Quick Enclosure Design with Fusion 360

I'm Kevin I come at this from maybe a different direction from a lot of folks I'm a mechanical engineer originally spends a lot of time working with folks doing mechatronics which meant I built a bunch of enclosures prototyping last 20 years I've been at Autodesk part of the fusion 360 team and in the last two years been doing a lot more of ad hoc prototyping along with Matt who will be doing a presentation tomorrow and figured it would be a great opportunity to sit and share some of the the tricks we've learned over the last couple years on how to quickly bang out prototyping and quick enclosures so we're gonna look at this from a bunch of different directions I'm sure every one of us has done this before you know tying soldering prototyping kept on tape to prevent things from shorting out all of this in the expedience drives necessity here so we may enclosures to cram things in but what we really want to do is just get simple enclosures simple rigs banged out really fast and so we can continue our prototyping our iterating between electronics and mechanical sometimes these enclosures are super simple you know we just need skeletal scans to hold some things together while we're iterating we're not committing on final form sometimes we're modifying other people's creations to fit a particular need doing really custom test cases and rigs for for working with a customer on a prototype more durable prototypes that might need creative ways for fastening and holding things together for for testing in an environment that's a little bit more durable or enclosures around existing participants that people want to go print so all these are examples really quick enclosures and we're going to build to today along this vein and show some some tricks on how to get there really quickly a lot of times you need a really simple enclosure or around existing boards you might be using Altium KY CAD mentor cadence Eagle you're grabbing boards off of grab CAD or you're getting open source files from crowd supply and generating boards you may be getting idea for step but these usually drive the shape around which you need to quickly build your enclosure or your test stand so some of those are pretty pretty darn detailed this is an example of a Raspberry Pi off grab CAD incredibly high fidelity other times they're much lower fidelity we're actually going to work with a pretty low five version here of a beagle and work off of this 3d board that was downloaded as a step file and then we're going to work on one connected with with eagle I like to keep this pretty interactive interrupt me anytime ask questions if you like I left a little bit of time at the end to talk about some design for manufacturing if that's interesting for folks but again ask questions throughout the presentation and I've left a little time at the end as well so I'm good it's mid-afternoon it's warm up here I'll try and keep keep people engaged okay so in this particular case in fusion there's actually a really nice way to fast-track this it's called new design from file particularly for step data this makes data acquisition really fast and I'm gonna actually do all of this live but just kind of give you the chapters we're gonna go through and then we're gonna actually do it in person that lets me load up the step file into the 3d environment and from there we're gonna build an enclosure four pieces top bottom two end caps and do this all in probably about seven minutes to get to the two end shape I do have a little Julia Child's magic I've got a couple already in the oven cooking so if we are a little going a little on long on time I'll pull those out so we can just jump ahead make sense okay so let's just bounce back over all right I mentioned before that I had downloaded this a step file previously so I'm gonna be working with this this BeagleBone step document that's what we're gonna use to drive this first so that little trick is right here we're gonna just say new design from file and that will let me go pick the step document now depending on where things come from either in the world or people's individual preferences you're gonna find orientation of boards varies pretty wild widely in this case this board is sitting on its side this annoys me to no end so again passing on a little tricks to deal with this we can fix that pretty easily right here is a simple little cube for navigating and essentially we're not looking at this in the right orientation so I can get it in the right orientation that looks a little bit better and I'm just going to tell it please set this view now as front and that it's gonna make the orientation of my model a lot more reasonable I don't particularly care about the world access coordinates if we want to change that we can but I'd prefer not to have be looking at this model on the side with a shadow on the floor so now we've got some basic orientation fixed you will notice that there is some pretty strange artifacts here on how the outline of the board was first generated it's fairly faceted we're not gonna spend a lot of time on this if you're interested we can talk later fusion does make this pretty easy for me to fix in this particular case I want to know what that radius should have been if it wasn't faceted into elements so we can just use measure I'm going to grab those two points and then ask it to give me the elements of the vector so it's 6 3 5 we have some nice direct editing tools where we'll just pick those would help I did that as a solid and we can just come back and make that a nice accurate the corner so we could go through if we wanted to do do some cleanup or move detail if we didn't want it add detail if we had it but a nice set of tools to get in and do some some basic cleaning up of the model and we're gonna design an enclosure on this and I like to keep the organization of my product hierarchy really clean so we want an assembly that is essentially the case and then assembly which is essentially the PC board and you'll notice that this is structured with all of these