This course provides a deeper exploration of mechanical assemblies and simulation, which are key engineering features of the design and manufacturing process. The foundation of engineering design is exploration and iteration. Design is rarely a perfectly linear and straightforward process. In this course, we'll explore mechanical assembly design and simulation, focusing on testing and improving design components and performance. As we move through design assumptions, testing, and refining design ideas, we'll come closer to a final design, while developing a deeper knowledge in Autodesk® Fusion 360™ for simulating and analyzing product functionality. After completing this course, you will be able to: • Describe the engineering design process and workflow in Fusion 360. • Summarize the trends that are influencing the design industry. • Demonstrate knowledge and skills in more advanced Fusion 360 CAD and simulation skills
Making component holding features
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Engineering Design Process with Autodesk Fusion 360
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From the lesson
Design Optimization
Just because a design looks complete, doesn’t mean that it’s done. Often times you will go through dozens of revisions before achieving the final result. We'll explore ways to optimize the strength and reduce the weight of our quadcopter design, and we'll pull from experience to help guide design decisions.
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In this lesson, we'll talk about making component holding features.
After completing the this lesson,
you'll be able to apply sketch constraints and create an extruded feature.
Carrying on with the file from our previous example with XSTAR component active,
let's add a few more features in here to hold our components.
Now, as we're looking at the ESCs,
I don't really mind the fact that this right most ESC can float around a bit in here.
I don't want to have any features that are keeping at a specific distance from
this wall because I feel like the extra flexibility might help when we do an install.
What I do want to make sure I have in here is
a feature that helps keep these two apart because they do create a lot of heat.
We want to make sure that they're not sitting right up against each other
and actually creating too much heat or more heat than is needed.
Now, we have ESCs that are quite a bit overkill for our design at this point.
They're 40 amp ESCs and they're
40 amp because we're having the flexibility or the ability to go up to
a 4 cell battery system and at which point our motors will pull up to about 36 amps each.
So, these 40 amp ESCs allow us to go up to that 4 cell battery system.
In our current configuration Max,
they're going to pull 27 amps per,
so we actually could go to a smaller ESC that
takes up less space potentially produces less heat.
But since we're only going to be pulling a little bit more than 50 percent,
these are going to be fairly cool in the grand scheme of things.
So, let's go and select the bottom face and create another sketch.
And this time again we're going to do rectangles and I'm going to come in.
And again, I want to make sure that we're not snapping to any geometry.
You can hold down the control key to override
that and we're going to place a single rectangle here,
a single rectangle here,
and then I want to place two more over here.
Now, the reason I want to do that is because I want to make sure
that I positively locate this ESC.
I also am going to come in and place a line in here.
I'm going to select the line and press X
on the keyboard to turn it into a construction line.
It's going to allow you to mirror these across to the other side when I do my extrude.
Now, this geometry is fairly simple,
we could still mirror it as a feature or as
a sketch but I'm going to go ahead and just do it as a sketch in this instance.
Now, it's time to add some constraints.
Because we're going to be adding several of the same constraints,
I'm going to start by deselecting everything.
I'm going to scroll down to
my collinear constraint and then I'm going to select each individual line.
This collinear constraint will allow me to get around,
making an equal constraint between the vertical lines. I'll then hit escape.
I'm going to come down to an equal and I'm going to make sure
that the length of each of these is going to be equal.
That way, I have a consistent wall thickness and
a consistent print and then I'm going
to hit escape and I'm going to go ahead and dimension this.
I'm going to make this one here three millimeters.
I'm going to give them a distance apart of eight millimeters.
And I also want to make sure that I have a certain distance from this inside wall.
I'm going to make that 11 millimeters.
The next thing that we need to make sure is that we're
a certain distance from either the top or the bottom edge.
So, I'm going to come from this edge right here and get to come to
the internal edge and we'll call that 54 millimeters,
and you'll notice that the last thing that we need to
define is the height of each of these.
I'm going to make this in this equal,
that way I have a perfect square.
The next thing that we want to do is we want to add
a few more collinear relations because that'll
help us keep these in
the correct orientation without having to add any additional dimensions.
So, make sure that everything is deselected then you can pre-select collinear
and we can add a collinear between these two verticals as well as these two verticals.
So now, the last thing we need to do is
determine what the height location of these is going to be.
We can come back in here and we can add
that equal constraint to make sure that these are perfect squares.
And now, the only thing that we need to do is
decide what the vertical positioning is going to be.
We'll dimension it from the bottom of this edge to the top of this one,
a distance of 20 millimeters.
So, as we look at this,
I'm going to go ahead and turn off show constraints.
