Summer Interns Imagined, Designed, and Created a Mechanical Octopus using Fusion 360

As I have mentioned in previous posts, we had some summer interns working to put Fusion 360 through its paces and report back to our CEO and the Fusion 360 team. Here is the final project for 3 of them.

• Ali Ahmed

  Ali is working on his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. He will graduate from George Washington University in 2018. He has lots of experience with AutoCAD and 3D Printing. One of his projects was using MATLAB to compute a more optimal gearbox ratio for a Baja race vehicle and then designing, fabricating, and installing the metal gears. He's even mentored a freshman-founded company that is developing a 3D printed violin.

• Connor Freeman

  Connor attends UC Berkeley, majoring in mechanical engineering, and will graduate in 2018. He has experience with AutoCAD, Fusion 360, and MATLAB. He's a shop assistant at school, so my guess is that he's seen other students make every kind of fabrication mistake that can possibly be made and knows what “not to do.” Connor is currently designing and fabricating a live object LED wire that's hooked up to an Arduino which fluctuates and glows according to incoming Twitter data.

• Eni Asebiomo

  Eni is majoring in mechanical engineering and computer science at Stanford. He's been working with Raspberry Pi as well as studying materials, thermodynamics, and fluid mechanics. He assembled his own 3D printer and then modified it (designing and fabricating new/replacement parts) to print with pre-melted chocolate.

Since our team is part of the Office of the CTO (OCTO), we have an affinity for the octopus. Just look at what we did a while back with the Autodesk logo.

So the interns imaged, designed, and created a mechanical octopus using Fusion 360. They did their fabrication at our Pier 9 office.

Here are the motors that provide its operation:

Check out their animation:

They loved Fusion's integrated parametric, sculpting, analysis, simulation, and fabrication environment but did manage to make some suggestions for how it could be even better.

Thanks, Ali, Connor, and Eni.

A mechanical octopus is alive in the lab.