Recreating the Hooli Box | Hacker News Reader

Recreating the Hooli Box

benhoad.net

95 pointskimburgess30 comments

This is far more impressive than the time I spent three full work days recreating the scrum board from season 1... Then again if I was an engineer and not a product manager, I probably would have chosen something else.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/qP9Kobt147kNo2vt5

Three full work days?!

Sounds about right...

It wasn't just me, you see. If it was, I probably could have gotten this done in one or two. But, because we are a team, we had planning sessions where I needed my team to commit. There, the team had long heated debates about some of the cards. You see, several had a great deal of uncertainty surrounding them. No matter how far you'd zoom in, some of the requirements were not fine-grain enough to be understood. Ultimately, we came up with a few prototypes and a/b tested to get at the best solution.

I just realized that the most important card from the emergency column was missing from that photo. I've added that to the album.

This is tangential to the core topic at hand but how did you/other readers get into CAD? It seems like such a useful skill to be able to design physical enclosures among other things, especially with the cost of additive manufacturing with 3D printers being so low. Any useful guides/communities worth mentioning? I am a little familiar with Blender but found it to be a little overwhelming to use, and I assume that most professionals use the Autodesk suite of tools but that seems really pricey to just get started using as a trial/for non commercial applications to start with.

I work with a lot of Mechanical Engineers, they all use Solidworks. https://www.solidworks.com

Yeah my introduction to CAD back at Uni was Solidworks and Catia, but for quick cadding of things where the material properties aren't too critical I just use Fusion 360.

I had 4 years of CAD in High School (autodesk had an office in town) and one year of 3DS Max, but it really feels like one could take some community college courses and get up to speed FAST.

Fusion 360, which looks like is what is being used in the article, has a free license as long as you're a hobbyist or your business makes less than $100000. Fusion 360 has its quirks, but it remains my favourite tool for this type of work, and it's relatively simple to learn (though like any powerful tool it can also get pretty complex).

yup, it's Fusion 360, I've got a background with SolidEdge and Autocad but Fusion is the best for quickly making decent parts with a 3d printer that need to be made-to-measure.

Solidworks is quite popular; it's not THAT hard to pick up, but make sure you have a real mouse as the middle button / scroll wheel are important.

They have an educational version for $150. https://store.solidworks.com/studentstore/default.php

They also apparently have a 'startup / entrepreneur' program.

how does SolidWorks compare to Fusion 360 if you happen to know? Is it designed with more 'engineering' focused projects with plugins to support microcontroller modules/embedded systems?

At the bottom end they’re pretty similar - basically, they’re both quite good for making static items. When it comes to mechanical aspects and moving parts, SolidWorks is more powerful, in my experience.

Still, I use Fusion 360, since it’s free for hobbyists, and the video tutorials are excellent.

In addition to the other suggestions, you might consider something like SketchUp. It's not going to do as much as the software professional engineers are using, but it's also not going to be as hard to learn.

SketchUp used to be awesome, but the recent in-browser free version is janky... My partner (who's a Civil Engineer) uses SketchUp pro and swears by it - she used it to CAD up our apartments in the past to sort out furniture placement; made moving into them super easy :P

Sign up for a free Fusion 360 license and watch a lot of YouTube tutorials. If you're good with spacial relationships, you'll start to work it out pretty quickly.

Of course, there are also online courses, but for the most part the software is so good it's not necessary.

If you have any experience coding GUIs, or thinking geometrically, then you'll find very little friction in picking up OpenSCAD, which is completely free/open source.

It may not have the features of the pricier ones, but I find its programmatic interface easy to use and more than sufficient for my hobby purposes.

OpenSCAD is for coder mech-eng wannabes. It's nothing an actual mechanical engineer would want to use. For that you will have to go for one of the proprietary options, of which the Autodesk suite and SolidWorks appear to be the most favored.

High school 'computer science' :(

I learned with fusion 360 and their online training. A hobby license is free, and the videos are good. There is also a Danish guy, I can't remember his name, who makes enthusiastic fusion 360 videos on YT regularly.

Edit: this is the guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5bc9c3S12g

I got into it by necessity when I moved into an apartment with these weird door latches that slid out and got lost really easily. I found Fusion 360 for free as a student, borrowed a caliper from my university's makerspace to get measurements, and learned how to sketch it up. It was super easy - the only hard part that took 5-6 iterations was getting the Ultimaker printer to print based on the measurements I had put into the CAD file.

Here's the file if anyone's interested: https://a360.co/2RiHZfK

For anyone else curious about the breadboard shield, here is a similar one on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/UNO-Arduino-Prototyping-Prototype-S...

Creator here, if you want to know more about it the best place is to hit me up on twitter: @benhoad.

Also I've been alerted to the fact that Thomas Middleditch (Richard Hendricks) has even shared it :D

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bqu0D2VAI8W/

It's not complete until it has a 24 core processor with ECC DDR4 SDRAM LRDIMMS ;)

signature looks like penis, is this intentional?

That was the joke from the TV show.

I found it annoying that, in the show, I was supposed to root against the Box. It's obviously a better project than what the "heroes" wanted to build.

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