Source for accurate cell phone CAD?

Hi all,

Working with mobile electronics, I often find myself in need of accurate CAD models of smartphones and tablets. In the past I have either built them myself or used something passable from GrabCAD or the like. The free, crowd-sourced sites yield hit-or-miss results. Does anyone know of a better source for reliable, dimensionally accurate CAD? It’s OK if it’s not free.

Thanks!

It depends on what you are looking for. Apple provides the drawings and dimensions of their devices online, but last I checked no direct CAD files. Not sure if any of the other guys are doing that.

Somthing like turbosquid?

Why does the cad need to be dimension-ally accurate?

I saw your post yesterday morning and found this article this morning. I hope it helps:

If you for an example want to create accessories for the products, that has to snap or fit together in a tight way, accuracy is a must I think.

TurboSquid is great for data to use for renderings, but I would not trust it for critical dimensions. The data there is typically created by folks who may or may not have the product in front of them, and they are mostly building the data for animation/render purposes.

GrabCAD can be good, but again you’ve got to be really careful. I downloaded two iPad Air models from there, both with very high ratings.
Although the creators of both said they had an Air sitting in front of them when they built the models, the two files were different from one another in lots of things that are critical for creating cases (corners, button locations, etc…). They were different than Apple’s dimensioned drawings too. I ended up buying an Air and building the model myself. I did find that the real product differed slightly from Apple’s drawings too.

The best solution if you can afford it is to get a sample of the device and have it 3D scanned. Not cheap though, we have paid from $1200-$1800 for smart phones to be scanned.

The dimensions have to be accurate because we often make things that require a precise fit.

Turbosquid has some good stuff, but it’s mostly focused on rendering and not a complete library by any means. I’m really looking for engineering CAD. I guess such a collection might not exist…

Thanks for the help, guys.