We reached out to a Creator and Expert on the HWTrek platform to learn more about how they are using or creating for Autodesk Fusion 360. Autodesk Fusion 360 is a cloud-based CAD/CAM tool for collaborative product development. Fusion 360 combines very fast and easy organic modeling with precise solid modeling, allowing you to make your designs manufacturable. Late last year HWTrek teamed with Autodesk to collaborate on transforming the making of smart things.
More on the collaboration from last year:
“Integration with industry-leading development tools like Fusion 360 aligns with the long-term strategic vision for HWTrek’s hardware development ecosystem platform,” said Lucas Wang, HWTrek CEO. “As a platform for hardware innovation, HWTrek bridges the gap with connections to consumer electronics manufacturing resources. We are excited to work together with Autodesk Fusion 360 to provide a seamless end-to-end service for hardware developers that shortens the time to product commercialization and scaling up manufacturing production with the resources of the global supply chain.”
“Fusion 360 is a central component of Autodesk’s product innovation platform, enabling makers and manufacturers to deliver on the future of making things,” said Stephen Hooper, Autodesk’s senior director for manufacturing industry strategy. “The Forge Initiative expands the capabilities of the platform by bringing innovative companies like HWTrek into the ecosystem.”
We’ll be talking tomorrow about the integration of the HWTrek platform and Autodesk Fusion 360 that allows hardware creators to easily submit their CAD files to manufacturing and supply chain experts on the platform to seek quotes for getting their project made.
Let’s get to the profiles…
Keyboardio
Please introduce yourself and your project.
Hi, I’m Jesse Vincent. I’m the technical co-founder of Keyboardio. Our first product, the Model 01 is an elegant ergonomic keyboard designed for people who type too much.
My background is in software. Keyboardio is my first hardware startup. Over the course of prototyping the Model 01, I’ve taught myself the basics of electrical and mechanical engineering.
What CAD solutions did you try before settling on Fusion 360?
After flirting with Rhino, OpenSCAD, Solidworks and a few other tools, we discovered Fusion 360 when the folks from Autodesk visited Highway1, the accelerator we were part of. They offered us free licenses for Fusion 360 and engineering support as part of a marketing partnership.
What were the most significant factors that you considered in making this choice?
While the cost of Fusion 360 for startups is attractive to me (it’s free), what really sold me were the Mac support, the phenomenal help from the team at Autodesk, the stellar CAM engine they built in and the mixture of sculpting and parametric modeling.
One of the most distinctive aspects of our keyboard design is the 64 individually sculpted keycaps, which I designed in Fusion 360, with a bit of help from Taylor Stein at Autodesk.
Because it’s sold as a service, Fusion 360 sees updates and new features monthly. While this hasn’t been without its hiccups, Autodesk has been very responsive when an update hasn’t gone as smoothly as one would hope.
What are you working on now with Fusion 360?
Today, I’m milling out a new set of test keycaps before we sign off on a final design for injection molding.
ProtoTech Solutions
We connected with Tarika Jain, Business Head at Prototech Solutions, to learn what they’re developing for Fusion 360. ProtoTech Solutions is a custom software development services provider in CAD, CAM, CAE. They specialize in plugin development primarily for Autodesk products such as Fusion 360, Autocad, Revit, Inventor, Max, Maya, and others. They can create custom solutions in the domain of 3D visualization, data interoperability, cloud and mobile apps.
Please tell us about your experience developing for Autodesk.
Our team has been working on Autodesk Products and customization for the last 5 years now. We have worked on various web-based CAD platforms as well. With the release of Fusion 360, our team tried their hands with it and I would like to share our experience. Fusion 360 brings CAD, CAM, and CAE together in the cloud. It’s an integrated, connected, and accessible platform built for the new ways products are being designed and made.
What did you first develop for Fusion 360?
First, we developed 3D PDF exporter for Fusion 360, an application to export 3D PDF for Autodesk Fusion 360 users. 3D PDF Exporter for Autodesk Fusion 360 exports CAD models loaded in Fusion 360 into a 3D PDF file (.pdf) on the local system. The 3D PDF file is highly portable and compressed format for visualizing and sharing 3D models. It can be read by anyone who has Adobe Acrobat Reader (v9 and above) installed .
This AddIn is live on the Autodesk Fusion 360 app store and can be installed through this link here.
What else have you been developing?
Apart from that, the ProtoTech team worked on developing a prototype of a web-based Configurator for Shoes, we demonstrated the following:
- In order to develop a web-based configurator, our team chose Fusion 360
- Input could be a Mesh/IGES/Rhino file imported into Fusion 360. Users can create cross-sectional views in Fusion 360.
- These cross-sectional curves can be exported from Fusion 360 and dumped into a separate file.
- This export file can be a simple curve point, dxf file, file supported by Illustrator, etc.
- So, the prototype demonstrates that it is possible to get the cross-sectional curves in a web-based platform (configuration) and export them to any format required.
Fusion 360 also has CAM integration and this enables us to generate manufacturing G-codes directly from the design.
How would you characterize your overall experience with Autodesk Fusion 360?
Fusion 360 is the latest product by Autodesk, cloud-based platform for entire product development with which a designer can design in offline mode and sync to the cloud later.
With respect to development, it is quick to start development or customization and very capable. Autodesk is updating it in every 7 to 15 days. The API documentation is good, however, more program samples will help to understand it in depth. The API is very powerful.
Designing UI is very easy and creating Add-ins is simple. The UI is similar to other Autodesk products. It is Phase 1 and thus a lot of features are yet to be expected. In phase 1, the API has captured the CAD part very well, but when it comes to CAM, the API does not currently support the creation of new setups and tool path operations.
We would love to hear from you whether you are using Fusion 360 for your hardware project or are developing plugins to enhance the functionality of Fusion 360.
