GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

I am looking into a free PLM solution for solidworks. I noticed GrabCAD was a sponsor last year and made their service free to FIRST teams. Now the company offers their software for free to all companies and teams.

I was wondering if anyone has used this plm software and what their experience was. Also if your team uses another solution what do you use?

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

2059 uses GrabCAD and I love it. Very easy to keep track of parts for different robots, does version management well, and can be accessed online very easily. And you can quickly show someone a part/assembly from the web if you want. I highly recommend it for teams without a version control system (we used Google Drive for a while; I don't recommend it...).

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

We used GrabCAD in 2015, PDM in 2014 and SVN years prior.

We've been loving GrabCAD so far, it's been very easy for new users to learn (which is generally the hardest part of any version control for us).

It has all the basic features you'd want.

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

GrabCAD is an amazing resource for FIRST teams to use. Ever since they started sponsoring FIRST last year I've used the resource for Ri3D (SnowProblem), FTC #5943 and FRC #2470. It is a great way to do CAD version control and look at your designs from literally any internet connect device. It is pretty cool when a judge walks up to your pit and you can pull out your tablet/cell phone with the GrabCAD app and have them play with your design.

Disclaimer: I work for Stratasys, which owns GrabCAD.

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

Our team used GradCAD last year and found it to be very useful. Their interface has a few quirks, but still very usable.

While it does have SolidWorks integration, it is really a generic version control solution. It should still work well with Inventor files or files from other CAD systems. I know the viewer does understand inventor files.

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

Big fan of GrabCAD-- like Evan said, we used it on 'Snow Problem, and it was great for that, but GOFIRST (our robotics student group) also uses it for most of our engineering projects, and it works great for those, too.

It might not have some of the more "industrial" features, but it's more than enough for FIRST teams.

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

As my mentor stated we used GrabCAD for the 2015 season and loved it. I will be developing a presentation on it soon. If you PM me I could send it to you once it is done.

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

We will be using GrabCAD for the 2016 season. I'm glad to hear the good feedback from people who used it last year.

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

Awesome, thank you for the great feedback. I think we will look more into setting up grabcad for the upcoming season

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

I'd be interested in hearing more from anyone who uses it with Inventor.

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

We use it with Solidworks after trying Dropbox and SVN in years past. It is absolutely amazing; making conflicted copies is nigh on impossible, and anybody can be taught to use it in a matter of minutes. Plus, the online repository and sharing is good too, with its integrated CAD viewer.
It has very few features, making is easy to learn with, but it also can't do things like locking assemblies and the like. However the version control is great.
The infinite file storage really sold it for me. We can store other stuff right along with just CAD files, like info PDFs about the files and renders.

EDIT: The SW plugin crashed some stuff for us when we started using it late last year. They may have fixed it by now.

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

Ahhh, GrabCAD is amazing, we started using it last year, and it is a godsend. SVN worked, but had troubles with multiple revisions, edit history, user rewrites, ghost-locked files, corrupt files, etc. The SolidWorks plug-in is also really helpful, makes it really easy to upload and download the latest version of files. Separate projects allow the admins to give access to certain people, and you can have previous year's robots at your fingertips if you choose.

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

GrabCAD is absolutely fantastic. We're currently using OCCRA to test drive it. It's very fast and easy to use, so beginners can catch on quickly. We love the online viewer as well, since we don't need to be on a computer that has and/or can handle CAD. Of course file organization and naming is on you, but once that is done, GrabCAD keeps every version on record and all files up to date. It's easy to find and restore previous file versions if needed as well.

I'm glad to know we're not the only ones. It crashes for me as well. GrabCAD workbench has been an effective way around, but I would love to know how and why the crashes are happening.

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

My old team used Grab CAD and it made the CAD process much easier. It's very well organized and the feature where you can view the 3D model any where was very useful by knowing what it is your downloading.

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

GrabCAD is a no-brainer, it's an awesome platform! Very intuitive and has great features for viewing parts and assemblies without having to open a CAD software such as Inventor or Solidworks.

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

This is really interesting! We are working on setting up a Vault server but GrabCAD seems like a really great solution (I just haven't figured out yet if the project is publicly visible or not). Does anyone have some opinions or suggestions between Vault and GrabCAD?

Edit: Just found that models can be made private. Awesome!

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

They are all private by default is my understanding.

Re: GrabCAD or Alternative PLM
 

We use Inventor with GrabCAD and love it. Easy to setup and use, just requires syncing files before and after you work on parts/assemblies. Files can be viewed online as well, but sometimes they take a while to load (depends on file size and complexity).

As for the public vs private files: GrabCAD by default makes everything private, but has a public "folder" within each project (we have a project per robot). Any files you move/copy to the public "folder" (partner space) can be viewed by anyone online with the link (not sure if it is searchable or not by Google), but all files not in the public folder are private. We publish our final CAD models each year in a project and post them publicly as .STP files at cad.team2059.org.