One of the nicest features of Fusion 360 is the ability to bring in components from other designs via a link into your current design. Then if the linked component gets updated, you can easily get the latest version for your project which imports that item. I’ve been building up a collection of designs of electronic parts that I use in my projects such as Adafruit Feather boards, sets of header pins, and other discrete components such as IR receivers and jacks and plugs. After laying out all of the components in Fusion 360, it is then much easier to build a 3D printing enclosure around those components. It also allows you to create really nice looking renderings of the project when writing tutorials.

Unfortunately when it comes time to share my open source designs with the world, it’s very difficult to save these Fusion 360 designs to my hard drive to later be uploaded to GitHub or Thingiverse. Fusion 360 stores its files in the cloud under your account most of the time. It does have the ability to save a design to your hard drive but not if that design contains linked components. If you try breaking the links it can create reference errors especially if the linked components themselves contain linked subcomponents.

There is a workaround however.

Open up your project and right click on the design and then click on “Share Public Link”.

This will bring up a dialog box. You should check “Share the latest version with anyone using this link” and check on “Allow item to be downloaded”. Then copy the link and paste it in your browser.

Your design will come up. In the upper right corner click on the “Download” drop-down and select “Fusion 360 Archive”. You will then be prompted to type in an email address and they will email you a link allowing you to actually download the file.

When your email arrives, you will have a link to the file that you can click on and actually download the file. The file format will be in “project.f3z”. Now that you’ve got the file, if someone else needs to open it, it doesn’t just open directly as you might hope. To import one of these files, you need to create a new project.

Open the project and at the top of the screen you will see an “Upload” button. It is called upload because all of Fusion 360 files are stored in the cloud under your account.

You will then get a pop-up dialog box that allows you to either drag-and-drop the file onto the dialog or browse your hard drive to select your file to upload. After a few minutes the file and all of its linked components will be uploaded and imported into the new project.

Nobody asked me, but it seems ridiculous that Autodesk makes you jump through all of these hoops. They ought to just allow you to do a “Save As” switch to word to your hard drive and have it create the f3z file directly. But at least this does solve the problem until Autodesk gets their act together.