Tag: 3D modeling

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Learning from the “Firsts”

For me, this week involved a lot of the “firsts.” It was my first time using the Fusion 360 to design and print out an object, first time interviewing an expert user for the project, and my first time not feeling lost about the direction of the project that the team was taking. With the advancements that we have made this week, I feel more confident that we will be able to provide a tangible product that will help our intended users by the end of the project timeline.

Autodesk 360

This week, one of our focus was on learning how to use the Autodesk Fusion 360. As someone who was hoping to learn about 3D designing software such as AutoCAD and be able to create an object through it, this was an exciting topic. In fact, I was so mesmerized by the shapes that were taking form on my screen while doing the first assignment that I forgot that it was to complete up to part one of the videos. Instead, I ended up completing all three videos to create a final product in one sitting even though it took me several hours.

My first attempt at creating an object on Fusion 360

Although it was fun and I enjoyed the process of creating a product on Fusion 360, there were many frustrating moments throughout the assignment. While trying to interact with the interface, I found out how difficult it is to select a very specific area or a part of an object created. Sometimes, it seems like you clicked the correct side or a part of an object but when viewed from a different angle and zoomed in, that may not be the case. It also frustrated me that there were so many lags with the interface. Many of the times when I tried to change the perspective of the view, the interface would lag, testing my patience. Regardless, I am very satisfied with the result and proud of how much I taught myself going through this one assignment.

The practice with Fusion 360 continued in class with Dan Banach from Autodesk leading the workshop. I was extremely happy to find how easy it was to follow him since I already dedicated a lot of time learning the interface. I am usually afraid of using such technical software since I feel that I am slow with technology but this time, I am looking forward to continuing to hone my skill and see where this leads to.

A phone stand created through Fusion 360 during the workshop led by Dan Banach

Interviewing Ryan

This week, our team finally had an opportunity to interview an expert user of a wheelchair. We were privileged to interview Ryan, one of the mentors for the course. With our goal of creating something that will improve the experience of youth wheelchair users, we began to ask him for his stories, especially focusing on his past. He was extremely nice and opened up to us quickly, sharing his stories and emotions that he felt being a wheelchair user since he was young. While sharing the stories, he shared one particular problem that he continues to face as a user of an automated wheelchair: rain getting into the joystick of his chair, leading to a power outage.

Ryan demonstrating his current solution to prevent rain from getting into the joystick of his chair, which is to simply put a plastic bag over the part

With further discussion, we came to the conclusion that it is better for us to focus on something very specific like Ryan’s challenge, rather than something broad like the one that we have been planning on addressing. Although Ryan liked our original idea, he guided us to a different path since we were under a time constraint. Therefore, we will continue to focus on this particular challenge and address it. We also realized that by pursuing this opportunity, we will be able to utilize the technical skills that we are obtaining in class and provide a tangible product by the end, whereas for the other topic, we weren’t sure how that would happen.

Now that our path of the project is a little more clear, we are planning on returning to our plans and activities that we have done in class to modify and adjust accordingly. Although I have always been nervous that our team was behind and unclear about our destination, I now feel much more confident that we will be able to achieve something that will be of help to users like Ryan by the end of the project. This experience confirmed the importance of working with mentors and understanding the perspectives of the users, so we are hoping to set up more interviews with not only Ryan again, but with other users of wheelchairs also. With the new topic in our mind, we have already started visioning what our product would look like, and we are looking forward to where it will lead to!

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A Fusion of Knowledge

THE VIEW FROM THE STUDENT’S DESK.

This week, we dived into using a CAD program called Fusion 360. First, as part of preparation for class, we read through some of the program’s guides and watched a video that walked us through creating a lidded box. In the process, we had our first introduction to Fusion360’s interface and built upon our 3D modelling experience from using Tinkercad as we had before to being able to use Fusion360 as well. In terms of complexity, Fusion360 definitely seems like a more complex program that we can use to create a wider range of models more efficiently than Tinkercad, and I was incredibly excited to be moving along in the 3D modeling learning process.

  • Original Model Created
  • Materials Application
  • Mesh for 3D Printing

For class this week, we got to attend a workshop by a representative from Autodesk. During the workshop, we were taught more about Fusion360 and learned more quickly and thoroughly through the guidance of the representative than we would have if we had set about messing around by ourselves. Throughout the process, we created a phone holder as a project which would allow us to explore many of Fusion360’s features. The versatility of Fusion360 was really fascinating to me. Although this is a relatively small feature which may not impact the modelling process as much as other sketching and creation tools, I found it interesting that we could change the different materials that we were modelling as well as model painting and enameling the model at the end. There were so many different combinations possible, and it is even capable of rendering a 3D model within a couple set backgrounds and lighting settings to simulate possible real-life locations. Additionally, the Fusion360’s feature that allows you to go back to each individual action and edit it without destroying any processes you have applied to it afterwards is going to be incredibly helpful in future projects. Afterwards, we were able convert the model to an STL file and 3D print our first model ever. I really felt a sense of accomplishment in being able to hold something that I created and modelled from scratch myself.

