Inventor or Creo?
 

Right now, I'm having our team use Autodesk Inventor and AutoCAD Electrical for or CAD models. I recently have been looking into PTC Creo, and I'm starting to think that we should use it instead. We wouldn't change now, mid-season, but we would use it next season. I want to know which program to use. SOLIDWORKS is not an option, as it costs money.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

Solidworks is free for FIRST teams.

I haven't tried PTC Creo, but of the CAD software that I have tried (Inventor, Solidwords, NX), I found Inventor the easiest to learn.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

+1 for Solidworks

I have used inventor and done a little with PTC Creo. I have found inventor to be the easiest to use immediately, but Solidworks for me has ended up being better after using it for a little longer.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

Thanks, I didn't know that. Whenever I used the link, it always took me to the student edition, which is $150. So I guess it is an option.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

I also want to say that ease of use isn't as important, as we would have the rest of the year to learn how to use it. I'm mainly concerned with speed of design and power of modeling.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

Go to www.solidworks.com/first.

Click sponsorship.

It's free to First teams and vex

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

I like Creo. It's got plenty of power and I find it generally more intuitive than Solidworks or Inventor (though Solidworks is miles better for drawings). To be honest, I think it's a matter of personal preference more than anything. I'd try each of them and figure out which one fits better.

I'd also ask what resources you have locally-- do you have mentors with experience with one or another? Are any of the companies local or do they put on workshops nearby?

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

The CAD team does not have any mentor help, and as far as I know, there aren't any local companies or workshops.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

I've used both Inventor and PTC and agree with others that AutoDesk Inventor is easiest to learn and to use. I haven't had a chance yet to download SolidWorks, but hope to do that in the off-season and try it out.

For people on your Team who are new to Inventor, please feel free to download our free, 5-session introduction to Inventor (geared more towards Robotics designs) that our Team (#2530) put together: http://frcteam2530.org/resources

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

I have never been more fed up with SolidWorks...external references are handled pretty horribly and is extremely unforgiving when other people make changes and you need to update your model. I wish Dassault gave out licenses of CATIA, but I may have to switch to Creo. I don't want to do it, but SolidWorks kills me. I 'be always preferred top-down design and SolidWorks' implementation just isn't that good.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

In this case I'd definitely suggest having your CAD team try each of them out. Inventor and Solidworks have good built in tutorials, and Creo has some good tutorials available on the PTC website. Once they've tried each, they should have a good grasp of both the fundamentals and and the general "feel" of each program. Like I said, I really do see this as a personal preference-- all three packages are perfectly capable of doing everything an average FRC team needs, they just have different flavors and approaches to solving essentially the same problems.

One thing to keep in mind is that generally Inventor is an academic program-- while I'm sure there are companies out there that use it, Solidworks, and to a certain extent Creo are vastly more common-- I know several people that design professionally in each. Make of that what you will.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

Disclosure up front: I work for PTC. The opinions below are my own, not PTC's.

You can download all the free PTC software and free training if you start at http://www.ptc.com/go/first

PTC is a huge sponsor of FIRST (sponsoring dozens of teams, the annual Kick Off, many regionals, and FIRST at a corporate level). Hundreds of our employees volunteer with FIRST. I say that just to give credence to the fact that we're not just throwing some software out there and hoping people use it. The company is firmly behind FIRST's mission.

I believe PTC provides FIRST teams with the most comprehensive set of free design and data management software and training that you can get. That said, I hope every team looks at all the options out there and picks the best one for them. As you are doing so, I suggest you look not just at the software functionality, but also at the job postings in your area from product development engineering firms and consider the specific CAD skills that are in demand in your area.

PTC provides Creo, Mathcad, Windchill, and Internet of Things software platform access for free and has for many years (IoT is new this year). We also provide the field and KOP models each year for free (http://www.ptc.com/go/firstkop).

Future teaser - I'd expect future games to start to include aspects that are specifically oriented around IoT. Maybe not next year, but I'll be very surprised if the game design committee isn't looking in that direction. I have no insider information, just my prediction.

Creo invented 3D parametric solid modeling, but besides everything you expect from solid modeling you also get mechanism design and analysis, automated drawing creation, automated BOM generation, photorendering, and quite a few other modules.

Mathcad allows engineering calculations to be performed, documented, and even linked to drive your CAD models.

Windchill is fully integrated with Creo (you run it in Creo, within the same interface, or can also run it in any browser). Windchill manages all the CAD content so you can avoid shuttling thumb drives around and having people lose files or step on each others changes. Generating CAD files is easy. Keeping them in synch manually is guaranteed to fall apart if you are reaching any reasonable degree of model complexity.

Windchill handles backup and is accessible anywhere there is an internet connection. People who don't have Creo but who want or need to see the model (and measure or otherwise interrogate it) can use Creo View as a very lightweight and easy to use interface to see the full 3d model and get information from it. You control access for your team, and can store and iterate whatever electronic file you wish in your project.

