CAD for beginner?

VEX V5 General Discussion General Forum
#1

I see all these awesome digital prototypes of designs and I’d like to sketch out my own, but I’m a CAD noob. Can you guys recommend any good tutorials or books to help? I have a copy of Autodesk to mess about with.

#2

This was a suggestion I gave in a thread in the CAD discussion forum.

https://vexforum.com/showpost.php?p=189676&postcount=7

This book is not bad.

http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Autodesk-Inventor-2012-LT/dp/1118016823/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1310346266&sr=8-3

Main thing to understand is it takes some commitment in time to learn this type of software.

#3

Thanks for the quick reply, sorry I didn’t notice there was a CAD subforum.

#4

Have you downloaded the Vex parts for Inventor? If not I would definitely recommend doing that and playing around with them a little bit. That’s basically how I learned Inventor. Try using the constraint function on different parts. I think you’ll find it’s pretty easy to figure out (at least in the realm of Vex).

Here’s a link to the Super Sonic Sparks Vex CAD Library. I’d recommend starting with that because Jordan (Legomindstormsmaniac on the forum) has already put in the materials for all the parts and the sketches for the metal parts.

#5

While I am a Solidworks user myself, I would say for any program if you want to learn how to make parts, go through that part of a tutorial book. If you want to learn how to do assemblies, I suggest using the VEX parts. The VEX stuff will help you grasp all of the basic stuff for assemblies really quick. Plus it will help you to learn how to make parts because occasionally you might have to change a part, especially some of the vex structural stuff.

just my $0.02

#6

No problem, there’s not much activity there anyway.

#7

How do you open the vex library on inventor? (I know I probably could find it if I search for hours, but I don’t have that much time on my hands)

#8

I would suggest one of the pre compiled CAD libraries put together by Team 24 or Aperture Robotics, they’re neatly sorted. From there you can simply open the parts into assemblies.

#9

Personally I found the help files in Inventor extremely useful… Although that depends on if you want specific or general help. In general I think just messing around with the parts works well.

I have a bunch of seperate parts from the VEX CAD page that are just drag and drop

#10