hey guys, Aidan here, from core electronics and we're back again with another 3D printing tutorial but today we're not going down the slicer route, we're going to look at something a little bit different and that is our design software. So, computer assisted drawing programs or CAD programs, like in multitude you've got different options everywhere you look, different free options as well. So we're going to just choose one and stick with it and roll with it for a while and show you guys how do you use it to create some models for 3D printing because after a while you'll print everything there is to print on thingiverse and you'll want to start creating some of your own things for projects and the like around the house or if that's what you're doing for a product or something like that. So, we're going to jump on here we're going to have a look at fusion 360, it's our choice we're going to have a look at why and then we will just go through a quick rundown of the user interface. So, jump over the computer now and we'll do that.

So fusion 360 is a cloud-based design software from a company called Autodesk, which are massive company in 3D design, to find some fusion 360 software for yourself essentially just go to Google and Google fusion 360 and one of the first links will be from Autodesk.com and that's the one you're looking for it should look like something, like this when you get on here. Now the first thing you'll notice is that you can have a free license for students and educators, so if you’re a student out there looking for some good CAD software to use you get a free license essentially. So you just need to create an account and sign in and just enter your details as it asks for it, this also is free for hobbyists and people that are making less than 100k years, so it's also another great tool for those sort of people to be using, so I picked this one a couple of years back when I started picking up some CAD skills and I've just stuck with it ever since and it's got a really nice tool chain for 3d printing, so I've just stuck with it. Go ahead download your version of fusion 360 and then we'll open it up and have a look at it.

So, the first time you open fusion 360, it will look something like this you'll have an untitled project open and then on the left you'll have your data panel, which you can see a couple of our projects here, you can simply close the data panel if you like, if you want to open it back up it's just there. Essentially that's just a quick way to navigate between your projects, now there's a ton of information on the data panel, we're not going into that today, we're just going to look at the basic workspace and how it works for 3D printing.

So to move around the workspace, you can use your mouse which works really well or you can use these buttons options down the bottom of the screen, I like to use my mouse, the middle button allows me to pan, if I hold and shift in the middle button I can rotate around to the green dot that's in the centre of the screen, if there's a model on the screen it will be the centre of mass of that model that I'll be rotating about and pretty much with those two options I can get anywhere I need to, and the zoom so I can scroll the middle mouse button to get in and out. On the left hand side you've got the browser here, so in there I've got the options the document settings, so I can change the units that are measuring in I've got some named views, which by default are set to top front right in home, alternatively if I can use the view buttons up in the top right to get around to all the standard views, that you might want and actually mouse over them you can see where it's going to look at it from. So essentially just clicking, you know where you just reverse right back to home by doing that on there and then finally you can click here and see the origin. So, you can see those planes and axes if you click to turn them on but usually you have them turned off.

So with that in mind we can see that we put out our bed here and what can we do to make an object, essentially the things that you'll be doing with 3D printing, is you'll be sketching out your objects, using the create sketch button you'll pick your axes just like that, you'll create a 2D image of what you're trying to create and you can see that, that's just a basic rectangular shape. Once you're happy with your sketch profile, you can then do things to a sketched profile, by pull it or push it out we call that an extrude, we can go out by a certain amount there say 20 mil and then we have a cube.

Finally, we can do a few things to the outside of our model, things like filling the outside just by clicking these buttons and once we're happy with a basic model, we can save it as an STL file. So, we go into our browser here, go to the bodies and we can save it straight away as an STL file. Usually we leave this as a binary format, we're only saving the one body and you can choose whichever you like usually high it's pretty good. Once you've got that, save that one your desktop as body file, it'll essentially output a STL model to here and then we can open that up with Cura

All right so now Cura is loaded up, this takes a little bit longer than we're used to, with the old Cura version. We can go in and we can open that STL file, that we've just saved from fusion 360 and there it is right on the bed, ready to be sent to our printer, or ready for slicing and to be sent to a printer. So obviously that was a quick and easy model to just whip up in a few minutes, a few seconds even, but in the future, we’ll cover off on all the different tools that are available to us in fusion 360 and how we can use those to create bits and pieces for our own projects at home.

So, I hope that this tutorial was a little bit informative to you and you should jump on that free license as soon as possible and have a bit of a play in your own spare time, we'll be uploading some new videos in the next couple of weeks specifically to do with CAD software. So, stay posted for those ones and all the best with your projects.