components loose at the root so again for hygiene sake I'm going to make a new component we'll just call that the BeagleBone grab all that other stuff that we had and we're just going to restructure that into that sub assembly create another assembly which is going to be our case now as soon as I made that second component is essentially activated that component for me that means it set the scope of what I'm about to create to be inside of that component so I can define where different things I create go in the hierarchy because this model was imported from a step file it actually came in is just a bunch of dumb solids there's no history here state exchange between CAD tools tends to be just basic solid forms so everything i want to do i do want to maintain parametric history on that so i need to take this document which came in as just dumb solids and tell it I want to actually capture some history based on what I'm going to do so by telling it capture some capture history it's going to reorganize all of the geometry that was imported into a series of timeline steps or parametric steps and everything I do from this point forward is going to be parametric on top of that geometry and that's gonna make it much easier for me to iterate on my case if people start throwing out curveballs and we want to change the model on the fly okay so that's that's all just set up to get us to the point of of actually creating the shape we can see this is a pretty simple board it's got IO on either end so we're gonna just do essentially a tube enclosure to encompass this as I mentioned two plates on the end with some openings and a clamshell for the housing to contain it so let's let's bang that out really fast and this is just giving me a construction claim all throughout this presentation you're gonna hear me talk a lot about trying to keep what I generate in my enclosure as loosely coupled to the underlying board and ecad geometry as possible the fewer the references I generate to actual faces edges and components on the board the less brittle brittle my enclosure will be that's really important particularly if we're doing a lot of iteration between the electronics and the mechanical we want to bake into the enclosure design as much flexibility that the underlying electronics can change as possible that means less rework as we're iterating with our electronics and our mechanics so by putting on this construction plane I've given myself an underlying face a work plane a construction plane that I will attach my sketch to that gives me a level of indirection between my sketch and the underlying model and if I'm doing lots of sketches I'll reference this plane that way if my electronics change I only have to update this one planes position and then all of the downstream features will rebuild appropriately if I built lots of sketches and each of those had associated to that plane independently if that it moved or disappeared I'd have to fix every explicit reference to that face whereas this work plane gives me that indirection and makes a much more robust model and in order for iteration to go fast we need we need robust models so let's use that to sketch out a basic shape I'm going to do that with a slot tool to cheat a bit here and roughly something about that big and then we're going to make the center line horizontal so that I know I have a nice horizontal set of lines and then I can just roughly size this to the board the underlying board that we can look at here in profile okay now the other thing that you'll notice is we have a series of USB ports on this side we have a micro USB as well and I'd like to have some openings in order to make sure we can keep access to that so that's just going to be too quick rectangles I would probably spend a little bit more time dimensioning and precisely positioning these but for brevity and demo sake we're just going to eyeball this together today if I go fast or you would like me to explain something that maybe I'm not being explicit about please ask me just quickly do one more slot all right and that gets us a good start we'll talk a bit about wall thickness later I'm going to start with a one and a half mil wall on that one end cap and now we want to do the same thing on this end I'm going to put a construction plane I'm going to go ahead and put a sketch on that end cap and project that outer boundary so we have a match yep I could reuse the same sketch there I'm building in a failure in a minute so no worries yeah the we're gonna talk of me a minute about exactly why I didn't do that and why I should do that it worries it helps to have a plant in the audience okay so then I'm also going to just do a quick slot on this as well all right so now I have two end caps those end caps give me my overall shape now we need the tube that's going to enclose all of this by doing that I'm going to put another sketch on this face and I just will reuse that outer contour so in that let me just do let's do a half mil on the outside and we're gonna do - 0.5 towards the inside and from here I'm picking those outer profiles we'll use that to create a new body and we'll just tell it to go all the way to this face plus a little bit of offset we're gonna give it about 2 mils of offset on that side and on the side I'm extruding from I picked I started with a profile plane I can actually tell it to add a bit of offset here we say minus - oops - now we've created a little bit of a lip and if you saw I did a an offset towards the inside of the cap and an offset to the outside of the cap that meant that's created a base basically a half mil interference between these two end caps and tube that I've just generated which is gonna make my life really easy because to finish this we'll just say let's do a combined this is my target object I'm going to use that end cap as a tool that end cap as a tool and we're going to do a cut I actually want to keep the end caps so let's just say keep those tools and when we say okay we've actually cleared up those interferences to create quick grooves in the shape and that