AutoDesk Inventor Fusion 360

So for a couple months now I had been tinkering with Inventor Fusion for Mac after finding out it was free on the Apple App Store. What I didn't realize at the time is that there were two versions of the program available. I was actually starting to get frustrated because I would look for tutorials on youtube and I kept noticing that the user interface was different between what I was seeing and the videos (both of which running on Mac OSX mind you). This made it hard to follow along, and in some cases I couldn't find features or menus that were shown in some tutorials at all.

After struggling for a couple months, I was starting to think Fusion was nothing more than Autodesk's stab at making a Google Sketchup competitor: it just didn't seem like a good engineering design tool.

Somehow, and I cannot recall why, I was on the Autodesk site looking for info, and I noticed they were offering a free 30 day trial of Inventor Fusion 360, which is apparently a paid cloud app different from the standard free version of Fusion for Mac. So I decided to look through the features and see if there was anything worthwhile that would make a paid subscription worth it (just as a last ditch effort). Well it turns out after more digging, that if you are a student/teacher you can get a free 3 year license, and if you are a startup company you can get a free 1 year license!

So I decided to download the free trial and register myself as a free startup 1 yr license. Surprisingly, you don't need to provide any documentation that proves this, but there is a licensing agreement that you must agree to. I read through it, and it pretty much just states that when your license runs out, you need to subscribe to the cloud app if you plan to make profit from your designs. That shouldn't be a problem for me since my design work has been strictly personal projects.

So first project in Inventor Fusion 360: modeling the Fat Shark 600TVL CMOS camera for my next quad project. 

Inventor Fusion 360 is much more engineering centered than the standard version. The sketches are parametrically linked to the features, which I don't understand why they weren't in the standard version. It was very frustrating when you went back to an old sketch and tried to change a dim, only to realize the sketch no longer drove the feature. In 360 there is a time line at the bottom which is kind of like a feature tree and you can right click and edit what you have done much easier. I like this much better, although it is still archaic when compared to the feature tree in Solidworks or even ProE Wildfire.

I am sure with a little practice I will become much more proficient with Fusion 360 and things will start to make sense. Not sure I will ever like it as much as I like Solidworks just because I have so many hours on it and I have perfected my hotkey setup. However it is hard to argue with having a decent engineering tool which is free and so far does most of what you need.