autodesk fusion 360 - free for businesses making under 100k ??? Holy Sh#%

[Keith Rogers]

Have you all seen this?  CAD, Simulation, CAM, Rendering... free until your business makes over 100k?  Free to hobbyists?  Is this really happening?

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/design-differently/how-and-why-we-re-building-fusion/ba-p/5496355

[EschewObfuscation]

I hadn't, thanks! Sounds to me they realized their pricing model was pushing away the little guys, some of whom would later become big guys.

[|RyanW|]

First taste is free... 

[Keith Rogers]

Apparently the Ultimate (higher end version) is free for commercial use for hobbyists and any business making < 100k.  I suppose if you're making >100k, you can afford the $100/month.  I see this as a potential solution for a design station or two and most CNC equipment at the space.  Low end 3d CAM software alone will run around 1k give or take and it's typically licensed to one person and in need of upgrades within a couple years.  A big challenge to any CNC equipment is figuring out the tool chain from CAD to CAM to posting working (and safe) g-code.  This seems like an ideal solution for the lowest possible cost... something that individuals can design and tinker with at home and then make the most out of their space time with configured machines and post files.  I plan to spend a few days playing with it to see what is possible.  Free use of the cloud-powered rendering is sort of amazing if it's what I think it is.  This seems to be a smart way to market this type of software.  You get lots of people familiar with it at a hobby level and if they make a business out of their tinkering, and can afford the cost, they start paying to use.  Figuring out how to transition users at that pay-stage might be challenging but most successful business won't blink an eye at $100 / month for software that provides solid CAD-CAM-SIM-Render-Design solutions with on-call support.

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[EschewObfuscation]

Also, for all the hype about cloud this and cloud that, I expect many have an issue with the notion of letting an outside organization hold their data. But once you get people to do something (no matter what it might be), they'll find reasons why that was a good idea. So if they can get people to use "the cloud" because of the free offer, that may break through resistance on that point. Any data on how easy it is to get your files from their cloud service in a form usable with other software packages, should users ever want to peel themselves free?

Keith, if you become adept with this package, a class in its use should become a priority.

[Chris Weiss]

looks trivial to get the files out.

vendors learned long ago that companies don't buy products that hold
their data hostage. it's quite common now to easily get all your data
out.

[EschewObfuscation]

On Tuesday, March 24, 2015 at 10:07:00 PM UTC-5, ||cw wrote:

looks trivial to get the files out.

Chris, are you seeing that in a downloaded copy? I haven't found any mention of export capabilities on the web pages I've looked at so far.

It appears that pricing model is pretty new; the site still says "free for students for 3 years, startups for 1 year, 30 days for anyone else", so the forum post appears to be newer than stuff on their main site:  http://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/overview It's not yet 1 April, so I'm not yet in max paranoid mode, just normal-paranoid. So I'm assuming that forum post is real.

[Chris Weiss]

yes, I installed it. it also supports exporting in a variety of
formats, including STL.

[Keith Rogers]

There are a couple intro vids on youtube (part 1 of 2) that give good overview of the CAD side in early 2014.  T-splines adds a lot of capability that isn't present in most engineering CAD programs.  They don't go into it much here but it's pretty awesome that t-splines is included as a regular feature. 

On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 9:44 AM, Chris Weiss <cwe...@gmail.com> wrote:

yes, I installed it.  it also supports exporting in a variety of
formats, including STL.

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[Keith Rogers]

I didn't realize this but apparently McMaster-Carr has CAD files posted for a lot of their products.  The fusuion 360 has an option for directly inserting these models - pretty slick!  See demo here.

[Robert Kleeschulte]

I am messing with it on a MAC. It's a bit different than Inventor on a
few things, but it looks like it will be more user friendly to a newcomer.

Took me a bit to find out how to export to STL as the normal export/save
as does not give that option. you have to start at the top of the
modeling tree and right click on the name of the component that you want
and will show STL export.

[Keith Rogers]

I installed it but haven't played around too much yet.  I found the verbiage on licensing (or web service "entitlements" here).  I believe most of us would fall under the "startup" category and be given a 1 year license (or until we make >100k or they take it away). 

I haven't tested this but I think we could setup the software on a space computer and have individuals login with their own "startup" account, which would house their projects and allow the local generation of g-code for shapeoko or whatever CNC machines are available at the space.

