Description
Key Learnings
- Experience the wide range of capabilities Autodesk Fusion offers with a focus on consumer products.
- Learn how the borderless collaboration between designers, engineers, and makers can benefit your business.
- Gain insights into the different manufacturing methods used to bring this consumer product to real life.
Speakers
- Christopher DerdakI am working for Autodesk since March 2020 as a part of the Technical Sales Team. Before that I studied mechanical engineering in a dual program where I also finished a training as a mechanic for fine-tool engineering to raise my practical knowledge regarding manufacturing processes. After that training I began to work for Autodesk as an working student and my task was to teach Fusion 360 from basics up to professional use of Generative Design and subtractive/ additive manufacturing. Beside of that I was quite active in the Autodesk Community and made tutorials and other content on several social platforms, which was honored by giving me the title Expert Elite. You might want to have a quick search for FusionChris if you are interested in what I did over the last years.
- William SiggeeManufacturing Specialist at the Autodesk Birmingham Technology, UK. My main work revolves around Fusion validation, additive manufacturing, robotics and automation.
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CHRISTOPHER DERDAK: So welcome to today's session, F1 Sim Racing Steering Wheel-- From Concept to Reality, a great choice. We are presenting something like a proof of concept or a case study, whatever you want to call it. But first things first, you might know it. It's our safe harbor statement.
So with that, coming to the interesting stuff, first, about us, so your entertainers for this session, it's me, Christopher Derdak. I'm working in tech sales at Autodesk, covering Fusion in the EMEA market, and I joined Autodesk in 2020. And with me is my wonderful colleague, William. So, William, it's up to you.
WILLIAM SIGGEE: Thank you, Chris. Yep, my name is William Siggee. I joined Autodesk back in 2018 as an apprentice, working as a manufacturing specialist. I mainly work with robotics, automation, and 3D printing. Thank you.
CHRISTOPHER DERDAK: Great. So let's have a look on what we are talking about today. So let's have a look at the agenda, what to expect, and what are our learning objectives. So we split the agenda into four main points.
We will start with the team behind our vision, so I will present all the people working on this project we needed to bring it to success. We are talking about the challenge of making anything.
We will go more into depth when it comes how to make anything. What did we do? What were the tasks and all the challenges we experienced there? And in the end, the Q&A, which will be not really a live Q&A at this time because we are remote. But you will get contact information about us, so feel free to reach out to us.
So starting with a quote from a wise old man, "working with a global team provides diverse expertise, but you need a common language to achieve your goals, just like CAD." This was said by a person absolutely different from me. It's Mr. CADman. Just kidding.
But I think everybody in the audience who ever worked in a team bigger than one experienced exactly that. So if you try to exchange things, try to exchange files and work together, you need to find in the end a common language to bring all the files and all the data together and work out something great.
So let's have a look on the team we had behind our vision. So when we started thinking of this kind of project we wanted to do, it did not take too long that we experienced that we needed a lot of experts for different workspace sizes and for different tasks. So we need people for manufacturing. We need somebody from marketing. We need an electronics expert, for example.
And all these people all around the world came together in one solution, and that's Fusion. So we all met there, brought in our expertise and knowledge, and worked on the same files, on the same data inside of Fusion and created our F1 steering wheel.
And this brings me to the challenge of make anything. What were our goals and our achievements? So why did we do what we did? So our challenges for this was to deliver a 100% Fusion-made consumer product.
We wanted to collaborate and converge within an international team. So as I said earlier, we were sitting all in different time zones, working in different positions at Autodesk, and we wanted to make use of any extensions we offer nowadays for Fusion to cover the full capabilities and to use whatever Fusion offers us to reach our goal of this sim racing steering wheel.
And in the end, of course, we wanted to involve several manufacturing processes and also external suppliers, so use the wide variety of manufacturing methods, like additive and subtractive, and also give the chance to external suppliers to produce parts for us directly coming out of Fusion.
