I think ‘hey, I’ve got a printer, I want it to look a little more put-together, I’ll harness the beastie and start making panels for it!’
I then looked at the Inventor Fusion videos on Youtube and feel like the music student, listening to Bach, who only just found Middle-C on the keyboard.
I can get the general shape, but the more precise things like ‘I need three holes, 25mm from the LCD opening, for sound, the rotary encoder, and the kill button’ is escaping me.
I’m sure at this point, someone will say ‘There’s a panel mockup in Sketchup, just convert it to an SDLPRT file, then to a fusion document, drag and drop, baby!’
or…
Inventor Fusion isn’t the app for that, you need
Last time I did any mechanical drawing…it was IRL, with a pencil and a T-square.
Usually once you have the primitive shape you would put a “sketch” on the surface you plan to put your holes on. The sketch should allow you to type in dimensions based on offsets from the edge.
@Matt_Miller not likely, the delta didn’t kill me, this won’t either. It’s a stupid problem, more like "how do I specify three holes, 25mm from the LCD, and spaced out to perfectly align with the parts on the board.
It’s one thing to kinda throw extrusions together and see what sticks, and draw stuff in the right place because you need it there.
A helpful step is to first draw the objects that already exist.
If you are trying to make an enclosure for a RAMPS board for instance, import an image of one and model it in 3D by simply tracing it, or better, see if a nice reference model has already been made and uploaded to Thingiverse or Youmagine.
Once you have the reference model, its much easier to model parts that will surround or attach to it. You don’t even need to know the original dimensions, just check the fittings by sight within the model and then adjust accordingly.
Odd, for some reason I posted and it didn’t show up.
Big trick is the sketch. Create the sketch on the work plane you need to tinker with. You’ll use a lot of offset commands to draw intersections where you want holes. Once you have the lines all there, use the hold wizard, it will try to snap to the intersections leaving your holes in the exact place you want them.
Thanks Andrew, that’s definitely 90% of the way there, I’m going to need to spend some time digging into the scad to understand it…which will be after Halloween.
it explains that if you click on the pin symbol of the transient dimension then it will remain fixed so your holes will remain the set distance from the edge.
Hopefully this will help you with finding the precision you require.
I wanted to thank y’all for your input. a combination of ‘offset plane’ and ‘axis through two planes’ was what got me most of the way there. I haven’t printed the panel yet, but the Z-bed supports (elsewhere on g+) were all laid out using these techniques.