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[Andrew Ricke]

We have an educational license of Autocad and several other cad/cam software on the lab PC.  That was the original purpose of me bringing the old desktop in before I got my laptop.  I can look into installing this autodesk version with the same educational license which if I read the site, will remain free beyond the one year.

Speaking of which, it is showing it's age and at least needs a card reader if anyone has a USB multi reader for the drive bay....

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[Brad Tissi]

Update: I think that the original post was pre-release. So here's an update.

Autodesk has released their new Fusion 360 3D CAD, CAM, CAE, software and is giving it away.

"Access the same design software used by industry leaders worldwide. A free 3-year license is available for students, teachers, and academic institutions. 

A free 1-year startup license is also available for hobbyists, enthusiasts, makers, and emerging businesses that make less than US$100,000 in revenue per year. At the end of 1 year, you can reselect the startup entitlement or transition to a commercial entitlement."

http://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/try-buy

Click on the Download Now button on the right side of the page, install it, sign in/up for an Autodesk account, then activate it. I selected the student/educator level for the 3 year span and it was just a check box, and I didn't use a .edu address.

Have fun...

[EschewObfuscation]

When I first heard of this, I thought "yippee, here I come!". Then after a little poking about, I concluded it didn't have any facility for plotting involute gears. So I wandered off, pouting, muttering "well, maybe when the release version comes out...".

Because of the above post, I looked again, and it still seems to not do gears. Is there a nonobvious way to do that; has anyone here become sufficiently adept with it to know that for sure? 

[Brad Tissi]

Hah, I just picked it up today. Though that would be an interesting addition.

On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 8:28 PM, EschewObfuscation <google...@mailfilter.33mail.com> wrote:

When I first heard of this, I thought "yippee, here I come!". Then after a little poking about, I concluded it didn't have any facility for plotting involute gears. So I wandered off, pouting, muttering "well, maybe when the release version comes out...".

Because of the above post, I looked again, and it still seems to not do gears. Is there a nonobvious way to do that; has anyone here become sufficiently adept with it to know that for sure? 

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[Chris Weiss]

did you check the scripts?  there seems to be a few gear options

[Keith Rogers]

If you're looking for exciting cheap gear design software, check out Gearotic by the same guy who wrote mach3 (Art Fenerty).

Inkscape will do basic involute gear profiles as well - good for laser cutting.  Making gears in a machining sense is usually a matter of using a set of specialty cutters or hobs combined with a rotary table or indexer.  If you've got the cutters / indexer, you can machine a given gear easier than calculating how to draw them.

Sent from my mobile device

On Mar 28, 2016, at 8:28 PM, EschewObfuscation <google...@mailfilter.33mail.com> wrote:

When I first heard of this, I thought "yippee, here I come!". Then after a little poking about, I concluded it didn't have any facility for plotting involute gears. So I wandered off, pouting, muttering "well, maybe when the release version comes out...".

Because of the above post, I looked again, and it still seems to not do gears. Is there a nonobvious way to do that; has anyone here become sufficiently adept with it to know that for sure? 

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[EschewObfuscation]

Yes, I looked at inkscape; doesn't do enough for my needs. I'll look into gearotic, thanks, hadn't stumbled across that one in my searches.

[Keith Rogers]

This gear convo got me curious... how would one go about drawing an involute gear profile manually?  Nick Carter over at cartertools has a pretty straightforward method.  Check it out here.

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[Jim S]

I loaded Fusion 360 on a couple machines (laptop and desktop).  Was pretty simple.  It said the video hardware wasn't optimum on the laptop but it runs fine.  At the end of the trial (a month or two IIRC) it just pops up and asks how you want to continue.  Since I am <<< $100k I selected that option and that was that.  I expected more questions but that was it.

I had a logo in Inkscape that I imported and made into a raised form for machining.  Worked great and cut the part out about a couple weeks ago on a friends router.  I hadn't done any 3d CAD up to this point.  Took a bit of learning but not too bad.  Their help forum is quite responsive.  The scaling is a little wonky from Inscape to F360 but once you figure out the proper scaling to adjust on import it's ok.

I am not totally sold on the cloud thing but it does make working on things on multiple machines easy and there are ways to get the models out although I haven't messed with that.  And it is easy to share files with others if you want to.

The CAM portion has a nice simulator so you can see what will happen when milling.  I would definitely recommend this.