And then the final goal and also a little spoiler alert, we wanted to build the steering wheel in real life and bring it to you, and here it is. So if you're on site, you will have the chance to grab hands on it. And if you are joining remote, then we have a little turntable to give you a first impression of the steering wheel. How does it look?
So this is what we made over the last month, what we worked on, so a fully functional sim racing steering wheel with all the buttons and whatever you need to successfully drive and race and win at the pole position.
So how to make anything-- let's go more into detail and talk about, what did we do, and what were the different steps we had to go through to reach this final consumer product and bring it here to you? We are starting with the external manufacturing and collaboration aspect because it did not take too long that we realized that we need external help because we do not have all the capabilities in our tech centers at Autodesk.
So we don't have all the machines. We don't have all the materials and any other resources to achieve our goals in creating all these different parts we need to assemble this steering wheel.
So what did we do? We shared the files and gave access through Fusion team where all the data were stored. So they are stored in the cloud, and all the companies and suppliers who worked with us got an easy and quick access on these files. Everybody was up to date, and it was an easy and good way for us to make sure that everybody is aligned on what we try to achieve here.
We outsourced some specific parts due to the availability of materials and manufacturing processes. As mentioned before, we don't have all these different types of additive machines. We don't have all these milling machines needed for that process or even some more specialized manufacturing methods we have in there. William will talk about that later in detail.
So this gave us the chance to make these parts in a very short amount of time, getting them from the different suppliers. At this point, I also want to say a special thank you to Nerc Precision, who machined our shifting pedals-- we will have a look on that later in detail as well-- One Click Metal, who supported us with their machines when it comes to the generative design part, which was metal printed; Xometry as one of-- or as a special supplier here because there is an add-in for Fusion where you get a quote and an offer directly out of Fusion for additive or subtractive machine parts; and in the end, A&M EDM for our spark-eroding processes.
So going more into detail, when it comes to Fusion itself, we are starting with generative design. This is our AI-supported design tool, and we use this to solve the challenge of stiffness in this steering wheel.
So everybody knows how a steering wheel functions. So you have the grips to turn the steering wheel left and right, and then you have the driving rod, which needs to be connected to the steering wheel and which moves over the steering movement to the steering assembly of your car, of your race car, or of your simulator in this case.
So the challenge we had to solve here was to create a part or design a part which adds stiffness, and it's a structural part, which brings together the carbon fiber plate we have seen in the front with the driving rod in the back. And we called it generative design spider. Maybe there's a better name for that. We're working on it.
But in the end, what it's doing is connecting those parts together and add stiffness to the full assembly because most of the rest of the parts are made out of plastics, so the back cover, the buttons, and all that stuff. So they are not there for structural stiffness.
Generative design, as Fusion and Fusion team is cloud based, offers cloud-based functionalities for the design process. So all these calculations, creating parts, designing parts automatically-- this takes a lot of calculation power we are using the cloud for. So it's not running on the local machine. It's running on the cloud.
And this offers us the capability to get, on the one side, parts that are specifically designed for our use case so we can add specifically our load cases, our materials, and our capabilities or our options we have when it comes to manufacturing. So what kind of additive machines do we have? What kind of milling machines do we have?
What materials are available in our tech center, or what kind of materials make sense for our use case in that way? So should it be quite lightweight or not? Should it be stiffer? Should it be a material made out of plastics, or should it be a metal?
So we put all this information in there, and then it's calculated in the cloud. And we get a couple of results out of it. But let's have a look on that in detail.
At first, how does this part look? So maybe now it's a bit clearer why we call it spider because of these kind of fingers or legs coming out there, connecting all the parts together. But how did we made that? Let's have a look on that.
So what kind of information does generative design need to create a part like this? So we are starting with an input of design restrictions, and the first thing we added here were load cases. Those are the blue arrows you can see here. So those are the forces or the loads coming up when you are using the steering wheel in different scenarios, so like I said, the steering movement or attaching and attaching the steering wheel on the driving rod, for example, so all different scenarios that came up or are coming up during using this steering wheel.