lets us finish this really fast I'm going to generate a mid plane construction geometry and then use that to split a body this tube with that face and pretty quickly we had can crack this open lay it flat on a bed take the two end caps lay it flat on a bed hit print obviously we don't have any fasteners in this case a really easy trick is two rubber bands throw it around the to hold it together we've got something that's safe easy carry around take the rubber bands off take it apart you're not dealing with any mechanical fasteners that are gonna wear out we're gonna talk about mechanical fasteners in a few minutes but in this case we've just taken a board quickly generated a really simple enclosure that's cheap fast and easy to print and is built off of the underlying geometry now one of the things that I talked about was sort of this loosely coupled idea and I'm gonna demonstrate why that's a really important idea if we were working with a word or an end cap like I had before and I want to create associativity and be smart about it what you actually reuse is really important so in the case of where I just made that end cap on purpose what I had done was individually selected these these edges to project them there are several other ways that I could have done this an alternative might have been and one that I would recommend in most cases is to project the entire face rather than rather than the ED end edges there are cases where we can actually reuse the entire sketch multiple times and just set the extents of the extrusion to a different place in space but what I really want to get across here is this idea of I see a lot of people go do this and start projecting points or lines individually and then making their sketch lines collinear or coincident with these sketched geometries their model changes and the whole thing explodes and they have to rebuild it in this case it's a really nice simple example the first sketch I could I individually selected the edges so I have an explicit reference between this projected line in that edge but in this case I projected the face the only thing this sketch cares about is that that face survives does not matter how much the outer boundary of that face ever changes this sketch is going to be much smarter because it's more loosely coupled it's only looking for the face and we can demonstrate that really easily by taking that one edge deleting it completely replacing it with as many edges as we want enough let's say finish and that's a perfect example so because it's a reference to the face it just says give me whatever boundary of that face is does not matter how much that boundary changes as long as the face survives and faces in most cases are very long-lived objects to reference and you can immediately see here it's lost its reference that edge has been deleted it doesn't know what to do fortunately in fusion when that happens it goes sick it's not a hard failure you notice it's put the sketch of sick it's shown the sketch line as being sick there's still a valid profile because it's using that sick line in order to generate a profile so the feature that might have consumed that sketch would probably recompute but it would also be yellow and sick to tell you that some of the underlying geometry that's referenced is has been broken and you should fix it but in this case I think the face projection is a is a much smarter path to go and we're going to show a couple couple more examples of so I don't think I hit seven minutes on the mark I hit about eight and a half but goal was to get about seven minutes from board to first enclosure we're going to spend a little bit more time on the next iteration because we're gonna build a much smarter enclosure around some some Eagle data so let's let's take a look at that Eagle infusion have a pretty deep integration makes enclosure design a heck of a lot easier than what we just saw we're gonna get accurate 3d boards out of Eagle if we spend time in in our library management we can make this really fast particularly if you're using the same library and components you have a favorite set that you're using all the time setting up your 3d components has managed libraries up front is going to give you huge dividends on every project you do after that you can also build in as much intelligence as you want we're not limited to constraining our thinking to just electronic components we can create a symbol that is a whole and we can manage that whole in the library and we can add a standoff and a fastener to it and so when we define the hole in the board we can also pick a symbol that has mechanical objects already assigned to it and when we convert that into a detailed 3d board will get standoffs and fasteners if we have power leads to a 9 volt battery hookup well that symbol may be in the schematic very simple and on the board that just might be too flat pads for soldering at a later date in the managed library we can create a very nice 3d model of leads plus a 9 volt battery holder attach it to that package and when we can when we get a 3d board out we get a 3d board with those pads and the leads and the 9-volt battery attachment point so you can be really creative in how you add geometry to your libraries it's also bi-directional Board outlines and components can be edited in either location so you can edit the board board outline and components in Eagle as you're familiar you can also edit the board outline in the components inside of fusion and you can pass those changes back and forth which is going to make it eration between the two really fast and easy it's all version managed if you've got bad changes you can revert them somebody screw something up you can roll back in time you get commenting and markups on top of that if you're collaborating between an electrical group and a mechanical group and you can compare versions over so you know what's changed the other nice thing that you get out of this is something that you can share internally with your teams as well as you can share externally if you're having somebody quote or do