Computer Aided Design (CAD) Part 2

 For the second lesson, I was tasked to create a simple 3D phone holder using Fusion360. The purpose of this assignment is to hone my skills in using Fusion360. 

To start off, I went to find the general size of a phone using my own phone as the basis. Measured dimensions of my phone is approximately 140mm x 60mm x 10mm. To give a bit of a leeway to the sizing in order for the design to accommodate different types of phones, I settled with having 150mm as the length, 100mm as the width and 20mm as the height for the design.

For my phone holder, I wanted the design to be simple, yet able to serve its function. Since I wanted a 150mm base, I added a parameter by going to "modify>change parameters" and double clicking the "+" icon next to "user parameter". In this case, I named this parameter "base" and made 150mm as the expression.

After that, I created a line as the base and made the dimension "base".

Next, I created two lines in the manner shown below. I wanted their length to be the same as the base so for the dimensions I also used "base".

Then, I wanted a base of 20mm for the phone to sit on, and a 10mm vertical wall to prevent the phone from slipping off, so I added two more parameters of  20mm and 10mm and named them "base2" and "wall" respectively. 

This is my intended design of my sketch.

Finally, I added a thickness of 2mm to my design to allow for extrusion in the final product. To give an example, I created a line parallel to the line of the 150mm base. Then using the "sketch dimension" tool, I made the distance between the two lines 2mm. I did this for all the lines in the sketch above. The two photos shown below is my final 2D sketch, with and without annotations.

WITH ANNOTATIONS

WITHOUT ANNOTATIONS

 

After this, I simply selected all the empty spaces within the design and extruded the design by 100mm. (It is easier to select the empty areas by zooming into the design)

SELECTED AREAS

EXTRUDED PRODUCT

After this, I wanted to create a gap at the part where the phone sits, to allow a phone charger cable to be inserted into the phone. What I did is right clicked the base, select "hole", and sized the diameter of the hole to be 20mm. I then positioned the cylinder shaped hole as shown below.

AFTER PUTTING GAP

And that's it for my phone holder. For this design, I strived to achieve a simple and easy to use design that includes a quality-of-life modification by adding a hole, allowing the phone to charge while sitting on the phone holder. Parametric modeling helps me in keeping track of each dimension in my design. I am able to quickly resize my model whenever I see fit and see these changes happen in real time. This feature will definitely prove useful in designing, especially for more complex models.

  The HTML file of my phone holder is shown below.