The second one is adding obstacles. So as you've seen, this is inside of the steering wheel, so space is limited. So the design and the modeling space is very limited.
We have PCBs in there. We have all the buttons. We have ribs in there. So we need to make sure that this generative design part fits perfectly in there but uses as less space as possible just to make sure that everything fits together in the end.
The next thing are the preserve geometries. So as this is going to be screwed together on several points, there needs to be geometry that is not being touched by generative design. So all these green areas are not going to be touched by generative design, and they will stay exactly in the way they are like right now.
And then there's something that's optional, but we use it in this case. And that's a starting shape. So you can add a starting shape, however it might look like. So as you can see right now, the starting shape looks way different from the final result, but it helps the generative design to start the study because it's not starting from totally scratch. You give it just some help in the beginning, I would say.
The next thing is the input of manufacturing and material defaults, as I said. So what kind of technologies do we have? Do we want to have a subtractive and/or an additive part?
We could also use both and just see what the design process tells us. So does it make more sense to create an additive part, or is it more economical to create an subtractive part? Do we take plastics? Do we take metals?
We put everything in there, and then we explore the results. And then we choose whatever we would like to take for our design. For this exploration, as we get a lot of results out there-- and maybe it could be a little bit overwhelming-- there is something we call design exploration with recommended results. And this is supported by AI. So you get a list of recommended results, which might fit pretty good your needs in design aspects.
So let's have a look on the result we took. So you can explore each different iteration of the design. So it's starting with a big and thick part, I would say, and then it's getting thinner and thinner, lighter, and lighter from iteration to iteration. And you can have a look on all of them, and you can use all of them.
In this case, we just took the last one-- that's the one you see right now-- because this is the lightest one, and this makes the most sense for us. But you could compare all of these different designs together and just make sure that you get the best out of it for you and your use case.
In our case, our manufacturing choice in the end was an additive part made out of metal, and this was created with the laser powder bed fusion technology. And this is the keyword to hand over to my lovely colleague because he is responsible for all the manufacturing aspects.
WILLIAM SIGGEE: Thank you very much, Chris. So yeah, as you can see, this is the final design. And to actually make this part, we have within the manufacturing workspace the additive section. This is where we can program different technologies of 3D printing, such as FFF, so your standard filament-fed printers. We can do SLA, which is resin based, and we can do metal printing, such as powder bed, which is what we have decided here.
And so if I show you this quickly-- I'll just go back a slide. There we go. Jumped ahead of me. There we go.
So as you can see here, we now have our purple structures. These are known as supports. Within 3D printing, it's very common to have supports in FFF printing, and this is commonly used for holding up a part. So if you have an overhang angle, you can't print in mid air, so it needs to be supported underneath. Otherwise, the molten material will just drip down.
But it's a bit different with laser powder bed fusion. Our whole part is encased with powder. And you would think, oh, if it's fully encased in powder, you don't need supports, right?
Well, these supports are actually used to anchor down the part because when there is this 200-kilowatt laser firing at the powder constantly, there's a big build-up and intensity of heat. And so the part tends to warp. And so these structures hold it down nicely, and so that's the reason for that. And these were generated within Fusion itself.
Speaking of Fusion, this is a One Click Metal machine that was actually designed in Fusion, and this is the one that we have in our Birmingham Technology Center. So just to explain a little bit about how this works, we have these diagrams that you can see on the screen now.
And so if you look at the top left, highlighted in red, this is where the powder is stored. It then gets fed down into this funnel area, and then we have this recoater that you can see highlighted in red now. This takes the powder from the hopper and lays it across the build plate.
And once it's done that for each layer, the laser then fuses the powder together, hence the name laser powder bed fusion. And layer after layer, the build plate moves down and keeps building up until you have a final part.
