**FIRST EMAIL**/2009 PTC Announcement
 

Greetings Teams: FIRST is pleased to announce that PTC, The Product Development Company, is expanding its sponsorship in this year’s FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC).
PTC’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, including Pro/ENGINEER, Windchill, and Mathcad, are the tools engineers use everyday to do their jobs. As a Crown Level Supplier to FIRST and the FRC program, PTC is offering these solutions to help students design their robots and, through which, FIRST students can learn the language of engineering. The following software products are available to each and every registered 2009 FRC team!!!

Pro/ENGINEER - FIRST teams will have access to Pro/ENGINEER, PTC’s integrated 3D CAD/CAM/CAE software. Pro/ENGINEER is the standard in 3D product design, featuring industry-leading productivity tools that promote best practices in design while ensuring compliance with industry and company standards. Pro/ENGINEER enables students to detail the form, fit, and function of their robot.

With Pro/ENGINEER, high-fidelity digital models have full associativity, so that as your robot design changes during the build season, those changes will be reflected in your drawings and assembly automatically. Used by 15,000 high schools and 1,451 colleges and universities, Pro/ENGINEER offers an intuitive user interface making it easy to learn and use. For many years, FRC teams have used Pro/ENGINEER as part of their high school curriculum.

Windchill – Through its understanding of structured information such as CAD files, engineering calculations, and technical documentation, Windchill helps teams to work concurrently together or virtually from home. You can find the right files, and share product development data during the build season.

Windchill supports CAD authoring tools such as Pro/ENGINEER, Autodesk Inventor, AutoCAD, and Solidworks. Windchill also includes robust visualization capabilities, and provides a secure environment for project management and execution.

Windchill facilitates collaboration with web-based workspaces, alerts, discussion forums, and Microsoft Office integration. Hosted by PTC, web-based Windchill is easily accessible through a Web-browser.

Finally, Windchill can manage your entire project including fundraising, marketing, and finance information. Last year, over 300 teams signed up to use Windchill.

Start your FRC project nowand get familiar with the capabilities that will allow you to plan, manage, share, and get the most out of FRC team information during the fast-paced build season.

Mathcad - Mathcad, PTC’s engineering calculation software, is used to perform, document, and share calculation and design work. The unique Mathcad visual format and easy-to-use whiteboard interface integrates standard mathematical notation, text, and graphs into a single worksheet making Mathcad ideal for knowledge capture, calculation reuse, and engineering collaboration. Mathcad lets teams work with interactive designs to capture the critical methods and values behind each of their robot designs.

Mathcad simplifies and streamlines documentation by combining equations, text, and graphics in a single worksheet. Mathcad makes it easy to keep track of the most complex calculations. Last year, teams used Mathcad to help them with key calculations during the build season to predict the behavior of their robot.

Lastly, PTC has created a dedicated web-page containing various information to aid teams in getting started using the PTC solutions for their robot design. You will find recorded product demos to learn more about the use of our products and how they can help enhance your design and collaboration for your team in this year’s FRC Competition! This page can be accessed from the project OR from www.ptc.com/go/firstgettingstarted.

How to register for the software:

Registration is easy. Your team's main contact will register at www.ptc.com/go/frcregistration Once registered, he/she will have the ability to create their team project or projects. In addition, the main contact will become the project manager and manage member access to the team project.

From the project, team members will download the Pro/ENGINEER Schools Edition, for Integrated CAD/CAM/CAE and Mathcad Student Edition for engineering calculations.

For Questions and Technical Support please email: firstsupport@ptc.com

Go Teams!

Re: **FIRST EMAIL**/2009 PTC Announcement
 

Does someone know how WindChill works with Labview???? Compatible?? Add-on for Labview??

Re: **FIRST EMAIL**/2009 PTC Announcement
 

As far as I know, WindChill is completely different from LabVIEW. WindChill is used along with Pro/ENGINEER to manage all CAD files.

LabVIEW is used for programming.

Re: **FIRST EMAIL**/2009 PTC Announcement
 

It says it supports all these other programs including Microsoft Office. Was hoping someone would have experience with it and would know if Labview was just left out of the list??

Re: **FIRST EMAIL**/2009 PTC Announcement
 

I've had a little experience with Pro/ENGINEER and I am familiar with WindChill. I have also been experimenting with LabVIEW.

Pro/ENGINEER and WindChill are products from PTC that are primarily used for mechanical engineering and design.

LabVIEW is a completely different animal. I would highly doubt that they would work together, but I don't know that for a fact.

Re: **FIRST EMAIL**/2009 PTC Announcement
 

What is the learning curve for PTC Wildfire.

Re: **FIRST EMAIL**/2009 PTC Announcement
 

Pro-e wildfire is much harder to learn then inventor or solidworks, unless you have someone on your team proficient in the software already. There are many benefits to know the software for engineering applications but it is harder to learn then the other offered alternatives. That being said Team DeWALT will most likely use Pro-e, as Black & Decker uses pro for design.

