Why I Like Designing the Air Engine on Onshape Mobile

Rıdvan Polat

6 December 2025 6 mins to read

Welcome to our training series! In this blog series, you will learn step-by-step Air Engine design, creating assemblies, and technical drawings directly on your tablet with Onshape.

If you haven’t tried Onshape, PTC’s cloud-native CAD and PDM platform, yet, you can click on the link below to create a free Onshape account or try Onshape Professional—which includes tools such as Simulation and Render Studio—free for 6 months.

6 Months Free Access to Onshape Professional

Onshape is a Product Development Platform that runs on a web browser. It also has dedicated apps for Android and iOS operating systems to enhance the mobile experience. This means you can design on a tablet, which is what I used to create this tutorial. Since I used a tablet for this tutorial, let’s explore Onshape’s mobile app on an Android tablet with some examples before we dive into the main Air Engine design.

Onshape Mobile App

I used a tablet throughout this training, and frankly, I prefer designing on a tablet to designing on a computer. I like the feel of touching the design with a pen. Of course, you need certain features to design on a tablet. For example, you need to be able to perform the same actions as on a computer, like right-clicking with the mouse, zooming in and out, or scrolling by holding down CTRL and the mouse wheel. With the Onshape mobile app, we can do everything we can do with a mouse and keyboard using just a few finger gestures. Let’s see how we do it.

Right Tap/Two-Finger Tap

On the design screen, you can perform a “right tap” (similar to a right-click on a computer) by tapping the tablet screen with two fingers. This feature offers different options depending on the active components. For example, when you select a plane or surface and tap with two fingers, it will display commands that allow you to create a new sketch, along with other commands.

When a sketch is active, tapping the screen with two fingers displays the command that allows you to view normal to the active plane, as well as other commands.

Position Selector

Based on my experience with CAD applications I’ve tested before, the most challenging part of designing on a tablet is undoubtedly creating a sketch. Drawing lines, circles, and rectangles, and then aligning them with each other, are just a few of the things that make this task difficult. Onshape offers a different solution and has named this feature the Position Selector.

The Position Selector feature allows us to snap to an origin and align. This helps eliminate the biggest challenge in the sketching environment. So how does it work? For example, after selecting the Rectangular command, if you want the rectangle’s center point to be the origin in the design environment, the first thing you need to do is tap your pen on the screen once and drag it without lifting it. When you do this, the Position Selector feature activates, and a + symbol appears at the tip of your pen. To snap to the origin, simply drag the pen until the + symbol aligns with the origin. When you do this, the origin will appear in yellow with a square frame around it. When you lift the pen from the screen, the rectangle will be created centered on the point you captured (which in our case was the origin point). You can adjust the long and short sides of the rectangle by tapping and dragging with the pen.

Another feature offered by the Position Selector is its ability to align objects. For example, you have created a circle. You want to create another circle but want the center points of the two circles to be aligned. You can perform this operation by following similar steps to those in the first example. The only difference is that when you touch the screen with the pen and drag it, you move it in the direction of the point you want to align with, and when you see the dashed line appear, you lift the pen.

Dimension

So, you’ve created your sketches, but how do you dimension them? When you need to enter a dimension, a mini numpad-like window appears on the screen, allowing you to input the numerical values

View Lock

You don’t want your model to rotate accidentally while you are panning with your finger. Or you might want to prevent the model from rotating while zooming. To achieve this, you can use the View Lock feature, which locks the view rotation.

Zoom-Move–Rotation

There are three main gestures you need to know for zooming, panning, and rotating:

1. To zoom, use the familiar “pinch” gesture, just like on your phone.

2. To pan (move the object around), simply touch the screen with two fingers and drag them without lifting.

3. To rotate, simply swipe your finger left or right on the screen.

Multi Select

We don’t have a CTRL key for multi-selection, but Onshape has a solution for this. For example, if you want to select two lines and make them equal, you simply tap to select both lines and then tap the “Equal” constraint. To exit multi-select mode, just double-tap an empty area on the screen with your pen.

Selection Box

If you’ve used other CAD programs, you’ll be familiar with this. On a PC, dragging from left-to-right creates a blue selection box that selects only items fully inside it. Dragging from right-to-left creates a yellow box that selects any item it touches. So how do we do this on a tablet? Onshape has a great solution. Just press and hold the screen with two fingers, and the selection box feature will appear. You can then drag to create either the blue or yellow selection box.

Now that you’ve mastered the mobile app’s tools and gestures, we’re ready to move on to the actual design work. In the second part of this series, we will start modeling the Air Engine components step-by-step. If you’re ready to start designing, I’ll see you in the next post where we dive straight into the details.

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Rıdvan Polat

Co-Founder at ChampionXperience

Ridvan Polat is a SOLIDWORKS Elite Application Engineer, Founder of ChampionXperience, and a recognized SOLIDWORKS, ENOVIA, and 3DEXPERIENCE Champion. He specializes in CATIA & ENOVIA technical support and 3DEXPERIENCE early engagement adaptation, helping organizations optimize PLM workflows.