And now we have the wonderful Thomas Stock. He works on the Birmingham Technology Center. He's one of our additive experts with our One Click Metal machine that is now showing in the Birmingham Tech Center in the UK.
And so just to explain part of the process afterwards, this is the unpacking stage. So you can see the part is slowly rising up, and that's all the powder that I mentioned that it's encased in. This powder is then brushed away into that metal grate and is actually used again. So it's recycled after it's been processed, so there's not a lot of waste, which is great.
And then we have the more beautiful process here of cutting off the part. So this is using a bandsaw, and it's cutting it away from the build plate. And that bill plate is also reused. So you can machine off the top surface and reuse it again.
And then we have to remove the support structures. It's quite a manual process, but it's nice and easy with the right tools. You just clip them away. And then once they are gone, you can then file back your part to remove any burrs or defects.
And then once you've done that, you can even do some sandblasting. This will get rid of any remaining powder and also any other defects that might still be on the part, which brings you to this final part.
As you can see here, this is exactly how it looked on generative design. And yeah, we had a really nice finish, and we were very happy with it. So I'll bring you back to Chris.
CHRISTOPHER DERDAK: Perfect. Thank you. So talking about the next chapter, that's injection molding from the design of a simulation and then going to the machining of the mold tool. So as you can see, we are talking about the biggest part we have in here. So it's the back cover, covering all the electronics and all the internals in that steering wheel.
And luckily, in Fusion, we have a specialized tool set for plastic features, so talking about functionalities, like ribs and webs, snap fits and bosses. So all the things from plastic parts, plastic components, fitting together, screwing them together, all these functionalities are in here.
And they take care of design rules and plastic rules. So if you use plastic materials and you have different plastic materials in there, then you have, for example, a minimum thickness or a maximum thickness of the material because of shrinkage and warpage.
So when you're doing a mold part, a plastic part, then there's plastic that's going to be melt, and then it's going into the form, into the mold tool. And when it hards and when it cools down, then it might deforms. And if there is a wide variety between material thickness, then you get shrinkage in your aesthetic faces, and nobody wants that.
So what we are doing in Fusion is using a tool that's called Design Advice, and this tool checks the manufacturability based on best practices. So as you can see now in this image, you get visual feedback on areas which might result into failures and where might problems appear, so where the material is too thick or if you have some sharp edges, where are aesthetic faces that you need to take care of, stuff like that.
And not only you get this kind of feedback. You also get recommendations on how to create an efficient design for this kind of plastic injection. So I mean, this is ideal for people like us who are not spending the whole day on creating injection molding parts or plastic parts, so getting this kind of feedback to understand what's going on in this process and what things I need to take care of. So this is a great feedback on working out a design for injection molding.
The next thing then will be an injection molding simulation also happening in Fusion. So just moving into another workspace inside of the same software. And there, we get several different feedbacks. So on the one side, we get a visual feedback, again, on how likely the part will be filled with the molten plastic.
We also get an analysis of the health of all aesthetic faces. As I said, this is the back cover of the steering wheel, which means on the back side, so the lower side we see right now. This will be visible to the customer, and of course, these faces should have the best service we can offer. So we get a feedback on that.
We get feedback on the warpage. So is the part shrinking? Is there some space that might not fit in the end to the other components that coming on top? So do we have some gaps in there or not? We get feedback on that.
And once again, we also get guided results here. So we get advices for improvement and things and tips how to optimize our part. So once again, if you're not experienced in injection molding and in the full process, you don't need to be a professional to understand what's going on there. And this helps a lot in creating and designing a part for injection molding.
And even though somebody else might is going to be the responsible person who is optimizing the part for the final thing, so the final polishing, I would say, you can reduce the workload of this person when you deliver a design that's almost perfect for injection molding.
And this brings us once again to the next part. We talked about how to design the plastic part. We analyzed it. Now we are good to go.
But we need a mold tool for that because otherwise we cannot create it. And this mold tool wants to be machined, and that's once again the responsibility of Will, so over to you.