PTC provides FIRST teams access to all of its on line training for those software packages, hosts a multi-week webinar where PTC experts lead you though the "How to Model Almost Anything" training (Sept to Nov each year), and finally PTC also offers live and video conference training workshops scheduled with individual teams.

All of this software and training is exactly the same as PTC provides to its commercial clients, except where we added more that is unique to FIRST. Oh, and its all free for FIRST teams.

Our team has had tremendous success using Creo, Creo View, Windchill, and (admittedly to a lesser extent) Mathcad.

I am not seeking to start a posting war over which CAD is better. OK, I will say that if SolidWorks is actually charging FIRST teams for their licenses (I've read posts that say they do, and others that say they don't) then I don't understand why there isn't a mass revolt against them (we'll welcome you to Creo any time!). In any case, our team is very confident in our decision and the benefits we get from it every day. Your mileage may vary. I hope the information here helps, whether anyone chooses PTC / Creo or not.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

External references are a big no no on 254, because they cause nothing but headaches.

Solidworks is easier to learn than Inventor and Pro/E. Pro/E is arguably more powerful (and more prevalent in industry), but it's not going to matter for FRC purposes.

Solidworks is the best bet for it's blend of ease of use and adoption in industry. Inventor is going to be a distant third in terms of industry use.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

Yeah, I don't think I'll be using them again. It just made it so easy to start with a requirement and build parts to suit the requirement. It's really not that bad when 1 person is working on the model, but when you have a team of people working simultaneously, it's just a nightmare.

This is a mistake you do once... I'm sure it's responsible for setting us back at least a couple days this build season.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

I learned drafting in college using AutoCAD...then tried to learn Inventor when I first got involved as a FRC mentor, and had much difficulty...Solidworks has been great, and I've managed to teach it to 5 or 6 people on my team easily. I've since figure out Inventor, but still prefer Solidworks for it's intuitiveness. I have tried and failed several times to learn Creo.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

Our school teaches Inventor as part of the STEM curriculum, so the team has elected to use that as our CAD tool. Last year we used Creo and struggled mightily with the learning curve. However, Windchill was fantastic for model integrity and storage. My personal preference is SolidWorks (with GrabCAD), but I struggle with what is best for the students. Is it better to support/augment what the school is already teaching them or is it better to use a tool that people are actually using in the mechanical design world? Don't get me wrong, I am an inventor fan-boy, but my industry experience as an engineering consultant proves that, in general, large, established companies use Creo, smaller, younger comapnies use SolidWorks, and a very small handful use Inventor.

As a side note, GrabCAD's support of Inventor 2015 is abysmal. It's effectively no better than GIT or Dropbox, imho. Which is another reason to switch to solid works, unless Autodesk could make a cloud version of Vault available (like Windchill) [HINT HINT].

SO with all that said... I am not looking to start a war and I apologize if I hijacked this thread, but in the spirit of the OP's initial question, is it better to support and use a software that the school teaches or is it better to use a more widely used software on our team?

Thanks for reading!

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

I only have experience in Inventor. It's a little complicated at first and a little difficult to get used to. Once you get used to it though it's a breeze! :D

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

I think it is best to expose them to a wide variety of engineering tools and processes. If you can make a part on a mill or with a plasma cutter, why not learn both and understand the pros and cons of each approach. If they can learn Inventor and Creo and learn where there is a market for each skill set then they should learn both.

Why wait for Autodesk or D'Assault to duplicate Windchill or provide it to FIRST teams for free (I hope you are not holding your breath) when Windchill itself can handle all of that and has been available for free for years? Even if all you do is use Creo's native multi CAD funcatonality as a means of either converting or simply loading non-Creo CAD into Windchill you'd be far ahead.

Nothing out there touches Creo (particularly 3.0) in terms of being able to handle heterogeneous CAD source files in their native forms directly in Creo, with more or less full access to modeling features.

Creo 3 multi CAD features

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

Dassault Systemes has provided PDMWorks for Solidworks for at least the last 5 years.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

Fair point. I should have inserted my breath holding comment after Autodesk which is what I was thinking in my head but didn't write.

The same comment I made about the benefits of having both Inventor and Creo experience applies across all CAD and data management software. The more experience the students get the more they form their own opinion and are better prepared for a STEM career.

I'm not an expert in PDMWorks, but I think it is a client/server application that the team has to install and maintain on each computer and the local vault, right? That would imply local hardware costs or at least the cost of the team's time to do installs and updates on every computer and the server. If it is web-based then this wouldn't apply, I'm just not sure.

We find our school's lockdown control over their computer systems means we stay away from as many installs as possible. Windchill is a website. No install, no maintenance, no local hardware costs, so it works great for us. That's my opinion, others may not have similar challenges to avoid.

Creo can import, open, change, etc. native SolidWorks (and many other CAD) files and manage them in Windchill too. So a single team could have some students using Inventor, Creo, and Solidworks, manage it all in Windchill, and have a top level assembly that puts all of that content together.

