Taylor Stein (@taylor_stein) a Fusion360 evangelist from Autodesk came to AMT to discuss Fusion360, how it works and what it can do for hackerspaces.  We had a full house of over 20 people who had questions about Fusion360 and how best to use it for what they are doing.

Fusion360 covers a wide variety of stuff from laser cutting to CNC routing to 3D printing that there was plenty of questions to be had.

Questions from how to export STL files for 3D printing, 2D layout, parametric variable and more where covered.

Taylor showed the way he teaches layout which is to do a quick sketch of the part and don’t worry about lining the parts up.  After the initial layout, go back and use constraints and dimensions to make the shape just the way you want and the relationships between the various parts stay consistent.  This is a different way of layout where the separate primitives like circles, rectangles and lines are defined in relation with each other so as you change one the others move with it.  For 3D modeling it makes things flow far better than having to go back and change everything after one adjustment.

We covered so much material we never really dived into the 3D CNC CAM side of things so another event was scheduled – Monday July 25th Taylor will be back to talk CNC routing and how to do 3D toolpaths and other CNC related questions.