external enclosure design or your customer who you may want to to get early feedback from so a bunch of bunch of benefits out of this as I said the workflow can start in one of two ways you can start in fusion you can define a board boundary you can push that outline to Eagle in Eagle you can get your schematic and board routing done push that detail back into Fusion do your enclosure what we're going to do here is we're going to start an eagle we're going to push the board in diffusion as an object extract the board outline infusion do some changes adjust component position push those changes back to Eagle rinse and repeat because it's usually highly iterative if we're doing prototyping work so again I'm gonna do all this lied but I'd like to give everybody kind of the garden path before we do it live we're gonna fire up just using a demo I highly recommend if you haven't looked at Eagle in a while pull down version 9 it's the latest release right inside of there is demo 3 everything I'm about to show you just works out of the box with one of the sample files from there once we open it up we can see the board outline and you'll notice on the right hand side is this little black box you can't read it because it's washed out but it says push to fusion when we do that we're gonna tell it we're gonna create a new Fusion design I get a list of a bunch of projects in which I can store it I'm going to set that location and then we're gonna get a preview here of what packages I've currently used in my board and whether those components have detailed models if they don't have detailed models we're just gonna get a bounding box and a height marry IDF like pretty pretty primitive but in this case the standard demo ego library has detailed models already assigned which is why it's a great way to try this on your own so that when we go ahead and push that diffusion we get a notification and we get a board that looks just like this solid models top and bottom decals showing traces and solid model detailed components this is a live link at this point you'll notice that in the browser it's shown as a special component it knows that this geometry comes from Eagle so that's a persistent relationship between the Eagle data and the fusion data which is where the fast enclosure and the real real powerful stuff starts to kick in so let's walk through that and do that live so as I mentioned you can just go right into Eagle look at projects go into examples we're gonna find tutorials demo three fire that up here's that magical button of push push diffusion link because I was practicing this earlier and now let's push new design it's grabbing my projects I'm gonna put this in crowd supply preview that I have 3d packages for all of Mike my packages my devices that I've selected so we'll just say push and this takes about a minute to two minutes it's gonna convert all that data send it to fusion fusions gonna read the Eagle information it's gonna generate solid models generate a board extract the traces create the graphical representations of those and layer them on top told me okay it's successfully pushed I can go look at the that data inside of fusion so let's switch back to fusion and it's already told me data in this folder has been updated if I hit refresh we could see demo three has appeared as of a few moments ago let's go ahead and open it and there we go we have we have the whole board imported and ready to go that gives us a great starting point upon which that we could start start working we're going to do something even more from scratch or we'll go back to Eagle and I'm going to open up another design so here what I've done is I've just taken some random components from another board thrown some symbols down into the schematic I'm no electrical electronics designer I've laid out a couple components just for the sake of creating some cases some interesting cases for us to work through created an outline generated some holes this has an audio jack a microUSB and a nine T sub connector that sticks off the board connects with some standoffs and we'll go ahead and do this as well we'll we'll push this as a design create an infusion design I'm gonna put it in the same place again I've got all my packages so we'll just hit push we're gonna come back and look at the library side of this in a few minutes because we're gonna add another component and change a library component on-the-fly everyone hanging in there it's a little warm in here I know all right this is every every when do we want launch what oh when are we launched on our board Billa material is pretty pretty simple it's four components and no no traces no no etching required yes all right here's our component oops I may push it to the wrong place printables Thank You Man and there it is up that's demo three I named this right there now one of the things that's gonna look a little funny with this board is there's some big blocks on it and those big blocks are where a bunch of the secret sauce in making electric enclosures really easy so you can essentially see that my upcoming project that I will be launching on crowds applies but but we don't have an enclosure for it yet so we've got to get that done here pretty quick so let's talk about what those big those big blocks are and if we come back here as I said well bounce back to manage libraries in a minute what I've actually done is added extra detail inside of the components that I publish to the library normally we'd have an audio jack and we might think of that as just being the auto jack by itself but in this case what I've actually done is put a sketch on that component infusion i've extruded a cylinder that's roughly the region that needs to be kept clear for the audio cable in order to interface with the jack so I'm essentially modeling negative space and if I add my keep outs or my negative space to my 3d components every board that I populate comes with keep outs pre-populated so that the only thing I need to do is throw a box around it subtract the keep outs and I have essentially a functioning enclosure