Fusion 360 Tutorial – LED Noodle Shapes

hey what's up folks welcome back to another layer by layer in today's tutorial we're going to take a look at making some shapes using LED noodles so this is a 3D printed holder for these led filaments uh Adafruit calls them LED noodles and you can get them from Adafruit so the LED noodles can be press fitted into these little 3D printed holders I have a couple different shapes and I'll show you folks how to design different letters and different shapes using Fusion 360. but first I want to jump into our alarm guide that really takes uh these shapes to the next level so if we go over to the learn guide we created an LED noodle Lantern we basically took one of each color of the noodles and we mounted them vertically in this cool sci-fi inspired container and all the noodles are you know press fitted into these 3D printed holders and then the 3D printer holders are kind of arranged in these mounting brackets that allow them to be you know uh vertically mounted they look really cool you can do lots of things with the LEDs like fade them in and out create different animation patterns that sort of stuff so check out this learn guide and for the getting the Adafruit noodles uh adafruit.com search for nudes that's what we call them for short and there's different ones uh be sure to sign up to get notified when they're back in stock um I used all of my noodles up and I actually only have this one uh on hand so this is a 130 millimeters long in length uh but one thing uh to note is when you're designing a holder it's actually you don't want to create your holder to be exactly 130 30 millimeters long you actually want to go under a bit so I definitely recommend calipers measuring them out if you uh just measure uh you know from here to this end without the the metal contacts you'll actually get somewhere around like 110 115 millimeters um which is you know enough to make or break a design so just measure that out and we'll keep that in mind and also show you some tips on keeping track of the length of your shape when you're designing it in Fusion 360. um so let's go ahead and jump into well yeah we'll jump into Fusion but take a look at um neon letters like the alphabet you notice that um to do uh an alphabet with uh Neons you kind of want to have a diff a shape that doesn't close in on itself so for example if you want to do like a spelled out word you can see that it's doing like this cursive writing and it's just a single line so keep that in mind when you're trying to make a shape it's like how do I make a shape where it doesn't close in on itself because it can become difficult to do there's various techniques to do it but we're going to keep it simple and just make a shape that uh that just doesn't close in on itself for example when you saw the r the r doesn't close in on itself it just kind of wraps around so uh you know you can do some Google searching and search for different fonts that might inspire you if you're doing letters if you're doing different shapes like the heart you can see um you want to be careful with uh how close these ends you don't want them to touch so something like this you'll want to either use some sheathing to avoid a short circuit so that's one thing another thing I want to note this feature is um there is a little bit of a kind of a covering here and that allows the doodle to kind of stay secured so it won't pop out so that's kind of a nice little feature and we'll do all that stuff in fusion and you can print this without any support material it prints flat on the bed and they print pretty quick this took like 10 minutes to print so with all that let's go ahead and jump into Fusion 360. so here's the letter in Fusion 360. it's the r and we also have that heart shape so what I'll do is I'll make um a new letter I'll probably make like a z I think a z the letter Z would be kind of easy so I'm going to start off with a new sketch and I will draw on the floor here on the floor plane I want to have it be about the same height so let's just bring out our line tool and we'll start making our Z shape I'll start somewhere over here in the bottom and just kind of draw it out like that and then hit escape to stop so there's our Z shape when you double click align if your line is connected to other lines at the bottom here you'll see that the length of it is 100 millimeters so we can make a little bit longer let me start adding some Dimensions but before I do I just want to note some of the automatic constraints that were added here notably this one here it's called The Parallel constraint you can see down here what it is it's the parallel constraint and it's basically saying this should always be parallel with that one and then this right here is the horizontal constraint that just says that this line should always be horizontally or vertically set up so it can't do an angle like that like this line that I selected that has an angle so let's give this a length let's go with 30. and then I want this line up here to be the exact same line as this one down here so let's use the equal constraint so let's say this needs to be equal with that and that's okay that looks good next thing I'm going to do is I want to add a I'm going to select this line hold down shift and select that line and then