Fusion 360 - full, free 3D CAD and CAM

Shaun - In my category "retired hobbyist" the IP is not groundbreaking and to reiterate, they can have it in exchange and welcome. - Just to get a reliable Mach3 PP, (assuming it proves to be so) is worth any smarts my brain is likely to throw out.

Yes I am sure, however ownership of IP and protection are two different matters. In the end only an action for passing off or illegal use will enforce your legal position if someone uses your design, way of the world I am afraid.

Been there and won damages over a software product. Need a deep pocket.

Take another look - "A free 1-year startup license is also available for hobbyists, enthusiasts, makers, and emerging businesses that make less than US$100,000 in revenue per year. At the end of 1 year, you can reselect the startup entitlement or transition to a commercial entitlement.". Essentially it's free until you reach this threshold of profit, which none of us never will as hobbyists. And even then it would be something like $300 / £200 per year.

As for concerns about IP ownership, I'm trying to imagine how any of us would have reason to worry about that. I can't recall seeing anything in our hobby zone that has any obvious commercial value. If it did, then by definition, you'd want to treat it as a commercial venture, not a hobby. Any theft of IP is likely to happen out in the real world, not because your CAD company has given it away.

Autodesk are looking for market share in the professional sector, so giving it away to students and hobby users costs them very little but can only help them to gain acceptance and increase said share. Autodesk already have cloud based products (eg A360) and clearly commercial security is a key requirement for that.

This is the direction that products like Inventor / Fusion and others have to take as CAD and CAM become much more mainstream and the gap between amateur and professional activities narrows. Very encouraging!

Murray

I’ve been developing hardware and software products for manufacture in China for the last 15 years or so and the simple fact is that you can’t stop people copying your work, you can only delay them by making it more difficult, eg by keeping it local and under your control. You capitalise on your early advantage by charging premium prices until they catch up. Thereafter you need to keep ahead of them by continuing to innovate.

Once you stop innovating, you are engaged in a fight for the bottom of the market which is never going to be a good plan. Patents may help the process in some cases but many patents are both expensive and ultimately worthless. Rather than throwing money at lawyers, usually you are best to invest it in the next innovation. Of course, if it’s easy to copy, you probably didn’t have anything terribly valuable to start with....

Murray

Murry has it in one.

Flood the market and move on. You will have had all the serious money, the copiers will get the dregs, tyre kickers and model engineers

Just joking lads

I suppose I already know the answer, use it for hobby stuff which matters little and keep the work stuff as I do now, the question was more about the future, if all design software goes in this direction what then, I sign NDA's with some of my clients this means I'm responsible for there IP, that's why my site rarely has client drawings on there, its more a hobby website anyhow, it was a question that's still open, I do design work for some quite big names, although I'm semi retired, I ran it by one of them a whle back and the answer was to not use the cloud for storing files never mind development.

I don't know I have a 1978 MV Agusta 850s Monza, that's worth a couple of quid I think .

I'm convinced! Just have to save up for a CNC mill now.

Thanks for the heads up,

Rod

I suspect most companies now use some form of outside storage nowadays and even Outlook 365 is on the cloud. NDAs don't constitute liability insurance, they are a promise to take (very) reasonable care and not to knowingly divulge details without permission. Like patents, you have to ask what you think you are protecting. If you are a design house or consultancy, any conscious and public breach of confidentiality would be commercial suicide. The NDA defines penalties and scope but generally isn't what prevents leakage in itself.

Either way, whether the work is stored on a 3rd party server farm or simply on a network drive is pretty much semantics as they are just as accessible from almost anywhere (rather like online banking?). Only the truly self important or those dealing in national security need worry.

Ironically, when storage is isolated, it can increase the risk of leakage - you still need to be able to access it and in the process often resort to crudely controlled methods like flash drives, floppies(?) and the like which can famously be left lying around, unlike VPNs, firewalls etc which can be made very secure.

