on to the playful, heavily Y2K inspired, browser-based, bubbly joyful Womp. I've been following Womp since it was released a few years ago, and have tried it out a few times. I understand why they lock the freefrom drawing tool behind a subscription (developers gotta eat) but I still got to play around with the "goop" slider a bit!

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Being able to work with primitive polyhedra right away - that's my kind of CAD

Use another polyhedra to make composite polyhedra

Same thing for the cartridge bump - super simple!

This was the first CAD that utilized the familiar boolean tools I've known to love in TinkerCAD, but the implementation of it here felt a lot more like Blender's modifiers than making easy groups. I'll admit I struggled here and there with layers, groups and "areas" in the object panel. It wasn't clear at first where things were being placed and what interactions were possible between primitives.

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Each divet or notch is just another shape that is "eating" a chunk out of the main rectangular prism

Womp's notorious "goop" effect applied with some more primitives

You can tell this software is not designed for precision CAD, as it lacks constraining tools (to my knowledge) and there wasn't an easy way to "lock" primitives in place when using the alignment tools. Nevertheless, I modelled the cartridge as closely to spec as I could, and even added a few blobs of goop for fun.

➔ Womp

Overall Verdict: B

Pros: Browser-based, free, easy to learn click-and-drag UI, fun
Cons: Free plan doesn't let you really use what this software was meant for: creating blobby cuniform plastic-like objects. Much more difficult when you only have primitives to work with.

It always amazes me what people can make in Blender. I've seen incredible 3D (and faux-2D) animations, feature length, created by a single dedicated person. But what they say about Blender is true. It's also got a steep learning curve. I've done the donut tutorial in years past and have got some of my Grade 12 students to try it out in my media production class. I even tried it out when I got my first 3D printer, before I even picked up TinkerCAD as my primary workhorse. It's neat, but again, I don't think it's intended use case is for precision manufacturing.

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Ye olde faithful in Blender

Use the keyboard shortcuts to quickly resize and scale

In object edit mode - use the numbers "1 2 3" to change between "Face Edge Vertex"

Weirdly, a lot of features I was expecting to be in the software out of the box (alignment tools, water tight checks) needed to be installed as first-party extensions.

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How is this not preinstalled? or even better yet - why is it not a feature?

Forgot to bring my dimensions with me while working on this one which is why it looks a little off - I was just eyeballing the numbers

Again, I understand why Blender is so complex - it enables it's users to produce very incredible (and highly editable) works, but having to go through the ropes of setting up boolean modifiers just to make simple changes to a model is very tedious. Especially given how strong the software's edit mode is, allowing users to select faces, edges and vertices. I think the keyboard shortcuts in Blender are also quite useful. I found myself using S (scale), G (grab), R (rotate), coupled with the axis I wanted to constrain each movement to (XYZ) quite often.

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Like in Womp - all of the divets and cuts are actually just other primitive shapes that have been boolean'd out of the main polyhedra

Shown here - all of the "cutter" shapes applied to the main cartridge shape

Part of what Blender is known for is it's complex rendering system. So I thought I'd try my hand at a professional render of the cartridge. You'll have to excuse the lopsided dimensions on this one, I was trying Blender away from my calipers and had forgotten to take a photo of my measurements - so I was just making up numbers for this one.

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Applying rendering techniques used nodes

Honestly felt a little over my head here - felt like I was using TouchDesigner

Voila!

➔ Blender

Overall Verdict: B

Pros: Free, open source, very high skill ceiling, lots of toys and tools, sleek UI, intuitive keyboard shortcuts
Cons: Very steep learning curve to do basic things

I thought, just for the heck of it, I would return to good 'ol faithful to give 'er a proper review. If you didn't read the preamble above, I am probably the world's biggest TinkerCAD fan, an absolute power user. So much so, that it's really infected the way I think spatially when it comes to CAD. For context, it took me about 1-3 hours for me to CAD the cartridge in all the other pieces of software. In TinkerCAD, it took me about 15 minutes.

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Love that right away you can define dimensions

The "hole" function of TinkerCAD is super easy to understand and visually helps the user get what they are doing

I'll admit right away. TinkerCAD has a low ceiling in terms of what you can create without some clever tricks. Autodesk has been slowly adding new features over the years, but it's still missing some very simple tools that separate it from a tool you could use for complex parts. Namely, there are no easy ways to chamfer/fillet, you can't easily distribute or pattern objects, and the primitives they provide you with often are missing parameters to modify, which leads me to doing some silly things to get the shape I want.

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This is the annoying thing you need to do if you want a rounded rectangle only on one edge - it's really not pretty - I know

Frankenstein each of the corners on there. Super ungraceful.

Shown above. This is how I create rounded corners. You can add a radius to a cube, but it does so in all axes, so to get a nice rounded corner extruded, you need to cut it up into chunks, which do NOT scale well if you need to make edits.

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All of the little details boolean'd on

Voila again! Simple but it works!