  • The phone holder in use.
  • A view of the phone holder’s bottom.

DEVELOPMENTS IN PROGRESS.

During the last hour of class, we were able to touch based with our TA and mentor, Mehmet, and he helped guide us through developing further along our project ideation process. We first quickly reviewed the concepts we had gone over in the previous week before moving onto creating insight statements based on the themes we had created. These insight statements describe challenges for the people in the community that we interviewed based upon each of the themes. For example, one insight statement Solestice came up with was “Stigma of looking different affects the [prosthetic] user’s self-confidence.” After gathering our thoughts with these insight statements, Mehmet introduced us to the idea of “How Might We…?” Questions. These questions are meant to be created neither generically nor too specifically and can be used as ways to think of our project goals without getting tunnel-vision with a single solution idea. One of the questions Solestice came up with was “How might we increase stability for prosthetic users?”

Our only other update on the project is that we are in the process of scheduling an interview with a professor who makes shoes in his free time to learn more about a shoe’s design functions and how we might use those design aspects to our advantage with the tread we end up creating.

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Week6: First Touch in Fusion

Fusion 360 – Phone Holder Modeling

Prior to this week’s class, we had a pre-class assignment that introduces us to the Fusion 360. The video we needed to watch guided us, step by step, in creating a box assembly. I followed the steps and created a part of the box assembly. I found that the shapes with the shortcut keys are extremely useful and fast when we are using fusion 360 as compared to the tinkercad.com.

In this week’s class, we had a guest speaker from the Autodesk coming in to teach us how to use fusion 360. We had a hands-on experience of creating 3D models using fusion 360. The guest speaker led us through designing our own cell phone holder step by step. I was very excited about this type of hands-on experience because the hands-on experience is when we can actually learn how to use the different types of software and technology for our project and our future use. I believe that this learning session of 3D modeling will be very useful for our team when we get into the designing and prototyping stage for our project.

Fusion360 3D Modeling & Printing Record

“How might we …” – Question Generation

In the later one-third of the class, we went back to generating insights for our project. We selected three of the major themes that we decided are important in defining our challenge. Then we selected three insights under each theme we identified. According to these insights, we converged to the most important three and formulated a “How might we …” question for each of the insights. All of these questions aggregated together help us define our major challenge and what we need to work toward. I think this activity of design thinking makes us form a better understanding of our intended users as well as the challenge because we were able to brainstorm all the insights we have and aggregate them to form meaningful themes. Through these meaningful themes, we were able to organize what we observed to what we need to solve in reality.

At the end of this design thinking activity, we (our team) come to the conclusion that we need to design a product that will both help the users with prosthetic leg both be able to keep their stability and have the ability to slide. This product needs to help during standing poses (yoga) and not get in the users’ way during the grand poses. Since the product is designing for users with a prosthetic leg, one of the most important ideas is that the users want to look normal and not be different from others. Then designing a product that can both help a prosthetic user stay in balance and be subtle during classes to not draw attention would be extremely important.

Continuing with our project, we will continue to try to reach out to the experts and organizations we found online for the research. We hope to gain more insights to help us generate more ideas and understand our challenge better by continuing with our research. I am also looking forward to learning the tools we have access to and having hands-on experience on the tools in the fab lab starting next week.

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Fusion 360 Workshop

This week we focused on the CAD software, specifically Autodesk Fusion 360. Prior to class this week we learned quick shortcuts and the basic fundamental of parametric designing. Dan Banach, education program manager at autodesk, gave an immersive presentation of the world of Fusion 360. He has more than 30 years of Fusion 360 knowledge. He was there from the very start. It all started with a 3D model of a five and quarter sized floppy disk. Dan also simply broke down the ideology of the cloud product innovative software Fusion 360, into three main components: use, design, and make. After his intro  we had the task of going through a tutorial of creating a phone charging stand. This helped us get even more familiar with the functions and capabilities of the software.


Dan Banach during the Fusion 360 Workshop

I myself have some knowledge and previous with CAD. However its with solidworks, which is a lot different from Fusion 360. You have similar capabilities, but solidworks is far more complicated. I like how simplified Fusion makes computer aided design. The shortcuts and keys were super easy to pick up on and the drop down menus house every function. Solidworks took me some time to get a stable grip on. Both softwares are great in their own respective ways. Regardless of which a person chooses you’ll still get a understanding of not only parametrics but design thinking. The software gives you a different method of approaching problems and design decisions. The simplest thing from a curve to the material itself of the product all attribute to the overall product.

My final design and render of the phone charging stand

After the Fusion Workshop ended we were given another on “How to Statements”  from our TA Mehmet Aydin. This activity allowed us to further explore the centralized themes within our ideas. After choosing the top three themes, which we wrote out in concise sentences, we created a how to statement. Essentially staging  a question of how were were going to do some of the things we sought out to solve. Like mentioned in last week’s presentation his is a cycle within the design process. We came to conclusions last week, but this exercise allowed us to revisited, rethink, and revitalize some of those ideas. I feel like now we have a pretty concret grip on the opportunity and the market in which we’re trying to infiltrate.