so this shortcuts a bunch of that work of me sketching openings that you saw me do on the board that I imported from a step model will bounce back and do exactly that we need a little a little room off the bottom so we'll give it maybe six mil off the bottom and in this case sketch I'm going to project the face and use that to define a boundary now again I can sit here and wonder how thick of a wall am I going to need well depending on how I fabricate this I might be doing it additively so my wall thickness we'll talk about in a few minutes is a function of the size of the nozzle on the printer I'm going to produce it on because we want an even number of beads laid down per wall thickness if I'm going to injection mold this then I've got design for manufacturability constraints that I need to worry about given what type of material I'm going to injection mold and if I'm in a machine it again I have different constraints so rather than designing my intent around the thickness of the wall I'm going to actually make that I'm gonna do the opposite I'm gonna model again the negative space how much volume do I need want around my board independent of what the wall thickness is so in that case I just need to add a couple quick dimensions so in on this end I want to keep a pretty tight tolerance so we'll just say half a millimeter on this end we'll do the same and I can type in 0.5 but again I'd like smart models so infusion anytime you're editing a dimension you can go to any other dimension that's visible in the canvas and just click on it and it creates a relationship between the two so now if I change the first the second will automatically match we can have a little more space on the sides so we'll put two mil on that side and once again we'll just tie those together and we're going to extrude this sketch profile and I can just window select all these interior regions and we'll make a quick Oh about that big doesn't even good enough and I'd like a little extra contouring to make this interesting okay so that gives me a very rough box but I said this is just the negative space so now I'm going to tell it I want to do a shell I'm going to shell this whole box rather than shelling to the inside which you might be more familiar with I'm going to show outward and give it one and a half no wall thickness so I've modeled a negative volume and I'm using that now to drive drive a wall thickness of a plastic part around it that way anytime I want to change the wall thickness universally around this component I just go to the shell change one variable and I get univer Universal uniform wall thickness around around the entire entire design that also then lets me we see our keep outs we'll just go ahead and say let's well let's add a little more detail on here round off some edges combined as we saw before this is my target I want that keep out removed I want that keep out removed one thing I find a lot of folks who get new to fusion are not familiar with a tool sometimes called select other or select behind in other CAD tools in fusion you just click and hold the left mouse button down anytime styler anything's highlighted while it's still highlighted you can just move your cursor up and down it'll grab all of the faces and edges behind your cursor if you go to the parens tab you can walk the occurrence tree up the model so I actually want the whole body because then I can just press V for visibility and toggle it off grab this body this body toggle it off now we can clean up this up in a few minutes because well let's clean it up now we did this combined and obviously we didn't have enough clearance in order to create an opening so this is we're working fast and iterating is great I just have that sketch I'm gonna pull that line up a little bit it rebuilds it Rachelle's it recombines and I've now created clearance through my model so I've built in intelligence and editability into my model without by not dimensioning that sketch line I can just drag stuff around and I we need to split it right we have to be able to get inside of this thing so let's just throw quickly an access through an area that will be easy to define a parting line and plane edit angle will do exactly what you saw before split the body using that plane and now we have a nice simple quick enclosure but we're not done there's a bunch of changes that are still going on so we're going to actually go back to Eagle and make some edits so let's go these documents right back into Eagle and we're going to take our D sub flip it and we're going to move that out and move that to the side so a bunch of changes have happened components have moved orientation position so we want those changes back to infusion telling us we're out of sync we need to do an update let's just push it and say okay what do you think is gonna happen pork blue screen yep the very first model I went through was a solid model imported by a step and that would be typically how you'd get kicad data and you'd export a solid model and then bring it in so obviously with that in with that setup you're working off of just imported geometry this relies on a very deep integration of the data between Eagle and fusion which I'm about to show you how deep that actually goes which what I just did I just pushed it back and forth and actually without even open on purpose in fusion nothing was open in fusion the model was not open there's no there's no smoke and mirrors here the model got updated and I'm just going to go to the the view of the data that's stored in the project so when we push the data the Eagle that went into the service behind the scenes that ties Fusion and Eagle together it updated the location of all of the components that were there it then rebuilt the fusion model automatically including the position of those components so you didn't see me do rebuild I didn't say update parametric features anywhere but if I look at the webview we see all of the components have moved and are in the right position even this has updated and changed its position so the integration between the two goes