Of course, the major downside of TinkerCAD is that it's not parametric. If I needed to make changes to this design, I would need to ungroup each part, remember the order that I unioned each feature, and make the changes to the base primitives - likely introducing new issues when the shape is re-unioned.

➔ TinkerCAD

Overall Verdict: A-

Pros: Super user friendly, browser-based, free, snappy, great for creating 90% of things
Cons: Not parametric, missing some important dimensioning tools (honestly, they could add it - and if they did... I might never stop using TinkerCAD)

On to the last piece of software for my journey this week. I was saving this one for last for two reasons. My mentor at ESAN, Jorge, said that it is his software of choice for CAD; and the makers of Fusion are also the makers of TinkerCAD, Autodesk.

Sketching in Fusion was already a superior experience. I really liked the fact that, maybe 90% of the time, the software understood what it was I was trying to do, providing me with a dashed guideline when trying to align a particular line to another feature. Right away: you see a familiar face in Fusion. The same gimbal as in TinkerCAD!

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Hello old friend

Dimensioning out the basic form

Trying out chamfers and splitting the object

I also really liked the fact that you could just keep adding sketches to surfaces, rather than having to work exclusively within one or two. Being able to extrude a feature in 3D and then go back to working in 2D was a serious upgrade. Whenever I tried to do this in other software, it would always fight me, or make the option unavailable.

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I actually really loved how quickly you were able to just create a new sketch on top of existing geometry - all of the other constraint based software I tried would totally freak out if I tried to do something like this

Super satisfying but I really do need to change the way I think about modelling and dimensioning in terms of spatial alignment

I'm doing all of the little details for this one - pulling out all the stops

You can apply textures or canvasses directly to faces in Fusion as you'll see below

Getting the inside hollowed out

Spoiler alert: I decided pretty quickly that Fusion would be my software of choice, so I opted to get every single little detail of the cartridge modelled so I could practice as many features as possible. I even tried splitting the part into the two halves that would be part of the actual real world part, connected by a screw. I didn't get a chance to develop the snap fit though. That is still something on my to-do list.

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and even the little screwhole on the reverse side!

and since I do not own the special screwdriver used to keep the carts closed - I just had to guess what was inside

Voila!

and a bonus render! Hey this software can do a lot!

It was super simple to bring in a decal and apply it to the model, so I could get a render looking nice right away!

➔ Fusion 360

Overall Verdict: A

Pros: Very intuitive (at least for me), didn't try to fight me on dimensioning, very forgiving when it comes to sketches - easy to flip back and forth between 2D and 3D, high level of functionality (rendering, assembly, etc.)
Cons: Nobody is perfect! When I got errors (often shown in the bottom right as a popup), it does not really help you get to a resolution.

After modelling the cartridge with great success, I decided I would try my hand at creating the first CAD model of my final project, which you can read about on my final project page at this link here.

Again, I would call myself an expert in Illustrator already. I use Illustrator geek out and make fantasy transit maps (here's one of Toronto's subway system in the style of the Tokyo Metro) and custom graphics for work and my personal life.

For this week I did try my hand at creating some graphics for my final project and to prepare for the computer-controlled cutting unit next week.

IMAGE CAPTION ⇲

Some visual motifs to play with for my final project

IMG_FILE: stickers-100.jpg

TYPE: JPG

XYZ: 123

and creating some "swatches" with colour pallettes I could explore more. I use a site called coolors.co to generate colour pallettes.

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Which colour palette do you like the most?

Which colour palette do you like the most?

Which colour palette do you like the most?

The beauty of Illustrator is it's simplicity (once you get in the vector mindset). Yes, Adobe continues to flood the program with so much unnecessary bloat, like the incredibly annoying AI tools and floating bars that I need to disable every time I boot up Illustrator on a new machine, but it's still my preference when it comes to vector graphics.

➔ Illustrator

Overall Verdict: A-

Pros: For the most part, simple to understand. Lots of familiar features found in raster graphics programs, such as layers and alignment.
Cons: Adobe. You have to deal with Adobe if you want to use Illustrator, unfortunately.

I purchased a used iPad Air almost exclusively for Fab Academy. Because I'm on the move for this course, I wanted something slim, lightweight and adaptable not just for jotting down notes, but for creation as well. I got my hands on the iPad several months before the course began, so I've had some time to play with my new toy and try out some of the amazing applications that use the Apple Pencil. Prior to the iPad, I owned a few different Microsoft Surface models with Microsoft's own stylus. This was many years ago but I remember the stylus experience in Windows being really sub-optimal. The pens themselves kept dying on me, always needed a battery change, kept getting disconnected and ultimately didn't feel great in the hand to use. The Apple Pencil is a complete upgrade.

Procreate is one of the killer apps for the Apple Pencil. It's a one-time purchase of $12.99 CAD and unlocks a whole suite of features that are not found in any of the stock Apple notetaking apps. I particularly love the brush framework in this app, you can adjust the pressure of your pencil and it will react accordingly on the screen, giving you soft sketching and sharp line work when you need it.