Murray

You mean they finally woke up to that fact after getting really vicious in the 80's and 90's with computer hobbyists who used pirate copies of Autocad, learning (Autodesk-style) CAD in the process and making it attractive to their subsequent employers? (Who then paid the enormous licensing fees). Autodesk certainly had market share then.

Edited By Bandersnatch on 22/06/2015 21:46:12

I have spent a few hours going through learning this package since Sunday, watching a few videos on youtube. Managed to draw up a design of the QCTP broaching tool I made recently, except the CAD version has better pivot joints than the 6mm cap head screws I used

For the moment I have no use for the CAM as, like Rod, I need to save for a CNC machine. I have tried a few different parametric CAD applications in the past and so far this is the easiest I've tried out. Thanks again Murray for the pointer.

I've created some 2D drawings from within the application and I can share these as PDF documents if anyone's interested. They are very basic though and I'm no designer or draughtsperson so you'll have to excuse the very amateur conversions and cramped annotation. I can also share the models if you are using/trying Fusion.

I accept no responsibility for inaccuracies if you decide to make one of these, however a test motion animation within Fusion gives me some confidence that the design would work.

Note: The design uses 5mm E clips to secure the pivot pins and have been drawn at 1mm thickness but they are apparently less than 1mm in real life, so the pin grooves should be cut to suit whatever you would like to use.

Cheers all,
Ed.

The only way to find out of something will run under wine is to down load it and install it. It's best to get the very latest version of wine.and install wine tricks. When it comes to tossing in some real windows dll's etc there isn't much help about.

There is no need to dual boot these days if some one wants to run windows and linux on the same machine. VirtualBox is probably the easiest virual machine to use but there are others. I'm not sure if it will run 64biit windows. There was talk last time I used it and that was some time ago. In terms of obtaining windows some smaller PC outlets may have earlier versions around that they will sell. Totally illegal of course.

Seeing comments about 32bit and memory a lot depends on what the OS decides to let users do. It doesn't take much memory to blat a pc screen even a big one and the overheads for paging in memory are surprisingly low.

Me - well I have only used Linux plus KDE for around 18 years now. I did use both for a couple of years before that. I do have Vista Home on a laptop that I use for the web when I am away from home and also for upgrading firmware in certain items when I can't do it from Linux.. I also have a copy of XP pro that will have to go on it at some point.

John

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Picking up on Eds comment about drawing a 5 mm E-clip 1 mm thick despite the real thing being thinner how does Fusion stack up in the component library stakes. Being able to call out standard hardware directly rather than drawing it yourself is a major timesaver and probably more accurate anyway. Its also useful to be able to import drawings of commercial components. Given its professional links I would have expected Fusion to have all the standard E-clips in a data library and to be able to import commercial components supplied in standard file formats such as AutoCAD ones. Is the 5 mm clip just one of a few omissions or is the library still very much a work in progress.

Does anyone know if it will import Vectorworks files? I'm distinctly underwhelmed by Vectorworks 2014 which I currently use so if Fusion will output 2D files to suit my current workflow it would be a good opportunity to make the jump to modern 3D methods. Especially as I have an unused Taig Micromill CNC sitting about the place!

Clive

Hi Clive,

I have just been looking at parts import. There are currently two sources to pull parts from that I can see, McMaster Carr and PartsforCAD. Importing from McMaster Carr I was able to pull parts directly into a design in STEP format. PartsforCAD requires a registration and acceptance of terms before you can import. I didn't go that far as I'm only trying the software. E Clips are available from both sources.

I found a video of the parts import feature: LINK My experience so far is that it takes a lot longer to import a part than the video shows, about 40 seconds. Maybe just connectivity issues across the pond.

I don't know if all the parts available are strictly from companies based in the USA. It would help if there was some kind of international part number cross-reference for standard items, (maybe there already is ? )

Ed.

Edited By Ed Duffner on 24/06/2015 01:13:35

Have you tried Traceparts ~?

