3D Modeling with Onshape

Onshape have excellent documentation on its help website (also can be found on the top right corner of your homepage), and should be referenced when you need more detailed help of a specific feature.

Create an Onshape account using any email with and choose a student (education) subscription, this will allow your designs to be private and not leaked to competitors, because a free account cannot make private documents. Go to Onshape signup and follow the onscreen instructions.
You should be at the intial setup screen where you can choose your units, controls preferences as well as test your browser, it might tell you “reduced performace detected” if you are using intergrated graphics, don’t get offended, you’ll be fine. You can change all of these settings later in your account page (top right corner)

After that, you are really to go, the following videos will guide you through the process of designing a example robot and provide some best practices for designing using CAD in general.

Getting the most of the user interface

Despite having one of the simplest interface of any CAD programs, Onshape can still hide some very useful features from you, find out where to find them! tab manager, search, feature visability, file storage, shortcuts keys, 3d space navigation

Invite your team!

Team work make dream work (maybe not sometimes). Onshape behaves much like Google Docs and GitHub, workspace can shared and edit at the same time to keep everything consolidated in one place. Teams, email invitation

Making your first part

Sketching is extremely important in CAD (you wouldn’t be able to do anything else without sketching first). Planes, shapes, constraints, references

Making your second, third, fourth,… part

Being organized is the key to reducing hassle while designing, learn the effective tools to be organized! Variable studio, naming, folders

We be doin a bit of stealin sometimes

Aside from GrabCad, you can also get 3D models of parts you need straight in Onshape and quicky model with it. Public page, importing models to own document

Put it all together!

Time to see your robot coming together virtually. This step is very important to make sure you don’t spend your time making a prototype that you later finds having just that one little dimension that is wrong and rendering the entire thing usable!!! (sometimes recklessly drilling would fix the problem, but we apparently don’t recommend that) Adding parts, attaching parts, types of mates, fixing

Making that annoying part

Some parts just have dimensions that are really difficult to keep track of, such as when it depends on something else that keeps changing. Part studio in context, editing part in context, derived parts

Lining up at Texas Invention Works

Now that you have confirmed that your part works and any small oversights has been ironed out, you have to transfer your design to a different program to make it (see: constructing chassis page) learn how to get your design “Offshape” STL export, STEP export, DXF export

Some neat things for later

Now you have got a pretty good basic understanding of CADing, and if you decide that you are going to stick with Onshape for your modeling needs, here a some cool things to explore:

FeatureScript is a extremely useful tool, performing different modeling task the stock Onshape can’t do. And the cool thing is, you can code your own FeatureScript to improve your modeling experience and help other users.
App store is a marketplace for addons, from a full-blown 3D printing slicer to a catalog of standard part selection, you can really make Onshape work better for your usage.
You can make complex lively machines in assembly using the animation feature to evaluate how parts interact.
A whole libary of lessons with varying difficulties can be found on Onshape learning