hit D on my keyboard for a dimension and then I'll let me do an angle I want this to be 45 degree angles so I'll just type that in and that looks good and the next thing I want to do is um kind of give some um some height from this to this how much height I want to do probably about 40. hit okay and then that's kind of it right there we can click and drag it to move it around if we want but really I don't think that's anything else I want to change you know I'm not liking the shape what I want to do is I'm going to delete the 40. and I kind of want this to be lined up with this line here so I'm kind of struggling to do that so I'm going to use another line and I'm going to kind of connect these two dots here this dot with that one you can see that it's not not a straight up and down so I'm going to add a horizontal constraint to it I just brought up my sketch shortcuts window you can do that with the S key on your keyboard and then just click that and then click that and then now it's straight so that'll always be straight but the next thing I want to do is hold that line I click on it and then hit the X key on my keyboard and that makes it a construction line so I have to worry about the construction line closing the path so now I can select this bit and tells me the length it's 102 millimeters so I can go a little bit taller now I I think what's making the shape a little bit hard is the uh the 45 degree angles so let's change that to something like less like 35. or more in this case let's do 50. let's try 60. that's too much 255 52. let's get rid of the uh who cares about the you know having a thing let's make the height really what we want 40 degrees or 48 millimeters and now you can see it's it's pretty much locked in there that's good I'm pretty happy with that it matches up with the the length here maybe a 42 would be better there you go that's a little bit better so I'm just referencing the size of this and then when I double click on that line it gives me a length of 111. you know that's going to be about fine because what I found is that when you start creating the Extrusion for this your your length never is the same because it's just the nature of it so let's go ahead and say we like that hit okay and then the way to extrude this out is with the extrude but you want to change the type from extrude to thin extrude so you just select that and now you're able to select that line that path that we created and the first thing I'll do is I'll change the uh the distance so let's make that the distance is how how thick do you want well not how thick but how tall you want this thing to be so I want it to be three millimeters tall and then the wall thickness this is how thick you want it to be so I'm going to make it four and that is really the number that you want to do four millimeters and you can see here a wall location you can switch that around you have three different options so play around with the options I think the center option works the best for us and you can see here it's already bigger than our R so I already know I'm going to have to change this Dimension here of the construction line because it's kind of defining our height um and then the operation sets a new body so hit okay now right click on the sketch and then say show Dimensions so that way we don't have to go inside the sketch and have to edit the dimension we just edit it here and see our changes apply so let's change that 42 to 40. that looks good looks better um it's still a little bit tall so let me make it maybe 38. yeah and then maybe move it up a bit it doesn't matter where it is because we'll just Center it in our uh in our slicer program but I just want to you know line it up be as kind of accurate as I can um and you could also make this like thinner if you want so maybe instead of 30 we do like uh 26. and that just looks to me that's just proportionately looks better but it's up to you however you want to do it um so let me uh double click that line again and see it's about 98 millimeters so um you know you can decide what how what you want to be bigger if we had a uh if we had it be taller it wouldn't match our R so maybe this is good at 30 millimeters and length and then we can see it's about a hundred maybe we want even more but like I said it's all about testing so let's leave it at that now the next thing I want to do is um actually round out these Corners you'll notice that we have some really nice radiuses here when you're bending uh you're thinking there's also a note here in the uh the learn guide for the noodles under physical properties there's something called Bend limits and you really want to be aware of your um your act your per axis Bend radius so you can read through this but basically you can't like make a super sharp Bend um it's just the nature of the thickness of the filament won't let you do that so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add some fillets and I found that these internal Corners here are really sharp so I'm going to give them a 0.25 millimeter fillet and hit okay um actually you can go back into the fillet hit the plus sign and then add these these uh these sharp corners on the outside and because we hit plus it's a different fill it so instead of having to create two fillet features in your timeline you can