Having watched an absurd amount of Home Office Youtube, I was thinking about how I could improve my office. I wanted a desk shelf, but they seemed really expensive for what they were. And because I want to do fascinating, fun, and weird things, I thought it might be fun to build one with my Dad. In true Leeroy Jenkins fashion, I decided I was going to build a model and make drawings of a desk shelf in some CAD program. But on an iPad. Because.
In the past I avoided CAD and fabrication projects because I was being really stupid1 and refused to learn a new thing. But CAD is WAY more approachable than I thought it would be.2 The fundamental concepts aren’t that hard to learn if you give yourself the space to do so.
I decided to try Onshape because I could sign up for a free account and they had an iPad app. I installed the app on my iPad and started making sketches, extruding, intersecting, assembling, and exploding.
Overall the experience of building models was not too cumbersome. I didn’t have my keyboard attached, so there was a lot of menu juggling. The iPad app does in fact have keyboard shortcuts, but part of the appeal for me was using the iPad in tablet mode. I enjoyed being able to manipulate the model with my fingers and making fine adjustments and selections with my pencil.
The models turned out well! But when building things with wood, you build them from drawings, not models. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to generate drawings on the iPad—they must currently be generated using the web interface. Bummer! Generating the drawings on my 2017 MacBook Pro was a little painful due to UI input lag, but that’s an old computer and this is full-blown CAD in a browser. Once completed, though, it’s easy to generate PDFs of the drawings and then share them.
I like the idea that anybody could create an Onshape account and collaborate on a project together. One limitation of a free Onshape account is that all of your projects are “public.” I say “public” because if you want to view somebody else’s project, you must have an account. Links to models are not accessible unless you log in. I haven’t done lots of exploring on their web app, but given that restriction, I’m not totally certain how somebody would discover your account or models.
The Onshape website talks about how they’re the fastest-growing, uh, CAD community or whatever, and I bet it’s because of their requirement to create an account to interact with their product at all. But hey, if MAU isn’t growing as much as your investors expect, you’ve gotta do something.
Onshape was great but I’m not married to it. Next time, I’ll look for a different product and see if I can complete the entire workflow without leaving the iPad and without paying an absurd price for personal projects.
Oh, and if you want some drawings for a desk shelf that resembles a product that retails for pert-near $400, reach out.