My team uses Fusion 360 for our CAD and CAM needs. I decided it would be nice to have some simple tools like those available for OnShape to simplify robot design. I searched around and could not find Scripts or Add-Ins for Fusion that were similar to those available for OnShape so I decided to take a crack at making some.
Please try them out and give me some feedback on them. They are in a very early development stage and are definitely buggy. With build season just around the corner, I don’t anticipate having a ton of time to put into making improvements in the near future. My hope is that they will be helpful for myself and my team for the 2025 design cycle.
I have not tried them on MacOS but they are written in python and I think they are supposed to work.
Haven’t had a chance to play, but read the docs and it looks Very Nice! Suggestion, I don’t think most peeps gain/need the actual belt profile generated. Is there an option to just use the rough preview as the finished belt?
FYI: FRCTools is already a thing (https://frctools.com, it supports the rules plugin on CD). Not asking you to change it, just letting you know lol. We both picked a very generic name
Now that I have tried it out, I can confidently say that this is super useful and I will be using it this season. However, I did have a few areas that I think it could be improved:
1: Pulleys are made at the origin, and so then you have to go move them, t would be quite a bit easier if you could set a centerpoint for the pulley
2: I’m really not quite sure how to use lighten, some documentation on that would be super nice
probably be a lot faster to just generate a pulley externally and then add it into your design as a component. can add whatever bores/flanges to make that pulley do specific things (i.e. end cap for roller).
I love this. Our team is at a school which almost exclusively uses Fusion, so we didn’t want to use Onshape. With this, it helps solve the problem parts we couldn’t easily make!
One note; whenever I lighten a part with more than 4 faces, the program says “Compute Finished” in the bottom right, and Fusion freezes. I have to use task manager to close Fusion, which is a problem. Anything you can do?
I just put out a new release that should fix Lighten locking up the Fusion UI. It also allows an option to the Timing Belt generator to keep the belt toothless. It keeps the size of the belt just the thickness without the teeth but it probably makes more sense to have the simplified toothless belt be the thickness including the teeth so it is more obvious if something will rub on the belt. Also, If you find any bugs or features that you think may be useful then feel free to either post here or start an Issue on GitHub.
The idea behind the Timing Pulley generator is as @tkchan stated. It was not intended for COTS pulleys. It would be a starting point for say a dead axle hub that you would create as a separate file and then insert it into a design as a component using joints to place it. Something like this:
@GalenSpooner as far as how to use the Lighten command, it basically just offsets a profile (the selectable areas that you can Extrude) inward, then extrudes that offset curve toward the solid, and finally fillets the extruded feature.
So for example the following is a gear reduction setup for a climber using 2 Krakens and a 9:1 reduction:
