This week, our assignment was to begin brainstorming final project ideas and to try out some drawing/CAD tools.
I thought it could be interesting to make a working model sailboat, perhaps with some autonomous functionality. I started by trying to model the basic structure in a CAD program.
I had used Fusion360 before for a really small project in college, so I tried it again. Unfortunately, it doesn't run well on my cheap, 5-year old laptop, but I managed to loft a hull. Sadly, the save feature was broken, so I was only able to export a step file and wasn't able to take advantage of the really cool built-in renderer.
Here's a screenshot of the Fusion-360 hull as seen in FreeCAD
I then decided to try FreeCAD, on the grounds that familiarity with a free, open-source CAD program is more likely to be useful than familiarity with a very expensive proprietary suite.
I attempted to make another boat hull shape, this time using the FreeCAD lofting tools. I found it easier to make the profiles I needed to define the hull shape in FreeCAD than in Fusion 360, though perhaps that was just because it was my second try.
In the end, I didn't have time to explore designs for other things, such as the control system and actuators for the model sailboat. See my final project page for more thoughts on these parts. My explorations with Fusion360 and FreeCAD were really useful though in giving me familiarity with the CAD environments and in helping me to choose the CAD program I'd use for the rest of the class including the coming week (FreeCAD won).