I use Procreate for a lot of the preliminary design work for this course. I used it to sketch out the original design for my final project, I think the best feature for this particular use case (technical drawings) is the snapping shape modes. Simply draw (make an attempt, really) a straight line, circle, polygon, etc. and hold your pencil in place for ~1 second and the app automatically cleans up the shape and gives you parameters to quickly edit.

I'm incorporating Procreate into my documentation workflow a bit more with a little cartoon version of myself that you may see more of around the site. If you don't see him around much after this, it's probably because there's just too much documentation haha.

The last thing for me to sort out while using Procreate is a quick pipeline for getting images both on to and off of the iPad and into my workspace on my laptop. Right now, I'm just saving procreate files (or even taking screenshots of them) and they automatically sync to my Google Photos account where I can copy them from the web. Ideally, I'd like to make an Apple Shortcut to automate this process, get it directly into my repo and give it a proper filename.

➔ Procreate

Overall Verdict: A-

Pros: Incredibly user friendly: just start drawing. Familiar raster features like layers and blending modes.
Cons: Requires the use of Apple's ecosystem. Can be a little slow on older iPads like mine.

Alright these ones are a bit of a stretch to refer to as 2D CAD software, but since image and video compression are grouped into this week's assessment criteria, I'm rolling with it.

My static site generator handles (maybe not perfectly) all of the image compression that I include in my repo's images directory. I spoke on this a bit in (week 01's entry)[../assignments/week01.html] but in essence my python script does 3 things, prioritizing the quality of the image, but with the goal of getting the image size under 1MB:

1. Convert .PNGs to .JPGs first (this honestly just keeps things consistent, even if it doesn't change the filesize outright)
2. Shrink the width of the image to 960px (maintain aspect ratio)
3. Apply JPEG compression

from PIL import Image 
import os

#
# STEP 1: CONVERT .PNG to .JPG
#

if filename.lower().endswith('.png'):
    with Image.open(filepath) as img:
        rgb_img = Image.new("RGB", img.size, (255, 255, 255))
        if img.mode == 'RGBA':
            rgb_img.paste(img, mask=img.split()[3]) 
        else:
            rgb_img.paste(img)
        new_filename = os.path.splitext(filename)[0] + '.jpg'
        new_filepath = os.path.join(IMAGES_DIR, new_filename)
        rgb_img.save(new_filepath, "JPEG", quality=QUALITY_HIGH)
        filepath = new_filepath 
        os.remove(os.path.join(IMAGES_DIR, filename))
        modified = True

#
# STEP 2: RESIZE WIDTH IF STILL TOO BIG
#

file_size = os.path.getsize(filepath)
if file_size > TARGET_MAX_SIZE:
    with Image.open(filepath) as img:
        if img.width > TARGET_WIDTH:
            ratio = TARGET_WIDTH / float(img.width)
            new_height = int(float(img.height) * float(ratio))
            img = img.resize((TARGET_WIDTH, new_height), Image.Resampling.LANCZOS)
            img.save(filepath, "JPEG", quality=QUALITY_HIGH)
            modified = True

#
# STEP 3: APPLY MORE JPEG IF IT'S STILL TOO BIG (LAST RESORT)
#

file_size = os.path.getsize(filepath)
if file_size > TARGET_MAX_SIZE:
    print(f"    [Step 3] {filename} is still {(file_size/1024):.1f}kB. Compressing to Q{QUALITY_LOW}...")
    with Image.open(filepath) as img:
        img.save(filepath, "JPEG", quality=QUALITY_LOW)
        modified = True

This is all well and dandy for the static images in my repo. But does not help me much with the video. This is where ffmpeg comes in. Right now, I have a terminal command that I run manually on a case by case basis, since video is not something that will appear as often as images.

ffmpeg -i assembly_render.avi -vf "fps=15,scale=800:-1:flags=lanczos,split[s0][s1];[s0]palettegen=stats_mode=diff[p];[s1][p]paletteuse=dither=bayer:bayer_scale=5" assembly_render.gif

I'm using .GIFs at the moment for simplicity (it plays nice with my css), but I really would like to be able to include .webm playback on the site in future. Here's how the rest of the script works.

fps=15: The frames per second. The original files are generally 30 or 60, but 15 works fine for what I'm doing here.

scale=960:-1: Sets the width to 960px (which is what I'm using for images) and maintains the aspect ratio.

flags=lanczos: Uses a high-quality scaling algorithm to keep edges sharp, important for the style I'm trying to replicate.

palettegen=stats_mode=diff: This is using another compression algorithm to more effectively move the difference in pixels each frame to optimize filesize

dither=bayer: Provides a clean, structured grain that looks better on technical models than random noise.

I run the script for each video, there are 3 this week, and then link each reference in my markdown files!

➔ FFMPEG and Pillow

Overall Verdict: NULL

What can I say? It's a command line function. It works well provided you read the manual!