Adding Colour Coding to Fusion 360 Assemblies

How did I not know about this Fusion 360 facility ?

I was watching a YouTube video on Fusion 360 joints by Garin Gardiner. I couldn’t help but notice that he had colours on his assembly listing and time line. My interest was really perked…..

A quick search revealed that this is a standard but maybe not so obvious Fusion 360 feature. Go to the Inspect drop down menu and then Display Component Colours. Magic (albeit it can be a bit garish ..) but it really helps you to see what part or function is with what. If you start to feel a bit nauseous you just have to use Shift+N to toggle it ON and OFF.

Here is my recent Mark Presling clamp in Technicolor. (OK the colours could be better chosen ..).

It’s funny how sad engineers get all excited about such simple things……

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Adding a logo to a Fusion 360 model

How to take a PNG file and import it as a SVG

While you might think I write my activities on my blog for general interest, you might be surprised to know that the main reader of my blog is me ….. my posts act as an aid to remembering how I made something or the processes I use.

I recently had a item to make and this needed a logo inserted onto the Fusion 360 model. I had the logo as a PNG file and I needed this to be converted into a SVG for ease of import to Fusion. You can do this conversion online for free at the following link : –

https://convertio.co/png-svg/

Once you have the SVG file you import this into Fusion using the Insert menu in the Design workspace. The inserted SVG can be manipulated to fit the location on the model and can then be extruded either as a cut or a build on the surface selected.

There is a simple video covering this activity on YouTube on the following link : –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rAi1lvgxS4&ab_channel=RubenGuscott

Sorry that was nothing exciting but it will help me remember next time I need to do this.

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Two important Fusion 360 Preferences tips

One obvious and one more specific

If you already know these Fusion 360 Preferences tips then well done. If not check out below.

The first one is to set the default orientation to be Z up so your CAM output is already well on the way to being correctly configured.

The second one is not so obvious – scaling the entire sketch based on the first dimension you specify. Suppose you have an object that you want to draw to scale based on a photograph image. If you import this using Insert/Canvas you get a faint image of the photograph over which you can superimpose your sketch. Once you have created the sketch you can then draw a construction line that runs from any two extreme longest points of the sketch. Measure the distance on the real object and then specify this dimension on your sketch. Everything on the sketch will now be scaled accordingly. So useful ….

Probably the best example I have seen of this was by Clough42 in this video about his construction of a depanelizing tool for PCB biscuits. He has done a further video recently using the same technique with dual axis images. This is impressive to watch.

Minor update on the Qidi i-fast to say all is going well and I am getting some very good print results. I am still debating which slicer to run with and do seem to be getting more repeatable prints using Simplify 3D.

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3Dconnexion Spacemouse has better Fusion 360 integration

I had a mailer this morning from 3Dconnexion to say that their Spacemouse has now got better integration with Fusion 360.

One of my long standing frustrations when using Fusion 360 is that there did not seem to be a short cut or macro to provide the equivalent of using your right hand mouse to click on ‘Home view’.   This is desirable when you have flipped and spun your model and just want a single action to reset the view to your starting position.

It appears that the 3Dconnexion Spacemouse now provides this and it can be associated with one of the two buttons on the device.   You have to go to Settings/Buttons/Views and then select ‘ISO1 View’

Note that you have to set up the use of the two Spacemouse buttons for each Fusion module i.e. once in the Modelling module and once in Manufacturing module.

Attached below is a write up of the process.

SpaceMouse-Home-view-with-Fusion-360

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Try again after update completes Fusion 360 Error Message

I have had issues when opening Fusion 360 files downloaded from third party fellow users.   I never really got to the bottom of this.   Sometimes they would send me an assembly file and I could open the separate items in the structure but not the overall structure itself.

Things then got worse after a visit to France when I created some straight single item models on the machine out there.  On return to the UK I could not open these files getting a message “Try again when update completes”.   What updates ??  Both the Fusion install in UK and France were running the same version of Fusion so what was the problem ?

I happened upon a thread in the Fusion forum that suggested uninstalling Fusion and re-loading from scratch.   This solved the problem.   The files all now open on all machines.

Be warned – trying to find a simple click to download button on the Fusion site without going through lots of marketing click boxes is not simple.   I was expecting to just log into the Fusion site with my account details and find a hassle free download.   It doesn’t seem that simple.   I got there in the end though and all is running well.

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