On September 23rd, the Fusion 360 Hackathon will be begin. If you’ve heard of Hackathons before this one is slightly different in that you’ll be able to get some sleep at night. Instead of an intense couple of days this one is spread out over five weeks with the goal of you being able to learn about the Fusion 360 API, write your custom app, and share it with others via the Autodesk App Store. And if you submit your app by October 30th you’ll get $500.
You can learn all the details about the Hackathon and sign up on the official Fusion 360 Hackathon site. Even if you don’t have an idea for an app, this is a great chance to learn about the API and get started writing your own utilities. The Hackathon will consist of several presentations and also scheduled time where you can get help with your specific issues.
Learning more about the API is a great way to better understand the internals of Fusion and how it works which can help you in your day-to-day use of Fusion. The API also allows you to do things that you wouldn’t consider doing interactively because of how tedious the work would be. And it’s fun.
For example, here’s something I’ve been playing with the last couple of days that I would never consider doing interactively. It’s nothing special as far as features in that’s it just a bunch of combine features but positioning the tool bodies like this would not be fun through the user interface. Once the program was written now it’s just a matter of a couple of minutes to run the program to generate this geometry.