WILLIAM SIGGEE: Thank you, Chris. So now we bring it onto the manufacturing of the mold tool. So as you can see on the right, we have our two mold halves. And first of all, we want to analyze the model for its manufacturability and make any changes to suit for a manufacturing model that we can use for machining.
And then once we're happy with that model, we can then utilize the manufacturing workspace in Fusion to create the toolpaths and simulate the toolpaths as well before we run them on the machine.
So this is another view of the one of the halves of the mold tools. As you can see, it's very complex. And if we bring it here and show you these features highlighted in blue, these are some of the ribs of the mold tool.
And if I call out this part here, for example, you can see these channels are very thin and very deep, even as thin as 0.06 inches thick and 0.94 inches deep. And if you try and get a tool that's that thin to that depth, the cutting forces-- yeah, it's just going to snap.
So to make it suitable for machining, what we did was got rid of them and introduced any radiuses where there weren't any internal corners to make it suitable for machining. And so this is a comparison. The final mold tool that we will achieve is on the left versus the one that we will machine to begin with, to explain the differences.
And then we bring it to the manufacturing workspace in Fusion. We can do a lot of 3-axis and 5-axis toolpaths. As you can see on the right, that is a pocket toolpath. You can use the Autodesk manufacturing extension if you want to access more toolpaths or more advanced toolpaths. On the left there, you can see some of the toolpaths that we have available to you.
And so bringing it to simulation-- simulation is incredibly important to validate that your toolpath is free of any collisions. So we can check for that. The bar at the bottom, the green one, will show in red anywhere where it thinks there might be a collision. You can check it and rectify it before you even run it on a machine. So that's one of the capabilities we have in Fusion that you can use and we use a lot.
And so here we go, some machining footage. This is a pocket clearing toolpath run by Josh Reader. He's also a manufacturing specialist in the UK.
And this is our Technology Center. We have a lot of milling machines, turning machines, machines that our customers would also be using. And the job of our Technology Center is to act as a customer using our software. And the reason for that is we like to validate that it works before it reaches a customer.
So if there's a new feature coming out, we test on our machines first, report back anything that needs improvements or any bugs, and then the developers can go away, fix it. And then we can test it again. So that's the kind of value that we're adding back to our Fusion team.
And so here are some pictures of the parts. On the left, it's part machines, and on the right, this is the cavity side. So fortunately, the features of this were all machinable so we could machine all in one rather than having to use multiple processes, and we got a very nice surface finish there.
However, for this side, remember, we talked about those features we had to remove for machining. Well, we do actually need these in the part. And the way we achieve that is through EDM machining. You might be thinking, what is EDM? EDM stands for Electro Discharge Machining, also known as spark eroding. And so I'll explain a little bit about how this process works.
So on the right, those red parts are the electrodes that we design in Fusion that are used in this process, and these are the electrodes that are used in the manufacturing process. These are commonly made out of graphite. So these were made by A&M Machining in the UK, so thanks to them.
And then here is a little video of the actual process itself. So there's one of the graphite tools. And how this works is the graphite tool actually creates a spark when it touches the metal, and that spark can reach up to 21,600 degrees Fahrenheit, so very, very hot. And that basically just evaporates-- not evaporates. It vaporizes-- that's a better word. It vaporizes the material away. And then the material is taken away by a dielectric solution, a.k.a. oil, as you can see there.
And if I show you this part here, this was the final part. So we managed to achieve what we wanted to using both machining and EDM. So I will then pass this back to our wonderful colleague, Chris.
CHRISTOPHER DERDAK: Great. Thank you. So let's move on with the next topic. That's the PCB design, talking about layouting and then talking about simulation as well.
So we have seen how to create the enclosure. We talked about the back cover, and now it's time to have a look inside. So see what's inside of the steering wheel to make it work and make it better than just a display item standing around.
So we have a lot of buttons. We have a lot of LEDs. We have a display and all that stuff, and this needs to be powered by some kind of PCB.
