Blog awards: April (07/04/16)

The first blog awards for 2016 are here! We’ll be doing these on the first week of every month and recapping our most successful blog posts by our wonderful Research Community Coordinators. 

1. “Before I go, let me tell you a story… “ By Dr. Paul John Michael Mignone
It’s with a heavy heart that we say goodbye to one of our original “first generation” Research Community Coordinators. Paul has been with the ResBaz community from the very beginning & was the lead in kicking off the CADventurer community. A beautiful story by Paul - thank you for everything!

2. “Virtual Surgery using 3D Slicer at the Research Bazaar 2016 Conference” By Louise van der Werff
CADventurer Louise recaps her (hugely) successful 3D Slicer stream at ResBaz 2016! The post contains highlights, recognises the growing community & shares the course notes. 

3. “Autodesk Inventor at ResBaz 2016!” By Aliza Wajih
The CADventurers are on a roll! Aliza’s Autodesk class was majority women (75%) which would definitely make Rosie proud! She recapped the course content and thanked her two wonderful helpers - all in the name of community. 

That concludes our first Blog Awards for April - with the CADventurers out on top! What more can we say but… game on. 

Autodesk Inventor at ResBaz 2016!

By Aliza Wajih

Oh, what a fantastic experience ResBaz always is, full of fun & surprises! 

Last year it was one of my goals to attract as many female participants to attend Inventor CAD class as I could. Through the year I managed to find a few communities like WISE (Women in Science and Engineering) Unimelb and RoboGals and was able to reach it with a 75% majority female class at ResBaz. I was also able to find two brilliant female helpers!

At Resbaz, we had a wonderful group of people from diverse academic backgrounds. We had two artists, Emilie and Tiziana, who plan on using 3D modelling and printing technologies for sculpting. We also had engineers, architects and PhD students. One of our participant, Lisa Giusti, plans on using Inventor to design safety vests for jockeys as an intrinsic case study in the role of design in radical product innovation! Inventor is just the kind of tool she would need!

We were a class of about twenty-four people with five helpers. Having this participant-to-helper ratio allowed us to maintain a collaborative space where we could get everyone talking. There were many questions, no hesitations, and a lot of collaboration and mingling. From my point of view, that is exactly what makes a successful workshop!

The Inventor course covered everything from basic sketching skills to complicated sketch designs and assemblies. This time however, we also focused quite heavily on free form modeling - as this feature in Inventor gives designers more ergonomic design capabilities.

Featured below is our most innovative member, Eve, participating in our Makerspace meditative colouring event!

All in all, ResBaz was another successful event but I could not have done this without my fantastic helpers! Pictured below are Bobby and Vincent , the Inventor training experts from last year, and five brand new additions to our Inventor family: Alison, Melissa, Bentley, Basit and Aston! We had been running intensive training workshops in preparation for ResBaz led by Bobby and I. From the excellent feedback we have received it is evident that everyone’s hard work has paid off.

Lastly, I would like to thank all the participants and helpers for the wonderful experience. I hope Inventor is going to be helpful for you and that you enjoyed this as much as I did!

The Inventor course can be found here.

More workshops will be run for Inventor throughout the year so keep an eyen on the calendar if you have missed out on ResBaz!

What to Expect from Inventor?

by Aliza Wajih

Hey Everyone!

It’s ResBaz time again! If you have chosen the Inventor stream for your ResBaz conference or if you just would like insight into inventor this should be a good read.

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So, What is inventor?

Inventor is a 3D CAD software offering professional-grade tools for 3D mechanical design, documentation and product simulation. If you are doing research on a product that you would like to design and possibly have manufactured, Inventor is the tool you would use to design it!

Its application is largely in engineering. This software helps you easily handle large assemblies and automates advanced geometry creation for intelligent components. You can design using sheet metal, plastic parts, steel frames and rotating machinery as well as tube and pipe runs!

However animation tools and free-form modelling make it a great software for art and free-hand design too!

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Freeform Modelling View

Who is this class for and what do you expect to learn?

This class is for beginners! Don’t worry if you’ve never used 3D modelling software. We will go through it at a pace that will keep everyone on board! If you’re a fast learner there will always be more exercises to keep you busy.

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In our class we’ll be going through basic design element. We will look at how to take a 2-dimentional drawing & make it a 3D model! We will also look at how to work with multiple parts and make more complex geometries further on in the course. We will conclude the session by learning how to do some free-form modelling, as well as 3D printing our final products!

It is going to be a guided session with plenty of helpers and plenty of fun - hope to see you all there! 

Let’s bring our inventions to life with Autodesk Inventor!

Here is a rough timetable we will follow! See you all there :)

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From Concept to Creation #CADventures with AutoDesk Inventor!

By Aliza Wajih

Hi Everyone! Here is another great story from the Research Platforms!

Last week we ran our hugely successful CAD course for the first time after #ResBaz! We used Autodesk Inventor to teach 3D modelling and once again had a fun and wonderful learning experience. The workshop was fully booked within the first 2 weeks of advertising and there were plenty of requests for more… so keep an eye out for them because we will be running more CAD workshops very soon!

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Paul Introducing ResPlat and ResBaz 

The purpose of the course was to give a basic introduction to Autodesk Inventor as well as help participants develop an intuition about the how to take an idea, transform it into a 3D model and modify it so that it can be printed or manufactured.  

After introducing the fundamental concepts of design we looked at some practical examples with a capstone project of designing a fan using some basic Autodesk tools. This was the best way to show participants that even the very basic knowledge of CAD can enable you to make very complicated designs. It was also a great way to demonstrate that what we learnt in class is directly applicable to real world problems. Below is a picture of Ali Daneshpour who went ahead and 3D printed a model of that fan and brought to class for everyone to see!

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Ali With his 3D printed fan and CAD model

Later that week I also discovered a similar model of the fan being used a propeller for a ship. You can imagine the excitement to see that what we did in class with just a few basic tools can be used to design a giant propeller! The link below will take you to that page

Moving onto our next challenge, The Lego Man was also a great success and had people learning and having a little bit of fun with animation and assembly! This is regarded as one of the more challenging aspects of design but everyone made it took very easy! Check out Jaimys’ Lego man and his rock star moves!
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Lego Rockstar with Jaimys

To see all our adventure follow #cadventures on twitter and see everything that happened on the day! 

Participants and feedback

To give you a little background information about our participant, we had a diverse group of talented researchers from molecular chemistry, architectural and engineering background. We encourgae a collaborative and friendly environment in our workshops, so even though most of our participants were not of similar academic backgrounds everyone not only worked with us but also helped each other overcome challenges while collaborating in smaller groups.

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 Group work in progress on day 2…

From the amazing feedback we received, the course was taught well, ran at good pace and everyone found the helper were always there to fix bugs and clarify doubts (for the participants reading this… Thank you for the lovely feedback). I would like to thank the helpers,Paul Mignone (@PJMignone), Vincent khau (@thevinniek), Bobby Lii, Karlo Julian, and Tony Zathila , who put in tremendous effort to make this another successful course.

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Another day of overwhelmingly positive feedback for @awajih08 and her #cadventure team #resbaz .@ResPlat pic.twitter.com/uSlCrPjomX

— Paul Mignone (@PJMignone)
June 30, 2015
And last but not least, I would like to thank all the participants who came to the workshops. I got to meet some brilliant people and I am glad that my team and I could help them with their work and research. It makes me feel that I am part of a bigger community and that all the hard works has paid off. (#myresearch) Keep inspiring us!
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