That is another example of good prep for real world. Sure, most companies standardize on one CAD or another. But companies have supply chains and customers and unless you have the weight of an Intel or Cat (both Creo) you can't dictate CAD format to your suppliers or customers (e.g. if you're building for the Army they're probably demanding Creo files and you can't negotiate that). In any engineering job you have to deal with some design content coming in formats other than your company's CAD standard, so it would be great if we exposed our FIRST teams to that as well.

I would do it in a non-build season project though. There's no need for artificial complexity, we all have enough going on in build season without inventing challenges even they are good lessons to teach.

Keith

We have used sketchup for the last few years..... Next year we intend to use solid works but we shall see.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

If anyone from Autodesk is reading, PLEASE we need cloud-based Vault. We love vault currently, but some things are a real pain. It's a real love hate relationship.

We might be looking into using 360, but I'm not very familiar with it yet. Does it maintain similar functionality to Vault with revision history and check in and check out?

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

Based on discussions with other teams I have posted this question to the Vault development team.

My guess is that the answer is A360.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but can't Windchill handle non-Creo CAD systems? I've never used it myself, but that was my understanding when watching some videos about it.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

Yes, Windchill can manage the CAD for anything that I've ever seen any FIRST team use and more.

Windchill Multi-CAD management

AutoCAD, Inventor, CATIA V5, SoildWorks, NX, FORAN, ECAD, and Cadence can all be managed in their native file format. For that matter, you can open (and change if you want) most (maybe all, I haven't checked recently) of them in their native format in Creo.

There is also a wide range of viewer support.

Using viewers so non-CAD team members can see the model in 3D without all the overhead of learning CAD is an underrated thing. This year our team permanently had a Creo View session running in the main fabrication shop. If someone's print wasn't clear they went to the model and measured directly off the model to clear up confusion - or to find out we had a design problem.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

I would love to use Windchill with Inventor, but I could not find how to get the latest version of Windchill to talk with Inventor 2015.

below is what Windchill is saying I have available. In the old version of windchill, there was a plugin available for other software. Any idea how to install the plug for Inventor 2015?

The word group manager software for Inventor is apparently not bundled with the free Windchill instance that gas been set up for FIRST teams. I am checking with PTC to see if that could change, but unless I post something to the contrary here that seems to be a restriction that is going to stay in place.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

I completely agree with this. Solidworks was easy to learn and I have loved it for the past couple years. This year I started doing top down modeling using derived parts and it has given me so many problems. If somebody has a better method for top down design in Solidworks, I'd love to try it, but as of right now we will be looking into Creo for next year.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

3081 used A360 this year for multi user design and it generally worked well.

2869 has used sketchup for years. It's nice to organize thoughts quickly but thats all its good for.

This year we decided to learn inventor. I have a basic understanding already. We are making a off season bot so we will see if it's all worth it

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

Just to put this part to rest, 3506 has had 30 seats of SOLIDWORKS Student Edition for 5 years straight now and we have not paid a dime. SW is free for all FRC teams so do not discount it as an option.

As for version control and external references, using a data management software such as (free) GrabCAD Workbench would alleviate a lot of those grievances. I am hoping that EPDM will be included in the next license handout from FIRST and SOLIDWORKS because that would be even better.

As for CAD platforms I found that functionally CREO and SOLIDWORKS are very comparable while Inventor does not quite have as many features. SOLIDWORKS of course boasts ease-of-use more than anything else which I found much easier to teach to high school students. I work in the CAD industry and I can say there is no such thing as an unbiased opinion on these programs and that any head to head comparison is biased.

My bias lies with SOLIDWORKS but with that being said you can always change programs and learn something new. I would use the resources at your disposal and make the software decision based on what mentors are available that know the programs, what teaching resources you have access to on the web, and any literature such as a CAD manual from a course.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

Inventor is extremely easy to use, and to get used to. It lacks some more advanced abilities, though. Solidworks is also pretty intuitive, is more widely-accepted in industry, and is a bit more powerful. Creo, in my team's experience, is a massive pain to get used to, and its more advanced capabilities aren't really useful in FRC. I'm still an Inventor peasant but I'd strongly suggest Solidworks as it offers a good balance of user-friendliness and advanced features.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

I use both packages daily.

CREO is an advanced package and is incredibly powerful...however it isn't very intuitive in my opinion and can be very challenging to use if you continuer stand the fundamentals.

Inventor is very simple and has plenty of firepower for FRC.

I'd much rather teach Inventor to students than CREO.

Re: Inventor or Creo?
 

Inventor is the most preferred program on our team, due to our experience with it. As others have stated, Inventor seems to have an easy-to-learn design. Personally, I don't know anything about Creo, though I would like to learn in the future. We have a new student joining our CAD subteam who knows the basics of SolidWorks, and he may be able to help us with it. Overall, Inventor is currently my most favored software.