From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Designing for Consumer Electronics

Designing for consumer electronics - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Designing for Consumer Electronics

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Designing for consumer electronics

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- [Instructor] Consumer electronics are all around us in the modern world. From communications and work items like phones and computers, to entertainment products like music players, TVs, and video game consoles. And all of these items have been designed by product designers. In this course, we're going to walk through the design of something, which is hopefully fairly familiar to you, a games controller for a video games console. Even if you haven't used one of these, and chances are you've probably seen one, even if it's only online or on TV. And you know roughly the sort of item that we're talking about. It's a handheld controller, with a number of buttons, maybe some thumb sticks or joysticks, and it's designed to fit comfortably in your hands, and allow you to ease the control of the game. Controllers like this are a good example of consumer electronics, because they usually have an outer shell, which is often plastic, but increasingly metal, on more high-end devices. Then inside, they've got electronics, things like circuit boards and maybe batteries. And then they also have some components that allow the user to actually interact with the products, in this case, buttons or switches. And this general layout is quite typical for a lot of consumer electronics products. During this course, we'll first create the outer shell, and then we'll hollow it out and split it into two halves. Then we'll create and add the PCP, and then more components like these buttons and joysticks. The course isn't really designed as an exhaustive step-by-step guide to making this specific product. It's more just a general guide to the overall process, and as such, we'll make some assumptions and simplifications throughout the course. And these will be mentioned as we progress. This also means that you don't have to follow this design exactly. You don't have to copy all of the dimensions and shapes used perfectly. You're very welcome to tweak the design a little bit, to suit your own preferences, as long as you follow the general workflow. With that in mind, let's get started creating our games controller.

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