We have four squares and these are going to allow us to have
some sort of positioning to help us locate where these ESCs can sit.
It'll also help keep them upright so they don't start to fall over and it will
help us with our wiring and pre-wiring to make sure everything's in the right location.
We're going to go to sketch,
we're going to create a sketch mirror and we're going to mirror these four squares.
So, we have to select each of these edges.
We can also use a box selection or we can zoom in each one.
Once you have all four selected,
we'll use the vertical construction line we created as the mirror and say
OK. We can now stop the sketch and create an extrude.
We want to make sure that we select all eight of these squares and again,
we want to be careful not to add too much mass where it's not needed.
Now, in this case, if we come up a distance of 10 millimeters,
that should be enough to make sure that we have the ESCs in the right place.
If you want to go up a little bit more, we can go to 15,
but at some point we have to be careful because we're
adding mass and we're adding these tall walls but the taller they get,
the easier they're going to be to break.
So, 15 is probably going to be about
the limit and if we want to add a bit more structure to them,
we can add a small fillet or chamfer in these corners.
We'll go ahead and add one in between each of these.
We'll do the same thing for the other side as well.
Let's say five millimeters and now we're adding a bit more structure to that.
And we can add it on the back side as well but that's
going to be enough to help keep them in place and we can say OK.
So, at that point, that helps keep the ESCs in
their location with a little bit of extra room on the backside to let
this first one float depending on how
much room we need to get these wires around these boxes where the screws are going to be.
The last two things that we need to make sure are positively located are going to be
the power distribution board and the flight controller.
And the flight controllers are going to be the most critical in terms of positioning.
The power distribution board,
we just want to make sure that it's in roughly the right location.
Now, as we rotate this around,
the power distribution board itself has a small gap from the bottom
and that's okay because that's what we want and
we're actually going to be screwing that in.
What we're going to do is I'm going to hold down
the left mouse button and I'm going to select
the bottom face and then I want to start a new sketch on that face.
Then I'm going to use the peaky to project the mounting holes for each corner.
Now, this is a standard bolt pattern and if
you decide later on to change a flight controller,
use a different flight controller or a different power distribution board,
this is a pretty standard bolt pattern and you can use
multiple power distribution boards or even flight controllers like the full size CC3D,
we're using a micro CC3D here,
but the full sized one actually shares the same bolt pattern and it can be
very handy to use that functionality.
So, now that we have those four bolt locations,
what we want to do is we want to start a circle at each of these points.
So, sometimes you might have to zoom in depending on
other geometry that it might be trying to snap to,
and I'm simply going to just draw four larger circles right
now but I want to make sure that they're centered on these holes.
So, you notice because of the grids snaps that oftentimes
it tries to snap to those locations and
making sure that you're snapping only to the center point of those circles.
Once we have those,
we need to decide the diameter of the hole that we're going to
be creating in here as well as the size of the boss.
So, we're going to start by making all four of these circles equal
and come back over here and we're going to make these two
equal and back to the original and this one equal as well.
So, I'm going to make this six-millimeter diameter to give us
a nice large pad where we can attach to,
and as we look at this board,
you can see that it slightly overlaps a few things.
There's a small hole here and that's a through hole that could
potentially produce some problems if we have wires run to it.
So, instead of six, I'm going to reduce it to
five and make sure that I don't have any overlap here.
Next, I want to make sure that I add a hole that's going to
be an okay size for the screw that we're going to use.
And in our case, we're going to be using
a three-millimeter screw and this is
plastic and we're going to be using a thread forming screw.
So, in this case, two and a half will
be the bare minimum for the size that we're going to use.
And I'm actually gonna go all the way down to two millimeters in this case,
and that's going to give me plenty of meat or plenty of material.
And that way, whenever I screw that first time into the plastic,
it will create a nice deep thread for me to use.
And that way, I know that I'm holding the power distribution board in
a nice location and it's fixed.
So, once I have that first one designated,
I'm going to come down select equal and I'm going to go back and make all of
the new circles that I sketched in and make them all
equal to that internal two-millimeter size.
Once I have those, I can stop the sketch, create and extrude.
And again, I'm going to have to hold down that left mouse button.
I can also come in and I can hide
the power distribution board and the power distribution board will
help by allowing us to see the sketch without having to accidentally select the geometry.
So, the profile that we want is going to include
the larger OD five-millimeter as well as
the small distance between that and the two-millimeter.
So, make sure that you select all of those and then we're going to extrude
up to object and we're going to select the inside of,
in this case, our package tray or the component tray,
and it's going to join.
Right now, let's go ahead and save so we can move on to the last step of mounding
that flight controller before we finish
off the shape of our package tray or component tray.
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