Activities for Getting Started with CAD (Onshape)

I have just finished recording 23 videos that

are designed to help you get started with CAD

quickly.

The idea behind these videos is that we focus on a very simple object

and then use it to show you all kinds of CAD operations and various CAD

techniques.

Now there's 23 such videos,

and

if you decide to step through them,

I'm convinced that you will learn essentially all of the basic CAD operations

you'll need.

Now, let me tell you a little bit about how these videos go

and give you a few insights before you start using them.

All right,

first thing is

feel free to watch the videos that are helpful for you.

Don't watch the videos that are not helpful for you.

I suggest watching them on 2x speed

if you can

and

scrubbing around looking for the parts that you need.

I think that will be

helpful.

In each of the

videos, there is a particular activity that's being

done and the description of that activity is shown

in the video.

In some cases, I read the words of the activity. In other cases, I kind of skip

over it. Of course, if you need to look at the words of the activities, you can just

pause the video and take a look at what's

there.

The other thing that's going on in the videos is

that I've just did them all in one take.

So, they are what they are,

okay,

with

whatever

small mistakes I may have made here or there.

Nevertheless,

I did that on purpose hoping

that it would feel

like you've come into my office and we're talking through

how to do some of these activities.

I think that you'll find them useful

in that way.

OK.

What else do I need to tell you about this?

The

main

challenge associated with this set of activities

is that if you have in your mind

that the only thing that matters is

the correct geometry and the correct material assignment,

then you can make this part

very quickly.

But actually, that's not the goal of these videos and activities.

The goal of the video and activities is to expose

you to various ways of dealing with the CAD system.

And so, it means that we're doing a lot of operations,

some of which we would never really do on this simple

object

that is the subject of these activities.

But that's okay.

The point is

to learn and to be exposed to these different

actions,

not just to create the right geometry and have the right material assignment,

although that's important too.

OK,

what else.

I think there's one other thing that I wanted to say about this.

And

ah,

after a long day,

I'm having a hard time remembering what that is,

but nevertheless,

here's where we're gonna leave it.

These activities I'm confident

do expose you to

the

actions and the techniques that are gonna show

up again and again and again in the course

but also

in your own CAD work. So,

I recommend that you give this set of activities your best effort.

And as you do that,

you're really setting yourself up for a really really good experience

in the rest of the course.

Okay, that's it.

Thanks so much.

And as typically would be the case,

the minute I stopped recording I remembered what that other thing was

that I wanted to say about these videos

and that is that you're gonna learn

a very important technique

relative to saving

your files in a cloud-based system.

And this is where we will be doing

versioning,

branching,

merging,

and all of those kinds of wonderful things that

aren't as complicated as they sound

but yet very,

very important to learn

not only

in this course and in dealing with on shape but also

just in dealing sort of in the modern

computing world. So,

I'm bringing this up because

the shape that we're working with is so simple

it's not really required

to be doing all the merging and actually branching

and merging that we're doing in this set of activities,

but

the activities

are not about

that.

It's about helping you understand

what are

the versioning techniques,

what are the merging and branching techniques

that will be helpful when you work on more complex

models and more complex

systems, which we're going to be at very,

very shortly

in

the course.

So,

that was the second thing was just that there's versioning

and

that's why we're working on this to expose you to

that and to let you know how important that is

to the whole system.