way further than just a data exchange of solid models Eagles actually editing fusions core data it's changing the parametric models inside of the fusion storage so that you can have super deeply integrated collaboration between the two and that goes both directions we're gonna come back into fusion and we'll open that up and we'll see that we're missing a whole there's a component that was that was moved and we should have seen we should have seen it opening but we didn't because it wasn't moved close enough to the edge so it tried my keep out wasn't big enough it tried to move it it did move it but it didn't have enough room or space to to make that work so I can fix that I'm going to go into the PC board feature and from here I'm allowed to move components so I'm going to just grab that USB mount I'm gonna just do a quick shift of position make sure I grab the right one component okay it shifted down as I exit rebuilds now we have an opening so I I fixed the mistake so we're gonna get into a two way loop I've changed a component I'm gonna save this because I've made a correction it's a good question I'm gonna go back to Eagle and pretty soon here Eagles gonna say the board is out of date with respect to the mechanical so now what I'm going to do is pull those component positions back from fusion into Eagle obviously a small change like this the the route probably is fine you know if I'd radically change things I probably need to rip some stuff up and reroute the traces and I had some failures built in on purpose to show show this because that move that the mechanical guys done he's Bork the electronics now I'm violating a live design rule here and it's showing that with a with a red hatching that I'm too close to the edge so but the whole point here is to actually show that there's this is now so tightly coupled that these types of iterations between the electronics and the mechanical become effectively pretty painless and the more intelligence you build into your library and loosely coupling modeling techniques that we've talked a few of the techniques we've talked about here mean that those models will will survive all sorts of interesting edits and changes which is what we want we want to be able to to be prototyping and making changes and not feel like the fact that models blow up prevent us from being creative or experimenting we want fast quick enclosures and highly iterative experience so hopefully that that gets us there yep so you'll notice everything that's happened here notification goes off and then I I explicitly say now I want to pull so fusion in an eagle in this case all both have a kind of pull model will tell you if there's something changed and then you pull when you want it that way you're not dealing with any simultaneous forking on an ongoing basis you can wait yes there is some tools inside both to tell you precedence so even on the fusion side I can show that really really easily when we go in we can look at things and say what you know what the heck's going on where's the board shape what's changed at any given point if there is conflict whose shape do I want to use right now do I want to use the Eagle board shape or the fusion shape at some point you're gonna have to to reconcile your edits but there are some safety tools in there too first tell you what's going on because that can be a little disconcerting not knowing what's happening and to to the point of pulling you can kind of tell it which way to prefer to be at a given moment in time yes the mental model is pretty pretty similar we're dealing with versions so we might call them you know and these things are discrete domain so we might even say they're like sub modules we're referencing each other at a version level we're not referencing at a commit you know every transaction and then we choose when we want to pull a major version between them that's even true for fusions assembly environment if you've used inventor or SolidWorks or others they tend to open what's known as latest so whatever the latest version of every item is in your team's project when you open it will grab the latest of everything fusion actually is an as saved behavior because everything's versioned it opens the versions at the time of save and then tells you if new items are available and you can pull them individually or in mass so it's a bit more explicit about pulling change between domains both inside a fusion in between ego in fusion that means a lot less surprises when you save something and you come back tomorrow and you open it you opened it as it was saved and then you're told if there's any changes and you pull them and it makes it a lot easier to absorb change and understand what what happened and this can quit can get quite sophisticated so fortunately if I go back to my crowd supply folder there I was sharing with Josh when this first work worked about nine months ago health PI guys were really nice to put up the board and schematic from Eagle directly I extracted that created a library added some 3d components and that produced this automatically so I was able to now get a highly detailed board of all of the components solder mask labeling I showed you a Raspberry Pi 3 throw these things two together and we're off to the races building building an associative enclosure between the two okay so I'm gonna happily share this presentation there's a bunch of content that goes through I'm gonna backtrack here in order to create a managed library you can take any one of your Eagle library files you go to library data yo you upload it once it goes there you're able to see all of the packages and footprints from there you can go to any one of your packages and you'll see the generic sort of IDF ish bounding box that's generated based on generic size data we can go ahead and tell it we want to upload a step or obj file you get some tools to do refinement of positioning on top of the footprint will then save that you know back to our library that updates my managed library the only thing you need to do then is back in Eagle pop up in the library manager