Wow! This blog exemplifies someone whom I wish I could be. I am an EE who is hopelessly enamored with the idea of one day becoming at least proficient in mechanical design.
I better get going. I am not getting any younger
I better get going. I am not getting any younger
ME's scoff at the very existence of Sketchup, but for a free modeling tool, its good enough.
If you like something more programming oriented, OpenSCAD is great for parameterization. You literally code your 3D model.
Neither of these tools comes close to something like SolidWorks, but they both get the job done.
A 3D printer is probably the easiest and cheapest method of fabricating your designs, but the ability to make functional parts is fairly limited
Sherline sells a small tabletop mill for something close to $1000.
Grizzly sells a bigger one for $1300.
Both of these can be retrofitted for CNC for around $2000.
There are now 3 offerings of complete tabletop CNC mills for $2000 to $2500 (Nomad, Othermill, and Carvey)
If you can program, learning GCode will be a breeze.
CAM is probably where most of the learning curve lies. This is where machining knowledge is most beneficial.
If you are lucky enough to live in certain metro areas, Techshop has several locations across the US. Its essentially a fitness club but with machine shop tools instead of exercise equipment. You pay a monthly fee, and you can use everything. They have several different types of CNC machines, as well as training.
Cubify Design, although not open source, is one of the cheaper 3d cad tools which also supports parametric modeling.
It doesn't support assemblies yet (although its on a branch!) so I just designed a linkage system extremely carefully and swiss cheesed some parts to avoid dealing with dimensions as much as i could. I used to use Inventor but Fusion 360 is nice - and its free for startups.
As soon as Freecad supports assemblies I will probably switch back. I hate booting into OSX for Cad work and back home to linux for coding.
It was very, very promising, right until the moment I started doing a real design in it. I hit so many bugs and problems, that I couldn't finish the work. Debugging constraints was pretty much impossible: if something went wrong (and it almost always did), I'd have to restart from scratch.
I can compare it to SolidWorks, which I also used, where debugging constraints is also a major pain point (why don't they make this easier?), but at least it's possible. And it is buggy, too, but much less so than Cubify, which means you can actually get things done.
From my point of view (external perspective of a software engineer), 3D modelling tools suck, in general. Few support parametric modelling, which consider a must-have, and those that do are pretty poor at it (discuss after you've created a parameter-driven assembly of multiple components in SolidWorks, and then decided to change a parameter name/value or move a parameter from a component to assembly-level).
I would welcome your thoughts on just how to best hack these exact types of parametric changes in SolidWorks, especially at the component to assembly-level transition. It does seem pretty hopeless, as you say.
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BTW, top-down building (e.g. starting from the assembly) has never worked for me. I always end up with an unmaintainable mess — but that could be my poor skills.
I like your description of TechShop, and imho it's about 50% true. They do allow use of the tools after you've paid an extra $100-$200 for a "Safety and Basic Use" class on each, which is usually a 3 hour session providing just about enough information to not kill oneself on a machine. Not to knock it -- it's a great way to get access to tools in many situations -- but in all honesty, after a semester of machine shop at the local junior college, I'm no longer stumped about why I kept breaking drill bits in blocks of aluminum.
If you know Spanish check the tutorials on OpenScad and Freecad of Obijuan: http://www.iearobotics.com/wiki/index.php?title=Obijuan_Acad...