This is so cool, stuff like this makes me wish I had studied mechanical engineering instead of computer science.
Does anyone know of a good route for learning the software stack associated with this stuff? I keep up with some maker YT channels like Stuff Made Here and they usually do an okay job of showing which machines were used and how each piece was made. But what they usually never show is which programs they used to model and mock up their creations before they started machining.
I'd really love to learn more about CAD modeling and designing these kinds of projects but I don't know how to get started.
I don't know of any great resources, but from my personal experience and understanding of the landscape is that Fusion360 is the most common real CAD program used by hobbyists, and small shops (especially those that are basically "hobbyist bought a bigger mill and moved into a larger garage"). Some of the bigger places will use SolidWorks (which is what 95% of my CAD experience is in), but the price there is way out of the range of someone just trying to learn.
In general, the aspect you're asking about is called an "assembly" - where you can bring in multiple parts that you have designed (and even design new parts "in place") to see how they go together and, to a minor extend, interact. I say "minor extent" there because most assembly systems aren't running full physics simulations or collision detection, at least most of the time - SolidWorks will happily let you design and assemble a model that is physically impossible to put together, while letting you rotate bodies through each other.
So yeah, I'd recommend starting with Fusion360. There are plenty of resources out there for learning it, but I do know that Grimsmo Knives and NYC CNC have videos showing how they specifically use it.
Here's what seems like a very in-depth video from Grimsmo on 5-axis machining (so definitely not applicable to just starting to learn, but this is the first I found - I know plenty of their other videos have details about fixturing and setup): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqhctiVZtRU
NYC CNC has an entire playlist called "Fusion 360 for Beginners": https://www.youtube.com/nyccnc/playlists ; I haven't watched any of that, but I've watched plenty of their videos and enjoyed them, so think that playlist should be at least a bit helpful.
There's plenty more detail here, but I don't have the time at the moment to dig deeper - if you have any questions, feel free to leave them here and I'll see what I can dig up.
> Some of the bigger places will use SolidWorks (which is what 95% of my CAD experience is in), but the price there is way out of the range of someone just trying to learn.
FWIW, SolidWorks does have a low cost option ($99 a year):
And arguably there also features included in the above that are not available in the free version of Fusion 360 (available in the paid version, which has similar licensing costs to full blown SolidWorks).
This Old Tony, Blondihacks, Wintergatan, and others have done end-to-end videos from CAD to machining to assembly. I particularly recommend Blondihacks' beginner videos: well produced, fun to watch, and cover nearly everything you need to know to get started.
Also, face the reality you won't be doing work like this on day one. But you will make something fun.
So I'm a software engineer too, but also a cyclist. A weightweenie. At certain point, you begin to mix and match totally incompatible parts, solvable with a modest manufacturing capability. For me, the learning path was basically the same as with programming - lots of motivation, access to internet and tools (a machinist). Back in school, we were taught part sketching and machining basics, which helped a bit. I picked FreeCAD out of available open source solutions, watched a lot of great tutorials on YouTube and, though trial and error, managed to produce designs good enough to serve the purpose. Machinist services in Russia are incredibly cheap, especially if they have their own machines in a garage. With small beginner projects, the price of error is just your time and materials, don't be afraid to experiment.
On a side note, my mechanical engineer acquaintance complains that he should have followed the CS route because programmers earn substantially more here. The grass is greener.
I'm like your acquaintance. Did mechanical engineering, worked for a few years and realized the jobs around here doing mech eng kinda suck and the pays bad. In software now and sure, it's not hands on as much as I'd like but I earn enough money now to live comfortably and work on my own projects at home in my free time. For me it was a priority shift. Earn more so I can provide for my family better and then use the rest to work on modest projects as hobbies. Or earn less so I can work on mechanical projects but not be able to provide the quality of life for my family I'd like.
Fusion 360 has a free version and is very approachable. It's pretty popular among 3D printing hobbyists, but you can use it for all kinds of 2D and 3D designs.
I was Chris's housemate at the time, the victim of the hours of 'sssshhhh sssshhhh shhhhh'. Interestingly, he rendered this mostly by drawing boxes in pov-ray -- I'm not sure what he used to make dimensioned drawings, but it was definitely not any of the modern CAD tools, and they were mostly for his reference.
But these days, I do highly recommend Onshape -- it breaks down a lot of the 'rules' that I thought I knew about CAD software. I started using it about two months ago; one of my clients uses it for real industrial design of some IoT hardware, so it is powerful enough to do real things. Before I started using Onshape, I thought that 1) all CAD software was a million billion gigabytes, and required stupidly powerful hardware for no readily apparent reason, and 2) had an annoying licensing model that requires you to jump through hoops to get access to the free tier. Well, neither of these are true with Onshape: I went from 'hmm, maybe I should try this for my personal projects' to 'constraining a sketch' in about 90 seconds ... on Linux ... in Firefox ... on my Shenzhen ThinkPad ... with an Intel GPU. I was blown away at how much it failed to suck.
Anyway, my suggestion on choosing software is: it probably doesn't all that much matter. What you want to learn is the CAD mindset, not the software. An experienced MechE once told me that if you are not careful, you can end up writing 'spaghetti CAD'. These tools these days give you a lot of features that are, in theory, more expressive, but in practice, can result in unmanufacturable parts or unmaintainable designs: be careful!
> Before I started using Onshape, I thought that 1) all CAD software was a million billion gigabytes, and required stupidly powerful hardware for no readily apparent reason
Does anyone know of a good route for learning the software stack associated with this stuff? I keep up with some maker YT channels like Stuff Made Here and they usually do an okay job of showing which machines were used and how each piece was made. But what they usually never show is which programs they used to model and mock up their creations before they started machining.
I'd really love to learn more about CAD modeling and designing these kinds of projects but I don't know how to get started.