you're gonna see in the library manager a little a little hard to see here I apologize it has like the recycling symbol which basically says your local your local Eagle library is not up to date with your managed library just hit update that will sync your local library file to your managed library and at that point your your symbol is updated with the 3d package pretty straightforward to go through do that it makes a nice centrally located place where you can upload all of your commonly used Eagle libraries if you're in there and you realize you don't have access to a model one of the things that's really handy let's just go take a quick look at this is there are component generators there for a bunch of and components already so if we've got an icy or surface-mount we can pull that up yep and oh yeah let's just get to it from here let's just go ahead and hit packages and say create a new package cuz I can do that I can fire that up right from from the home page so now we've got a list of common components grab one of these pastes in your spec sheet information update your preview and it's gonna generate the footprint it's gonna generate the 3d model and we have a 3d component ready to go hold tight and there we are so lots of 3d library parts all over the web that you can grab but a bunch of them you can auto generate right from from the library page and pull it down and reuse it yes so in the in the presentation when we're talking about enclosures I can't as a mechanical engineer I cannot resist spending a little bit of time by talking about design for manufacturability I've covered basically three really common enclosure paths so if you're a 3d printing it's really good to understand layer orientation and the fact that these are non isotropic materials and they behave differently depending on the direction of load so some basic things to understand about how the way you print affects the strength of the material the orientation you printing will affect the shape of the holes that you produce overhangs around round holes will often cause a little bit of sag that can cause the holes also to elongate because of resonance in the mechanical system what you might have thought was a nice engaged round hole will print as an oval and you'll wonder why your fasteners are pulling out so just be warned fdn printing or FFF printing has some some special considerations again when you're dealing with lateral loads you can find delamination if you're not careful about providing gusseting or ribbing and make sure you have enough enough perimeters when you're printing to take whatever sized thread that you're trying to put into it one thing I highly recommend everybody do if they're gonna be printing the more upfront work you do the better dividends you get later on this is a super easy thing to do it's a sketch it's five rectangles the first rectangle is I'm printing with a point three five nozzle that usually means I'm printing with a bead width of about point four two millimeters so the first rectangle is 0.42 wide the second way is x to the third is x three the fourth is x 5 and the fifth is fourth is x 4 and the fifths times five then you can extrude that one or two millimeters send it to your slicer of choice and you can see directly what the result of various different wall thicknesses will produce I cannot tell you the number of times I see people complain I'm trying to print this and there's a gap between my two perimeters or I'm trying to print this and my printer is itself off the table because it's trying to go do that zigzag pattern down the middle a little bit of work to tune your nozzle width to extrusion your nozzle diameter to extrusion width to wall thickness and set that up once you know what it is for your printer you can avoid all of those cases this just takes a minute to do and we'll pay you back hours of headaches later in life so highly recommended on injection molding there's a bunch of basic things to realize junctions cause thicker material thicker material cools differently you get sync marks if those are visible they are ugly if they're not visible it's up to you to decide if you want to ship it that way so there's some basic tips here about DFM around plastics there are a bunch of non-conventional clips that I realize not everyone's familiar with so I've given some really simple examples of Clips that engage in and out or engage differently and release differently depending on the way you would like to work one of the best tips I can give anybody trying to do cheap and fast is oftentimes people model this but if it's on the bottom of an enclosure all it requires is a standoff and a hole through the bottom and there's no slide and this will take a $50,000 tool and turn it into a $15,000 tool because there's no slides required so the fewer sides that you have under cuts from the less work required this is super cheap way to build in some smarts into a molded component again there's lots of times people go to fasteners some general tips that you can read about on fasteners including pros and cons about using fasteners for enclosures and lastly a two and a half axis machining undercuts are no no the more sides you have to work the part from the more expensive the part is going to be just some basic understanding some general guidelines around diameter radiuses of internal corners relative to depths of features when you start exceeding these rules your costs will go up expense exponentially with a manufacturing or prototyping house that includes depth of holes relative to diameters of holes so hopefully it gives you a few quick rules of thumb that you can incorporate into your enclosures and that avoid some surprises if you're manufacturing through any of these methods and there I am one minute over the clock so hopefully it was useful thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Crowd Supply

Views: 16,601

Keywords: croud_supply, teardown_portland_2018, OpenHardwareHardwareCrowdSupply, KevinSchneider

Id: oqSg1mZ-1vU

Length: 57min 59sec (3479 seconds)

Published: Sun May 13 2018