CAD is one of the things I really enjoy doing. I am most adept at using PTC Creo for my employer. I am able to easily “think” and design ideas as easily in that software as I am able to draw it on a piece of paper.
I’m making it a point to get that way with Fusion 360. I don’t think it is as intuitive but if you were to ask anybody that hasn’t “grown up” with Pro-Engineer (Creo’s historical name) they would likely say otherwise
Installation
The installation of Fusion 360 is not as straight forward as it would be on it’s native Windows environment. It’s not bad but does require a little effort on your part. Though, I would say no more effort than I have had with other CAD packages on Windows.
Your first step is to install Lutris. For openSUSE
Terminal
sudo zypper install lutris
Optionally, you can click to direct install here.
The next step is to go to the Lutris sight and initiate the installation process from there.
https://lutris.net/games/autodesk-fusion-360/
Select the Install button. That will launch Lutris and begin the installation process.
This process will take a while and if you are so inclined, you can watch the process scroll by.
Once it is complete, you are given the option to add a desktop short cut and menu entry. That is all there is to the installation process. Now you are ready to run Fusion 360, but not yet ready to get to designing.
First Run
You are going to have to run Fusion 360 twice. This first time, Select to launch the application. The application splash screen will happily greet you.
You will then be required to sign into Fusion 360. Here is the one aspect of Fusion 360 that I am not keen on but I will overlook, this application does need to phone home in order to operate. You can function offline and it will cache locally so you are not explicitly required to be online every moment that you are working in it.
You are required to create an account and in doing so, you will have to identify yourself as an individual for free, non-commercial use. My understanding is that you will have annually affirm that you are using this for hobby, non-commercial use.
Once it is done loading up, you are greeted with this screen and this also tells you that Fusion 360 is not able to properly access the graphics drivers. That can easily be fixed by going into your preferences and change the graphics driver to DirectX 9
Choose apply but select “Not Now” on closing the application. It is known for having the habit of not actually closing out and just hanging. Close Fusion 360 then ensure all Wine processes are closed through the Lutris interface.
Another change you need to make is in Lutris. Right-Click and select “Configure” on the “Autodesk Fusion 360” entry. Select the “Runner options” Tab and Disable DVK, D9VK and Esync. I do not run it in the Windowed (Virtual Desktop) as some of the menus don’t appear.
Now you are ready to do some designing.
Second Run
This time you run Fusion 360, you are ready to get to designing. That is, assuming you see a grid pattern and the rotation cube in the corner.
If you don’t have this grid pattern and see the Autodesk Fusion 360 logo, this means something is not configured correctly, check again to make sure that you are on DirectX 9 and your Lutris Runner Configuration is correct. It could also be, something else has changed and this is no longer the correct answer too. After all, Autodesk does not support this what so ever.
Designing First Part
This is not a tutorial in part design. There are plenty of those out there. Without any training on using this software, I went to work and started designing. My choice for my first foray into part design was this sewing machine pulley that a friend asked me help him with.
I took the time to measure out the critical dimensions of this part, including counting the teeth. I had to determine the best course of action in how to build this part. I chose to make a revolved feature as my base feature. Since this will be 3D printed, I don’t need to the more complex rib features used for injection molding.
Next major feature is creating the notches for the teeth around the part. This is done by creating one notch and patterning it around the outer surface.
Next was to create the features through the center axis of the part that, presumably, are other critical features that interface with the sewing machine.
The last few features are also presumed critical features based on the my understanding for why they would exist. A flat on the sides of a cylinder are often used to prevent the part from spinning and the notch across the top may be to key the part as well.
The last set of features are the rounds and chamfers. These features should always be at the end of the feature tree in order to have more robustly designed parts.
Rounds and chamfers are important to a part as it adds strength and disburses the stress between the shaft and wheel features.
This process, having never touched this software before only took me about 45 minutes to do. I just had to understand how Fusion 360 expects you to use the design features. Ultimately, it was not difficult to use at all and making changes to parent features didn’t break the child features or cause it to become disjointed. I truly think this was fantastic.
What I Like
Fusion 360 is a great parametric modeler. The feature tools are very comprehensive and they help you along quite nicely with designing the part. The pattern feature is very nicely done and making edits to any feature in the tree is very intuitive. It all just seems to make sense.
I have also used the assembly feature and it works quite well. It doesn’t work exactly how I like to think it should work but I really can’t complain at all. This is the nicest I’ve seen work on Linux in recent times.
The file management system gives you a built in Product Lifecycle Management tool. You can put designs in folders and share them with others through the Autodesk services. I see a lot of advantages when it comes to designing in teams.
Exporting STEP or STL files is a trivial process and does a good job. I have sent the exports of these parts to my friend that needed to replace this sewing machine wheel for 3D printing.
What I Don’t Like
This is not directly supported in Linux. The reality is, using Lutris is kind of a hack and it does make for some less than exceptional user interface idiosyncrasies. There are occasionally some instances when the menus don’t refresh immediately and icons disappear. It’s not a huge issue, and running Creo on Windows has far worse issues after it runs for some time so putting it in perspective of my CAD experiences, this is a mild issue.
This application is very cloud dependent. In general, I do not prefer any applications that are highly dependent on “the cloud”. However, the design and analysis functions of Fusion 360 is so spectacular, that I can make an exception. The processing is all on the client side and you can work offline so designing something on the couch of an an internet-less home is absolutely possible.
The interface is too light. I prefer a dark theme interface to reduce eye stress. I think, perhaps, my excitement in using a quality, full-featured CAD package on Linux seems to have an almost euphoric effect on me and I am just not going to complain at all.
Final Thoughts
I have really enjoyed using Fusion 360 on openSUSE Tumbleweed. It works very well and if I were to give this a rating, I would give it an overall score of 8 out of 10 stars… or 4 out of 5… I don’t have a rating system. My main complaint, really, is the very white interface. I can look past all the other issues as they don’t inhibit my productivity with the product.
This has me so excited, I am going to be able to design and publish a lot of my designs to share with the masses. I don’t, at this time, need a commercial license for Fusion 360. A subscription to Fusion 360 is a bit pricey but not too bad, as compared to other packages out there. As of today, (January 2020) you can get a one year subscription for $495. As long as I just use this for hobbying purposes, I can continue to use this for free and there is a bit of a concern that Autodesk could pull the rug out from under me. That is the risk in closed source software, especially that which requires a cloud service to operate.
For now, this is my choice in doing any kind of personal mechanical design work. It has freed me up from using my employers hardware and software. Not that I have a problem using it from time to time for a personal project but more so that I don’t HAVE to use a Windows machine to do the work I want to do. I am free to work in an environment with which I am most comfortable.
I really hope that Autodesk can see benefit and value in supporting Linux. Since this application already works quite well in Linux without any of their efforts, maybe they will see that, do some tweaking and improvements to make it work a little better. One can hope.
References
Fusion 360 Overview on Autodesk.com
Lutris from software.opensuse.org
Fusion 360 Installer on Lutris.net
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