I've been learning Onshape and Fusion 360 as they are two of the cloud-based CAD solutions with a subscription tier that's free for me. They each have their strengths and weaknesses and it's always interesting to compare and contrast between them.

One item they share that I found surprising is that neither of them has built-in capability to add gears into the mechanical design. I've always thought of gears as a critical part of any nontrivial machinery. So I had expected to find a significant section of the CAD package to be devoted to creating various types of gears for different applications, simulating and analyzing their suitability to the task, but there was nothing.

For basic projects, a simple spur gear would suffice. Thankfully, both companies have heard the user requests and made simple spur gear creation available as an add-in created with their own respective scripting mechanism.

Extending Onshape requires learning to write code in their custom language FeatureScript. A member of the Onshape team used it to create the spur gear script and made it available in the public documents library. One downside of this approach is the fact that (1) Onshape users needs to make a copy of a public document before they could use it for their own purposes, and (2) all documents created with the free subscription tier of Onshape are public. These two factors combined means many, many copies of the spur gear script in the public documents library. Correction: Custom FeatureScript can be added to the toolbar without making a copy. Thanks [FS] for the comment!

OnShape Spur Gear

Fusion 360 did not declare their own scripting language. They expose their extension API to two languages: C++ for the high-performance native code crowd, and the Python interpreted scripting language for the less performance-focused audience. They used to also support JavaScript, but as of July 2017 they have moved that into maintenance mode due to lack of usage.

The spur gear script is part of the sample script library installed alongside Fusion 360, so I didn't have to find a separate download nor was copying of public document necessary. They presented it in both C++ and Python format. I found the Python version in the "Scripts and Add-ins" menu and clicked "Run".

F360 Script Addin

Onshape and Fusion 360's spur gear scripts present their gear parameters in slightly different formats, but both should suffice for simple projects. If I want to do something more complex, I will have to dive into coding my own extension script.

I've wanted to learn more about what is and isn't possible in an extension script anyway, so... challenge accepted!

F360 Spur Gear