So what we did here is that we have a PCB solution, or we have a software to create PCBs. Right. And this is called Eagle. You might have heard of it.
But there's also some other news. Eagle is canceled due to 2026. That's already official.
And there are good news. It's not just canceled. It's now inside of Fusion already. So it's Fusion Electronics.
But what did we do there? So we did not just cancel a product or rename it or whatever you want to call it. There are also some other advantages, and that's what I want to highlight here.
So by combining those two or bringing Eagle functionalities into Fusion, we combined PCB design tools with a cut tool. And by doing so, we get a chance to use, for example, given boundaries from our enclosures. So the back cover we've seen before-- take this one as boundaries for our PCB design.
And it does not matter how complex the contour is and how complex the part is. So we can see those splines on the top, so we can make sure with that to use the existing body to design a PCB shape and then the PCB boundaries exactly that way, that it fits perfectly into our steering wheel.
And that was quite important, as we had way less space inside than expected. So with all the parts coming in there, we just figured out that space is getting less and less. We have the generated design part in there. We have all these buttons and switches there. We have some other mechanical parts in there.
So in the end, the steering wheel was well packed inside, I would say. So with this functionality and this combination, doing it both in the same tool, this helped us a lot.
So this is how the PCBs looked in the end. So as you can see, we have the display in the center, and then we have several PCB boards surrounding it, so covering all the buttons and knobs we have there. With doing so, so having both combined, we do not only can use the boundaries as we did.
We also have the capability to direct edit our parts in place. And of course, we had to do that. So we had to move around holes. We had to reposition screws. Maybe the buttons had to be moved a little bit because they're colliding somewhere.
So we could do that all in the same tool. So that means the guy from our team working on the PCBs and the one who was responsible for the design of the back cover, for example, they could communicate live in lifetime what parts needed to be changed. And both of them were on the same design state all the time. So they were up to date, and they knew what kind of version was the current version to go on and work with it.
Beside of that, there's also another cool functionality. So we are not talking about 2D layouting or stuff like that, having sketches. We have a functionality in Fusion Electronics which gives us the capability to easily with just-- I think it's two clicks-- give us an output of the PCBs as volumetric bodies and components.
So we get what we see here, these 3D bodies. We get them directly out of the electronics workspace. We can edit them afterwards, anyway, and we also have the correct materials already applied on there.
And this brings us to the next thing, because where electronic components are working, there might is some heat. So you're consuming power, and heat is created. And we need to transfer it just to make sure things are not going to be overheating.
So just think of your mobile device. Think of your computer. So especially in the computer, you have a lot of fans in there just to make sure all the heat is transferred out of the case. And it's the same in our case, in our thing here right now.
So let's be honest. We are powering our steering wheel with an Arduino board because we are using an open-source script to get all the informations on the display. So an Arduino board is not known as a device which is getting super hot. But anyways, we had to check that just to make sure things are working and it's not going up in flames.
And we did this with the electronics cooling simulation directly inside of Fusion. So what we got there was a visual feedback on the maximum temperatures. So we had just to input the temperatures that are critical.
So for the processor, for example, there is a critical temperature when it gets broken. We get visual feedback on how the heat is performing on the full board and how it's expanding through the area. And again, like in the other workspaces we talked about earlier, we get guided results here. So we get tips on how to decrease the temperature.
So once again, even if you're not super familiar with PCB design and electronics, you get tips on, what can I do to make things-- to let them be a bit cooler and how to transfer the heat in a better way? So for example, placing a heat sink on the processor, maybe adding a fan who is circulating air a little bit more, or maybe we have to create some slots in there just to make sure the hot air can disappear through the case.
The good thing here is, as I said before, all these PCB components have already the right material applied, so I don't need to take care of that. So what I'm caring of is just, what kind of wattage do I have? So how many power is consumed by the part? So this is fundamental to know what kind of heat is existing there. And then I can run the analysis, and I have just to focus on the critical temperatures there.
