CAD! Fun. I've never done much CAD, so this will be an interesting learning curve.
In the few things I've tried, my experience is that it's quite the sleep learning curve. I was wondering whether there's space for some kind of start-up significantly improving the user interface & user experience. Especially powered by LLMs, it should be possible to have at least a partial natural-language interface.
Here's my quick sketch of the CAD for my final project:
If I want to make a box with easy assembly for my final project, I'll need to figure out how to make dogbone joints not unlike this:
So first, I cadded a flat box for each side.
Then, using parametric design, I added N = height - (hfingerw * 3) fingers at a distance of D = hfingerw * 2 to each long side of the board. I manually added a single finger on the short side of each board.
I found a really helpful plug-in making automatic dogbone joints, saving me hours (?) of work: https://github.com/DVE2000/Dogbone.
The final CAD close to production-ready looked like:
As for the electronics on the inside of the trashcan, here's a sketch of the system diagram (also in my final project page):
+------------------+ +-------------------+ +------------------+ | Power Supply | -----> | Microcontroller | -----> | Servo Motor | | (USB-C 5V) | | (ESP32) | | (MG966R) | +------------------+ +-------------------+ +------------------+ | | | | | | v v v +------------------+ +-------------------+ +------------------+ | Microphone Module| | LED Indicators | | Push Button | | (INMP441) | | | | | +------------------+ +-------------------+ +------------------+