That being said I do believe that it is better for large scale manufacturing as it's tools for FEA, Mechanica and integrated CAM programs are better then inventor and solidworks.

Re: **FIRST EMAIL**/2009 PTC Announcement
 

I can't comment on all of this, but I'm currently enrolled in a class that teaches solidworks, and one that teaches Pro/E. The learning curve on Pro/E is much, much steeper (I'm much more proficient in solidworks now, and the struggling students in solidworks seem to be doing better than the struggling students in Pro/E) and the interface much less intuitive.

I'd have to back up Greg's recommendation that teams use Solidworks unless they have a real good reason to switch.

However, both professors admit that for large scale projects in industry, Pro/E is probably a better choice.

Re: **FIRST EMAIL**/2009 PTC Announcement
 

Thanks guys, I was just wondering because I am currently teaching a class at our school. We have all the software (AutoCAD, Solidworks, Inventor, and Pro/E) and I have never used Pro/E. I was just wondering if I could make use of Pro/E, oh well, thatz what a summers for =).

Thanks,

RC

Re: **FIRST EMAIL**/2009 PTC Announcement
 

How many seats do we get?

Re: **FIRST EMAIL**/2009 PTC Announcement
 

As far as I know, there's really no limit...a teacher that attends a workshop gets something along the lines of 300 seats for their school (At school and for student home use). [http://www.ptc.com/company/community/education/]

Do we have to re-register for the 2009 season? My brother and I are having difficulties trying to log in: we type in the login info and it doesn't deny it, but it won't load the client. I know my account might be a problem since I didn't register under the same email that was invited, but dunno about his.

Re: **FIRST EMAIL**/2009 PTC Announcement
 

I did the Pro-E workshop for teachers this summer... I'd have to agree that Inventor seems to be a bit easier to use, but maybe that is because I have a couple years experience using it for FRC... and a couple decades using AutoCAD products for general CAD work. I was certainly able to figure out Pro/E and build some models... but it is taking a bit of work getting used to the interface. (Mind you, it took me a while to get used to Inventor, too...)

Currently I'm having some issues importing VEX models into Pro/E Wildfire 3.0, but am hoping that 4.0, the current release, will solve those problems and that new KOP components will be released in a native Pro/E format.

Pro/E was of particular interest to our school because of the generous licensing provisions. As much as I appreciate Autodesk's contibution of 10 seats of Inventor for team use, it is nice to be able to use the Pro/E software in essentially unlimited numbers of installations for classroom instruction.

Jason

Re: **FIRST EMAIL**/2009 PTC Announcement
 

Trying to install WF 4.0 Schools, but the bar on setup.exe initialization freezes (There is a ding sound as if an error had occured) at about 80%. Does anyone else have this problem/have and idea why this may be happening?
Does ProE not support AMD/Athlon64 processors?

Re: **FIRST EMAIL**/2009 PTC Announcement
 

If we can use licenses school-wide, that's a big attraction and advantage over the 10 Inventor licenses. The email blast says we can download the school edition. I'm registered and logged into the project, but can't find where to do a download. The installation guide says start with a CD...

Anybody figure where to download? Or other getting started tips?

Thanks....

Re: **FIRST EMAIL**/2009 PTC Announcement
 

Where did you get the setup file? I am trying to find where to download it from.

Schools version install guide says this:

Operating System Service Pack Processor
Windows XP Professional and
Home Edition, 32-bit
Base OS, Service Pack 1 and 2 INTEL Pentium/Xeon family
Windows Vista, 32-bit Base OS INTEL Pentium/Xeon family

But also says look here (http://www.ptc.com/WCMS/files/52592/en/proewf4.pdf) for details. In that document it looks like AMD Opteron is OK, but maybe Athlon is different? Here's info from that doc under platform requirements.

Platform Support Partner Platform Operating System levels CPU
Hewlett-Packard
HP-UX (64-bit only)
11iV1 a
PA8000 or later
Microsoft
 Dell
 Fujitsu-Siemens
 Hewlett-Packard
 IBM
 Lenovo
 Sun
 Fujitsu
Windows Vista Business x64 Edition Windows Vista Ultimate x64 Edition Windows Vista Enterprise x64 Edition
Base OS, Service Pack 1
Intel Pentium/Xeon/Core Duo/Core 2 Duo family
Windows Vista Business Edition Windows Vista Ultimate Edition Windows Vista Enterprise Edition
Base OS, Service Pack 1
Intel Pentium/Xeon/Core Duo/Core 2 Duo family
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
Base OS, Service Pack 2
Intel Pentium/Xeon/Core Duo/Core 2 Duo family AMD Opteron family
Windows XP Professional Edition; Windows XP Home Edition
Base OS, Service Pack 1,2 and 3
Intel Pentium/Xeon/Core Duo/Core 2 Duo family AMD Opteron family
Sun
Solaris (64-bit only)
8 and 10
UltraSPARC II or later
Solaris (64-bit only)
10
Intel and AMD Opteron family