When it comes to the airflow, of course, in this case, as you have seen, this is fully enclosed. So there is no real circulation in there, but we don't need that due to the Arduino we are running there. But once again, think of your computer. You have these fans in there, and environmental conditions are also quite important for heat transfers in there.
We can add an airflow, and we can analyze this as well. So in this steering wheel situation, if we would add a fan in here, we could analyze exactly how the air is moving in there and how the heat is transferred through the case.
And once again, this brings us to the next chapter where we are talking about advanced manufacturing. And as always, manufacturing is Will's topic, so over to you again.
WILLIAM SIGGEE: Thank you. So let's talk about advanced manufacturing within Fusion, just an insight into this. So in this section, I'll be talking about a few things here, so how we created the shifter paddles that are used to change up and down gears in a Formula One car and how we utilize the manufacturing workspace to make these and machine-simulation-generated toolpaths as well and also a little bit about the carbon fiber front plate as well.
So here we go. We're in the manufacturing workspace, as you are familiar with throughout this presentation. You can see we have generated all of our toolpaths. And this part was actually made by Nerc Precision in the UK, so thank you very much for that.
And what we can do here is machine simulation. So remember before, I showed you some toolpath simulation. Well, now we have it with the machine, so not just the tool. We have the gantry, the tool head, the spindle, and any other association to the machine, like the bed as well.
And by using this, we can see if there will be also any collisions, but not just with the tool, with the head against possible things like the fixture, the parts, if the tool head is colliding against the part when it's transitioning, or if it hits the bed, for example. So that's one of the advanced capabilities we have in Fusion and is very important to use before running your toolpaths.
And so here is the part after it's been machined. And if I show you the next slide, we can see them fit to the wheel. Please note that this is not the wheel in its final state. This was during the assembly process or partly during it.
But you can see we've got a nice finish on these paddles. You can see the really cool machining toolpath marks. And yeah, we were really happy with the finish of these. It gives a nice premium feel to it. So thank you guys for that.
Now coming on to hole recognition, so this is with the carbon fiber front plate. This is what you would see on the front of the wheel. And you can see there's actually a lot of holes just on this small part here.
Well, if you were to select all of these holes manually, you can imagine how long that would take. And if it's a customer that has to do hundreds or thousands of these parts a day, you can't be-- or different parts that have loads of different holes. You can't be doing this manually. It's not very feasible.
So with Fusion, we have the opportunity to use an automated process called hole recognition. So what this does is it recognizes the holes, and it can create these operations for you. So if I show you this window here, it recognizes the diameters of all of the holes in the middle section. You can see it's already populated the preexisting toolpaths for you.
However, if you do want to go back in and change it, there is a nice little dropdown menu, and you can adjust them to your liking if you need to. But this does a lot of the work for you and can really minimize the non-value-added time of having to select them manually. So that's a really great feature.
So another advanced technique-- this is additive manufacturing again. This is actually polyjet now. So this technology is similar to how your printers would work at home, believe it or not. And how I mean by that is you have your ink cartridges loaded into your printer, and it jets the ink onto the paper with all the colors you need in order to perform what you want.
And it's similar with this. So it works layer by layer, like all additive manufacturing processes. And you can see these are the different print heads that jet out different colors of inks and resin, and it's building it up layer by layer, as you can see here.
And this was the process that we used to print the buttons that you see on the front and some of the other parts. So here is an example of those being printed on one of the machines. At the moment, that's just printing the support structure to start with, and then the colors will start to come in as the print progresses.
And here we go. These are the wonderful buttons it can produce with very vibrant colors, which we're very happy with.
CHRISTOPHER DERDAK: So William, do you have a favorite button, by the way?
WILLIAM SIGGEE: I do. My favorite button is the DRS, the Drag Reduction System button, to open that nice big flap in the rear wing for overtaking. So yeah, that one is definitely my favorite.