just do it all in one fillet so I'm going to do is I'm going to add um the thickness of our wall which is four plus the uh the 0.25 radius that we apply to the internal corners and that'll just give it a really nice tangent uh shape so let me hit OK and now we're ready to start uh sweeping our channel so to create this internal channel for our filament to press fit into we will go on one of these edges here one of the end caps have it selected and then just create a sketch in there I want to bring in the geometry from this so I'll select it again and hit the hotkey p on my keyboard and that'll project in that the edges from that surface so I'll hit ok now you can see it shows a pink uh kind of pinkish purple and the next thing I'll do is I want to create a rectangle on the inside of this so I got my rectangle tool my regular you know two point rectangle I'm just going to draw a rectangle freehand like that and what I'll do is I'll select this top Edge this Top Line rather and then hold down shift and select that Top Line and then I'll bring up my my sketch model toolbox and we'll say I want those two to be midpoint constraint so it'll always be in the center of that line and then I'll select this line over here and apply a dimension to it I want this to be two millimeters in length and then I want this line to be one millimeters in length so it's a two by one next thing I'll do is I'll grab my line tool and here's a cool trick to create a curve if you click and hold down your mouse button and start moving you'll start creating a curve here you see how that curve is is affecting where I am where my cursor is so I'm just I'm still holding down my mouse button and I'll roll I'll hover over this this corner here and then you can see that there's a square like on if I let go of my mouse button now it's applied so now I have this really easy very tangent you can even see that there is a tangent constraint so that says that this will always be tangent with this which is really cool which is what we want uh and then kind of close this out I'll uh select this line here I don't want it to separate my shape so I'm going to hit the X key on my keyboard and that makes it a dotted line which means it's just a construction line and it won't intersect my uh my path here you can see that there um yeah and the next thing I'm going to do is I want to create a shape so that I can have something that covers over you see kind of how this one is so it's kind of covering it over and that's going to allow our noodle to thread in and it won't pop out because this top cover here this top roof uh will keep the filament you know in place so to do that I'll just create another rectangle two-point rectangle just like that freehand and then you could just click and drag the corners and just drag and drop them uh on the on the corresponding Corners sometimes Fusion will be like I don't like you like it won't move right now it really is annoying sometimes I really can't move it so I'm going to double click it delete it try again uh you know what let's use our shortcuts because clicking and dragging sometimes freaks out Fusion so let's try this this method instead I got my shirt my sketch shortcuts open I'm gonna click on coincidence that's actually what we're doing we want this corner to be coincident with that corner and we want that corner to be coincident with this corner and that's done that works better now the only the only um Dimension we want to apply is to this line let's make it one millimeter actually sorry two millimeters and then what we want to do is grab our line tool again and we'll do that same trick to create that curve like we did down here but this time we're going to do it up here so click hold down the mouse button start curing out and then just drop it here and that's it there's our shape now we can create our top roof and then we can use this shape to do a sweep along our shape so let's get out of here let's say finished catch and uh I'll bring up the sweep um feature so let's select select sweep and then for the profile we'll select our internal thing here and then for the path it'll be either this one or this outer one let's click the outer one and see what happens right away you get a really nice preview of what it's going to do so it's wrapping around those Corners very nicely because we did our fillets here um and we were you know we thought about the fillets they look good I'm going to hit okay the operation set to cut so that's all good and that's pretty much what we want to do there now we can start creating our roofs for the end caps so I'll select the profile start extruding I need to go the opposite way so I'll put negative and I found two millimeters of distance works well here so hit okay now unfortunately we can't like mirror that I'd love to mirror it but I really can't so a lot to create the same stuff uh on this cap on this opposite end so again select surface create a sketch select the surface project it in um and then really all we need to do is that rectangle again so let's make a rectangle let's not bother with right you know dragging and dropping the corner sometimes it works sometimes doesn't so we're going to do the method where we hit coincident click on the new click on the corner if I could select it and then the second corner where