Digital Design Workstation

The Digital Design Station is an educational and professional development resource for members. Digital design requires specialized software and equipment that not all members have access to. Our goal is a dedicated station will empower members to create digital designs for physical prototypes and as well as purely graphical assets. When possible we would like to use open source tools and participate in an open digital design community. However, proprietary CAD and graphics software are often more widely used, and therefore will also be available.

What's Included

• A desk with physical tools such as calipers and other measuring apparatus.
• A dedicated computer loaded with the necessary software to create files for 3D Printing, Laser Cutting, and CNC Routing.
• Software for purely virtual applications such as image editing, webby stuff, and animation.
• Laser Scanning and a photo lightbox are also planned.

Planned Software and Equipment

Some ideas for the workstation area

• Whiteboard area for sketching
• A place for books related to digital design
• enough room to physically sketch on paper
• A dedicated computer
• 3d scanner
• drawing input pad

CAD:

• Sketchup
• AutoCAD standard (edu download)
• AutoCAD Inventor (edu download)
• FHM plugin for Inventor (edu download - generates G-Code)
• SolidWorks (edu download - possibly from TriMech here in Richmond)
• CAD Libre (open source)
• FreeCAD (open soure - i think that's the one we looked at)
• OpenSCAD (open source)
• CADSoft Eagle PCB (free edition)
• SketchUcam

3D Printing:

• Slicer
• MakerBot software

3D Scanning: We need a 3d scanner.

Other:

• GIMP
• InkScape (used in a lot of laser cutting and CNC routing basic stuff)
• Adobe products - Photoshop, Illustrator, etc
• MatLab / Mathematica (sometimes used to generate 3D models)

Bookmark relevant pages:

• Thingiverse
• GrabCAD
• CircuitsIO
• Concise tutorials on how to accomplish specific goals