And this part here is actually a prototype just for show. So you can see the accuracy in the colors that we're getting and the quality just as it's come off the print bed. You might be wondering, why is there a minion in the bottom left? He's actually our test driver, believe it or not. Yeah.
So Yeah. So that now brings us on to our next section, if I go to the next slide, which will be this one. Yes, here we go.
Conclusion-- so what were our takeaways and learnings from this whole project? Because it's quite a big one. And so we have a few questions for ourselves. Chris, did we achieve our goals?
CHRISTOPHER DERDAK: Yes, absolutely. I mean, we made it. We built this steering wheel in real life.
We managed to create it 100% in Fusion. Everything was done there, so the manufacturing, additive, subtractive, all the different machines you have seen, the PCBs. We brought it all into life there. We did all the simulation in there, and we were absolutely happy how this turned out.
WILLIAM SIGGEE: Great.
CHRISTOPHER DERDAK: So another question for you, William. Did everything work like we expected?
WILLIAM SIGGEE: Well, I would say no, and that is the common case with a lot of big projects. So yeah, there were a few things or a few learnings that we found throughout this project. And anything that we noticed with Fusion, be it something that could be improved, we were happy to feed that back to our developers.
And that is one of the advantages of doing a big project that tests Fusion like this. We can add value back to our teams by giving them these feedbacks that they can then work on by acting like a customer and using our own software. So yeah.
CHRISTOPHER DERDAK: Perfect, yeah.
WILLIAM SIGGEE: [INAUDIBLE]
CHRISTOPHER DERDAK: What did we learn? That's my part. We learned a lot.
It was our first time creating a consumer product. It was our first time working in a global team, doing all these different tasks, make sure everybody is aligned, as I said in the beginning, that we are speaking the same language, that everybody knows what the rest is doing, that we have all updates at the same time.
And it's not just making it look good on the computer in Fusion itself, but also bring it to real life and make sure all the screws are where they should be, that everything fits together the right way, everything is the right size, and we all have the same understanding of what we are doing. So that brings me to the last question. William, did any of us have prior experience in consumer products?
WILLIAM SIGGEE: We did not have prior experience in consumer products, which goes to show the power of Fusion. Us novice people that don't do consumer products for our day-to-day lives or day-to-day tasks, we were able to produce this part using the capabilities of Fusion and the help of Fusion with all of its different features and help with automated processes as well. So yeah, that was really great to see.
CHRISTOPHER DERDAK: So then for final, we have some key facts for those who like numbers. We had more than 230 bodies inside of this steering wheel. We brought the idea, which came up like a year ago, to real life in less than a year beside of our day-to-day business. That's a very important thing because nobody from the team working on this is getting paid for creating an F1 sim racing steering wheel. So we did it beside of our day-to-day business.
Diving into this project, being there as Fusion enthusiasts, I think this is the thing that connected us all together, the full team, and, I mean, of course, our interest in racing and F1. That's for sure. But let's come to the very final question. So, William, what's next?
WILLIAM SIGGEE: Yeah, so you might be thinking, have we just made an F1 wheel, and is that it? No is the answer. So we plan to take these F1 wheels to different parts of Autodesk, so we're not just going to have the two that we have or plan to have at AU.
These are going to be going back to our technology centers for customers to come and have a look at when they visit us. We can then tell the story to them and show them in real life how our Fusion product can create these high-quality consumer products. And also, tech sales teams, they can take them to shows to spread the word and to tell the story. So yeah, you might see this around a lot.
CHRISTOPHER DERDAK: Perfect. So let's come to the last thing, so Q&A. As this is a remote session, there is no live Q&A. But anyways, we would like to offer you to reach out to us. Just ping us if there's anything around this project, any questions that came up. Just feel free to reach out to us, and we are happy to answer them.
And with that, I say thank you. Thanks for joining our session. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed it. And yeah, enjoy AU and have a nice day. Thank you.