we want it to glue to this corner and that corner and then with the dimension we can apply a two millimeter Dimension there the line tool and then we'll do our trick where we click hold it start curving and then let go where we want it hit e on your keyboard to uh start extruding again we gotta go negative two and that joins it automatically and that's kind of it that is our shape the next thing I'm going to show you folks um when you're um let's name it call it Z letter when you uh right click on it save as a mesh I like to do STL because I'm old school so let's try a 3mf to be new school hit okay I'll save it here as letter z and then I'm using Cura this is my STL let me delete that and bring in the 3mf if I can find it under shapes 3mf oh boy so let's uh right click on it Center selected that's good now real quick I'll take a look at my slice settings you see my line width is set to 0.4 that's sort of a default thing but if you don't have 0.4 your tool path might be different so I'm gonna leave it at 2.4 let's slice it and then go to preview and take a note of the path here the walls are super thin they're just two perimeters thick which is what you kind of want for something this small and you can see here uh it looks great the the radius if you were to see some infill in here then maybe your radius isn't as tangent as it could be now that's okay but I just wanted to show folks like um taking a look at your tool path and seeing if it's clean or not or if it has you know extra infill you can you can just play around with a fillet amount and you can get rid of some of that material to make it nice and smooth so this takes about three seven minutes to print which is great I haven't tested it out but I have the r which you can see so that's just kind of some of the techniques you could use in Fusion 360 uh to create these these holders um yeah you'll definitely want to test print them out and see if it fits within the length of your project looking at the overhead again you can see how much excess I have here and uh you can see it's not a lot but it's better to have some excess I I think uh the no excess because like um you wouldn't be able to bite onto the thing but you can play around with it so let me disconnect this and then kind of pop it out just to show how easy it is to pop it in and out you're just threading it through that little um kind of closing there and when you're bending it you can actually only it only kind of bends it only wants to bend one way it's kind of hard to see but you can sort of see uh the wire in the in the uh the LEDs in there and you'll you'll see that it only wants to bend about right there where that internal line is I think that is what's kind of bridging them all together and then you have this side here which is kind of the diffuser end and it doesn't really want to bend it wants to just bend like that so just keep that in mind when you are kind of manipulating the shape here so yeah this is the new Inca twist too which is crazy that doesn't seem to break it but you know be careful with it uh there's some notable things like knowing what the anode or the positive end it has a hole in here it's hard to see but there's a hole there and then over here there's no hole right uh you always want to use a choke resistor this is 220 if you have a different LiPo battery then you'll want to adjust accordingly you can use an LED calculator to figure out what resistor you want but this is a 3.7 volt battery pack wired up to a breadboard we got our Chuck resistor the resistor can go in either end if you want more information like I said go to the learn guide but let's let's wire this up again in free form so just making sure that the hole is visible for positive lead no hole for your negative lead and it should just power on automatically there it is it looks really nice looks like a little that you can eat and uh very flexible it looks really nice in person all over the camera you can kind of start seeing um the individual LEDs but yeah that is a little demo of the LED noodles that's going to do it for this tutorial don't forget to check out all the links in the description sign up to get notified when these are back in stock they come in different colors um different lengths really there's just two lengths you know 300 millimeter in that one 30 millimeter check out the learn guides uh if you want to build this very cool LED Lantern or just check out the learn guide for the noodles if you want to know more about it there's some example code here too if you want to animate them or whatnot in circuit python or do we know you have control to do that that's going to do it for this one um thanks for watching I'll see you guys in the next one but until then remember to make a great day bye folks

Channel: Adafruit Industries

Views: 4,241

Keywords: adafruit, electronics, diy, arduino, hardware, opensource, projects, raspberry, pi, computer, raspberrypi, microcontrollers, limor, limorfried, ladyada, STEAM, STEM, python, microbit, circuitpython, neopixel, neopixels, raspberry pi, circuitplaygound, nyc, make, makers, micro:bit, adafrit, adafruit promo code, ada fruit, adafruit coupons, raspberry pi zero, micropython, machine learning, ai, tensorflow

Id: XwwmBp9V06E

Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 06 2022