Week 2: Computer-Aided Design

Week 2 started with Fusion 360 which is a software that I had used previously, having access to a MAC as my chosen electronic. The activity of the week was to have a speed challenge, to see how quickly I could create an even 6-sided die on Fusion 360. The dimensions for the die is 10mm x 10mm x 10mm, with 1mm fillets on all edges, 2mm pips that extrude cut 0.5mm into the die as shown below.

I had many goes at the die speed challenge, finding different techniques that would speed me up. I would continuously learn techniques like some of the hotkeys, and tricks to improve. Some of the major techniques I learned include using “c” for creating circles, using “e” to quickly extrude, and highlighting the entire structure to fillet all the edges at once. This lead to a steady improvement in my time from 4:13-2:05 minutes. Below are the times I took over a few attempts at the challenge, with most taking place one after another.

After playing around with Fusion 360 more,  I found that it would be difficult for me to improve on my time of 2:05. There is a lot I can learn about fusion, as there are many shortcuts that I should learn. Ways to shave off time include starting to use some of the key shortcuts, find a completely different method of creating a die or keep practicing to perfect the method I was using.

Continuing with computer-aided design, I looked into Adobe illustrator, to help me create a background, and thumbnail for my website. I wanted to have a very simple color scheme where the background faded from one color I liked, to another color I really liked in the vertical direction. This was very simple in illustrator, as there is a tool that is made for this exact purpose. Below is the outcome.

This would end up being my background. I also made a thumbnail for my blog on Illustrator. Back in my post in week 1, you can see the outcome, but for that, I made use of the trace tool of Illustrator to get an outline of my head, so that I could black it out and put it in front of the gradient I made. I believe it looks good, and I am happy with how it turned out. This was also very simple, as tracing was built into the software and very easy to access.