Quote:
Originally Posted by dirtbikerxz
We personally use Autodesk Inventor. While I have used Soildworks before, I find Inventor easier to use.
You can grab a free license here: http://www.autodesk.com/education/fr...r-professional
Like waterbott said, get yourself familiar with grabcad. It's really useful for interactive previews. If you want a simpler method, google drive works just as well.
While I am not aware of any Inventor tutorials, likes simbotics has for Solidworks. (Someone post them if you know of some), I personally learned by just following Inventor's tutorials (integrated into the app), a bunch of googling, Youtube videos of a specific question, and some creative thinking. After I learned, it was relatively easy to teach just as capable team members. |
I would not recommend using Google Drive for version control. You sacrifice a lot of control over what is/is not being updated that you have with GrabCAD or other software actually designed for CAD use.
I'm going to suggest that you look around and try to find mentors before you decide on a CAD package. It will be much, much easier to implement CAD on your team if you have a mentor or someone else familiar with the software to guide you through learning it. If you cannot find a mentor, I would suggest Solidworks, as it's a good midpoint between being easier to pick up and being actually used outside of education. I'm a big fan of Creo and find it the most intuitive to use, but I know a lot of people don't share that opinion. You probably want to download and try out each package-- they're all free to students and mentors in FIRST.
Really, anyone designing parts from your robot should learn CAD. Once you have it learned, it is such a time saver compared to trial and error by hand. Some builders take to it more than others, but if you really want to teach or learn to engineer a robot, CAD is in my mind an integral part of that process.