Manufacturing from home solar yard light. So in the last section we put together a detailed prototype of our solar yard lights. After that, we set the materials in fusion 360. And once we set the materials, we are able to calculate an entire mass of our prototype. And then we looked at the rendering feature of fusion 360. And so if we, if we want to make a nicer picture of our three dimensional model, or if we want to take a nicer screenshot of it, we can use the rendering feature and make our solar yard light look a little bit more realistic, and we could use that for business or marketing purposes.

So in this section, we now need to get our parts manufactured and sent to our home so that we can build our prototype. So we have a detailed list here a detailed table of all the different parts in our solar yard light so the solar cell holder on the top in black, a battery holder Right here. The coupler is this black piece here, the light cover in gray, and so on. We also have our pre made parts down here. So we have the LED, that we're just going to be buying a rechargeable double A battery, and the solar cell. And then we also have six screws that we used in our design.

So every single part that we're going to need is all listed in the table here. This is essentially a bill of materials for everything we need to be able to build this yard life prototype. All the parts on the bottom are premade parts. These are parts that we're just going to be ordering. So we're either going to be ordering them locally or online. First of all for our screws, we pulled in the CAD models for our screws.

We already have the part numbers for these and so we got them from McMaster so we could just order them straight from there with our part numbers. We found our solar cell and our ground stake on Amazon. And so we could just order those online. And then I could get a rechargeable battery either locally, or I could get that online and same with the LED. Now in terms of the top parts here, I have four different custom made parts. And so what we're going to need to talk about now is how to get these parts made for us.

So we're back in fusion 360 and we have four custom parts that we need to get made. I have this top piece that is custom made, it's going to be 3d printed, I need to get this battery holder 3d printed. This coupler piece is going to be custom made. And also this acrylic, clear acrylic tube. And so what we can do is we can use utilize online machine shops is a very efficient way to get parts If we go to a, an online machine shop, a machine shop is a good option. There are many, many different online machine shops.

And here they're gonna have a machine shop, for example has all of the it has the capability for all of the manufacturing processes that we talked about. And what we need to do is go to quote your custom part, and choose request a quote. And so here we're going to be basically going to be uploading our CAD model or our CAD files to a machine shop. And we do that in part details here. We upload our CAD files, we need to specify a material and then they're going to quote us, they're typically going to quote us within You know, a day or so and if we're okay with the price and their and what they want to do to get your parts made, then you okay it and you're going to see your parts show up to your door within, you know, within a certain period of time almost very commonly within just a few days.

And so that is how an online machine shop would work. So we need to upload the proper file types to them the two file types that we're going to be using our STP for most of our CAD files that we upload and then for parts that we need 3d printed, we're going to upload STL files, so just these two file types, so let's figure out how to export from fusion 360 so that we can upload them to an online machine shop and this process is going to be very common with all online machine shops. We're going to be using the STP file type and STL file type for 3d printing. So if we go back into fusion 360, these two parts, again, we're going to be 3d printing. And so I need to export the solar cell holder, I just right click on it. Again, we're going to be 3d printing it.

So we need an STL file. So I choose Save as STL and hit OK. And then I can save it to a folder on my computer and it chooses STL automatically I choose Save. Now if I go to a machine shop and I choose a file, I should be able to go into the folder. And now I can choose solar cell folder. And so next we would need to get this top or this battery holder, 3d printed and I would do the exact same thing same as STL and then I'm going to need to upload the STL file to a machine shop. From there they would have the information than that they need to, to 3d print those parts.

Now we need to get these two parts custom made in the tree. I right click on the light cover, I can choose Export and you can choose a folder. And the type that I want to export is this STP file type as we talked about, and you can go ahead and choose Save. And now again, it would be a similar process I would go to a machine shop and I would go into the folder that I selected and now I have like covered dots as step or STB and that's what I would upload to a machine shop here. You can see that it just showed up because I just uploaded it and so for this light cover As we said, we need to specify materials. So we're going to tell them that this is going to be clear acrylic.

And you can always, of course, ask them questions about different materials that you could use. There machinists in general machinists are going to have a lot of tons of knowledge on materials and manufacturing processes. What they're going to need to do with this light cover is basically just drill four holes and the side of it and, you know, possibly just cut a piece of clear acrylic to length because they should be able to order it to have this clear acrylic and then cut it to the length that we've specified here. But they're going to get that length from the CAD model. The last piece that we need to get manufacturing is this bottom piece. And again, we're not 3d printing that and so we're going to need to so we can just right click exports Again, we're going to export an STP file, we upload that to the machine shop, specify the material.

And we also in this case, we're going to need to specify. So we put a hole in the bottom of this coupler, and it's going to need to be threaded. So they're going to have to drill and and thread or tap this piece. So we just need to specify the type of thread that mates with the plastic ground stake that we ordered offline. We need to get the thread type just offer the specifications and the ground stake off of Amazon, which is where we got this, this steak. And then I also need to specify the thread type for these set screws.

And for the set screws, they were a 1032 thread type. And if we specify that that should be enough information in order to make These parts. Now from there, we should see a ton of parts showing up to our house. And we can now put our prototype together, we're going to have to check it to make sure that everything fits the way we want it to. And also to check and make sure that everything looks the way we want it to. If something doesn't work the way we want it to or fit the way we want it to, we can easily because we have a CAD model, I can easily make changes in my CAD model.

As you've seen already, we've made a lot of changes as we went along. And as we made mistakes, I make changes in my CAD model. I can again upload it to an online machine shop or bring it to a local machine shop. Use your CAD model of course to communicate with your local machine shop, get a new part made sent to you and you should be able to turn around a design change quite quickly within you know, just a couple couple days. Again, and then you would see if that part would fit and function the way you want it to. And you can just repeat this this process in order to generate your final prototype.

And so overall in this course we have now we've designed a full prototype here we've chosen the materials for it. We've showed you how to get your parts manufactured all of your all the prototypes that you build, they're going to be a combination of custom parts and pre made parts that you're just ordering online or from your local store. And you really do now have a foundation to build many many different things of the material categories that we covered, especially being able to make custom metal and plastic parts if you look around you most products are made of you know metal and plastic. You can now make custom parts from these two materials and this overall process that we went through, first of all speed modeling or thinking in 3d by by util lysing the millions and millions of CAD models that are already built for you online we can pull them into our, into our CAD program.

And we can use those to to visualize we can even use them to directly manufacturer. From there we put together a detailed prototype and detailed design of our idea. And we can make changes to this CAD model and iterate until we until we can get our final prototype put together. We get the parts to our home and we can go ahead and build it and so you really have a strong foundation. Now we showed you how to some of the fundamentals of drawing parts in 3d with the four features that we discussed of extruding, revolving sweeping and lofting. We only actually use just two of those in this solar light, we use extrude and we use the revolve command for the bottom ground stake.

But you really do have a foundation for for drawing parts. In 3d now, and a foundation for assembling them with the different joints, you have a foundation of material choices, and of different manufacturing methods. And we for these manufacturing methods, again, we just need a simple picture in our head. And when you start communicating with a machine shop, you should be able to accomplish just about anything you might imagine. And so thank you for joining us here and at home engineering the course. My name is Samson, again, please subscribe to us for support on any of the information that you just learned.

And for continued education on exactly what we did here at home engineering is about enabling people to be able to build more and do more from their home and creating innovative ideas in the world through this process, again, all from our homes. So thank you again, and we'll see you soon.