I have, with SoiledWaste SolidWorks.

Have to confess it has never been that useful as the parts are often ones I'm not interested in, modelled incorrectly or just modelled badly (excessive detail where not needed [such as modelling the helix of a thread] &/or inadequate detail on interface areas). Have downloaded a generic 'Man' to provide scale references in the brochure engineering phase of projects, but the ones available are not very lifelike. Unfortunately the figures exported from the figure animation package I use are a little too lifelike, and a bit too obviously female for an engineering company to use to illustrate drawings. Hrrumph.

What is more useful is that places like Protex & WDS have full 3D CAD models to download for registered users. At work, that makes it much more likely that we'll use their latches, knobs, handles etc. I wish other manufactures would take the hint & do it too.

Regards,

Richard

It doesn't currently work under Wine, see Bug 34851 at WineHQ.

I haven't tried it in a Virtualbox installation but I found that Solidworks ran extremely slowly like that when I tried it some time ago. For now I will dual boot for playing with Fusion.

Russell

As JS and Ed suggest, there are various sources for CAD models. IIRC, RS Compts, Farnell etc also supply CAD models and most manufacturers of connectors, bearings, pulleys, fasteners etc provide them - they pretty much have to. There's usually quite a choice, so you can select one with the right level of detail and modify it to provide the features you want without having to start out from scratch.

Another excellent resource is Misumi. You can configure most of their products on their website, then download the resulting part as a CAD model, even if you don't actually order it. The fascinating thing is that they will manufacture it to order and deliver it within days at often surprisingly reasonable prices. It's a new business model and one that makes me wish I was a young machine designer!

Murray

Ubuntu mantain an engineering type list of programs. It might be worth looking through those to see what is about now. It's here

**LINK**

There are an ever increasing number of multi platform package about in many areas now so some may run on windoze and mac.

I'm not sure where they all are in terms of end to end cad cam but work is always being done on several of them. I suspect freecad might offer better rendering than some packages.

I've noticed zero difference under VirtualBox but haven't used it at all for a long long time.

Then there is the pay for wine ?? Crossover if I remember correctly. I suspect they might test it if you ask. Not sure on that point. The problem with wine is that there is little help about on sorting applications out and a lot of the interest stems from running windows games. I filed a bug on one application some years ago. Nothing happened as some body would have to pick the job up. It's an optical design package but it does run ok on the more recent versions of wine. There are no good OS optical design packages. I find that Q4Wine helps a lot with more complex packages that have to run from their own directory. Swine on the other hand is not of much use. Q4Wine is a bolt on which removes the need for general wine configuration knowledge.

There was an odd bug involved in running 64bit packages under wine. A search of the forum should bring up a solution. I'd have thought that would have been fixed by now.

John

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Oh! Oh! HERE WE GO.

Trying to run a trial CAM program. - When calling up the tool locker the whole programme crashes with a software error report. There is the option to send a report which I did three days ago without response so far.

Please check on a trial download to see if you can get past this to actually post process a simple shape.

I've run a few parts through the CAM environment without any issue (10 days into the trial period). Apart from the time limit, the program is identical to the "proper" version, so any crashes seem likely to be for some other reason.

I've imported some parts from Solidworks and then run 2D and 3D operations on them. The import is a bit of a faff - you have to upload them onto the "A360" web area and then open them from there from within Fusion. That route would seem to allow you to model stuff in a friendlier application like Solidworks etc and then take advantage of Fusion's CAM capabilities. Horses for courses.

My work laptop has a hybrid graphics card which caused problems today (HP Zbook, W7, dual Intel and ATI graphics). If you don't go into the BIOS and disable the hybrid operation, the panel at the left of the desktop goes black and you can't access any of the web area which is rather limiting. The Autodesk technical support is almost as useless as the Fusion documentation but I finally sussed it out. And the HP user manual instructions for changing BIOS settings was just plain incorrect. Where do they get these clowns from? Grrr.

Merry