Inventor is a computer aided design program, or a CAD for short. It's made for people to make designs of whatever they might imagine. We used it to design widgets and 3-D print them. Others have used it do design full scale parts to different machines like airplanes and manufacturing machines. The program allows you to make any shape, put dimensions to it, add holes to it, take off specific parts of it, and so much more that I would have a hard time explaining it in anything less than an essay.
To design the widget I 3-D printed, I opened Inventor, went into a new part, selected "New Sketch", and selected the XY axis which led me to this screen.
Next, I drew a rough outline of one of the sides of the widget.
Then I added the dimensions.
After that, I hit the extrude button and extruded the drawing 1 inch.
After that, I started a new sketch on the YZ plane on the face of the widget.
Then I drew and added dimensions to that face where the gap needed to be.
Next, I hit extrude and put the extrusion through the object causing a hole.
Then I added where the next gap needed to be.
Next, did the extrusion through the object again to add a gap.
Then I hit chamfer and made the top edges into the slanted way that they are.
Here is the finished product along with the other six widgets that I made in Inventor.
After having all of the parts finished, I put one of them into the Makerbot desktop software so I could send my part to a 3-D printer. This is what the part looks like in the Makerbot software.
When you open a file in Makerbot the scaling of it gets thrown off, so I needed to scale my part up by 1000%.
After that I hit export and came to this screen.
After that, I hit export, saved it to a flash drive, and plugged the flash drive into the 3-D printer. Then, on the 3-D printer, I selected that file off of the flash drive and it started to print.
These are some pictures of it printing
These are pictures of the finished product
I learned how to transfer something from just a shape on paper to a physical object. It was really interesting going through the whole process of going from sketch to object. I learned how to use Makerbot and how to 3-D print things. I got to brush up on inventor and how to draw shapes in that. I also got to learn how to use weebly to document a class.