Using Fusion 360 for the Time Machine

Arthur Harsuvanakit and Lucas Prokopiak are on our team. Speaking of teams, they teamed up with Autodesk CEO Emeritus, Carl Bass, as well as two guys from LUNAR Design to imagine, design, and create a clock. You may recall that this clock won some SPARK Awards.

Read blog article.

Well Lucas and Arthur decided to share their story on the Fusion 360 blog:

Read about their experience.

They told it like it is — the good and the bad. Knowing Arthur and Lucas for years, I recall their initial experience as well as this latest one:

Good

• Having been familiar with non-Autodesk software prior to learning Fusion 360, one can easily adapt to the new interface of Fusion 360. After some getting-used-to, modeling the components becomes intuitive.
• Working with models in the Simulation workspace, after only a few clicks, a user can generate results that are digestible even for someone with limited finite element analysis experience.
• Using the rendering workspace is easy, quick, and acceptable; however, using advanced features to add textures and different environments generates realistic renderings that could easily be mistaken for actual photographs.
• After working through the difficulties (see Bad below), it was great to create realistic moving simulations of the clock design.
• The ability to edit parts and automatically update toolpaths was a big time-saver.
• With the click of a button, Fusion created a photorealistic movie to showcase how the clock functions.

Bad

• When simulating an off-center stepper motor interfacing with a custom-designed central gear featuring perpendicular teeth using joints and contact sets, Fusion struggled to smoothly solve such computationally-intense calculations.
• Using motion links, motion studies, and in-depth animations presented their own difficulties.

Whereas the good extols Fusion's benefits, the bad uncovers opportunities for improvement (which itself is the goal of our experiencing our software for ourselves).

Since Lucas and Arthur are members of our team, we all pitched in to help assemble the clocks at our Pier 9 office:

We employed a very sophisticated system of quality control:

Storytelling is alive in the lab.