[DFTF] The Question of CAD

[Joe Johnson]

This is part of a series of posts called Drinking From The Firehose on getting Dr Joe back up to speed on All Things FIRST.

Today's topic:
The Question of CAD

For most teams, I think this solution is more or less preselected for them, but I find myself in a position where I have a lot of pros and cons, but no clear answer.

Relevant Facts:

• I use ProE at iRobot
• I use Alibre in my hobby work at home
• I know SolidWorks tolerably well from a prior life
• I used to be a tolerable UG (now NX) but this was over a decade ago
• My school has NO CAD in the building at all.
• The students on my team have never driven CAD at all (unless you count using AutoCAD at a summer camp in 6th grade)
• I want to have 4-6 kids learn the software and be able to help with the design stage (as well as transmit designs from engineers -- me at present -- to the kids on the build team so they can build stuff to print when the engineers can't be on site)

Thoughts:

• ProE is a pretty heavy lift to learn and over powered for our needs
• Alibre and AutoCAD are pretty easy to learn and powerful enough for our needs but as far as a CAD system to know going forward, seems is a little less useful than other choices.
• SolidWorks seems to be winning in a lot of the market, is plenty powerful, and is easy to pick up (imho)
• I've got no dough, so I am hoping that I can find one of these companies that is willing to allow FIRST teams to have a few licenses on the cheap (as in free if possible)

So... ...what should I do? Thoughts? Other than the AutoDesk licenses that come with the kit (they still come with the kit yes?) are there other CAD software companies that are FIRST friendly?

Thanks in advance.

Joe J.

[JackS]

Dr. Joe,

Autodesk student licenses are now available to any high school or college student. All that is required is that the the student must sign up online with a school e-mail address, or send a request to a teacher with a school e-mail address to approve them as a student. The Autodesk licenses are one-year licenses of the full program and any files created with it carry a student version watermark when printed out or added to a non student version file.

Pros:
Students can download from home
Licenses are free for students
All of Autodesk's programs are available (AutoCAD, Inventor PRO, Inventor Publisher, Showcase, 3DS Max, etc.)

Cons:
You aren't familiar with Autodesk Inventor
Even though the only CAD program I know is Inventor, I have always found the interface to be a bit cumbersome


In terms of Solidworks, there is a Solidworks rep for FIRST (correct me if I'm wrong but I think her name is Marie Planchard) who you might be able to PM about getting a few Solidworks licenses for your team. The most popular programs for FIRST are definitely Solidworks and Inventor and there will be resources in FIRST everywhere for students to ask questions. Either program is perfectly capable for FIRST.

Hope this helps!

Jack

[Aren_Hill]

You actually don't even need a school email address to download the latest Inventor anymore, any email address will do.

[Phyrxes]

I know a couple of my students taught themselves basic Inventor using a two monitor set up and YouTube over the summer.

One question though, what are you going to use as your preferred means of transmitting designs? We ran into some issues trying to find a "cloud" solution that wasn't blocked by the school district's firewall and was easy to use.

[Ed Law]

I have heard a little about you Dr. Joe. You are a legend. I still use your spreadsheet on chainvisualizer. It is very useful. Thank you.

To answer your question about CAD. For a FIRST Robotics team, you can get any CAD software for free: PTC Creo/Elements (formerly called Pro/E), Solidworks and Inventor. Our high school uses PTC software for CAD classes so it was a no brainer for us.

For the benefit of students, I would recommend Creo or Solidworks. That's what good engineering schools are using these days and many small to medium size companies also use them.

In terms of software functions, PTC Creo/Elements is the best. And it is closest to the high end software like CATIA V5, making it easier for students to learn in the future.

In terms of ease of learning, Solidworks may have a slight advantage. PTC Creo is more rigorous in terms of expecting you to do things correctly and won't allow sloppy work. Otherwise, students may get into bad habits of just putting something in that look close enough.

Here is the link to get started with free PTC software. It is www.ptc.com/go/first and click on the link at the bottom. They have very nice and free online tutorial called PTC University that covers many topics from very basic to advance uses. If you have any questions about PTC University, just PM me.

Since you use Pro/E at iRobot, I am sure you don't need me to tell you about it.

Self disclosure: I gave you my honest opinion even though PTC happens to be one of our sponsors

[Madison]

Joe,

Pro/E, Solidworks and Inventor are all available to FIRST teams for free, so selecting one is a matter of preference. Your bias against Pro/E for FIRST use is, barring any external pressures, warranted -- in my opinion. It is the least friendly of the three packages to work with and doesn't offer anything particularly useful.

Inventor is popular since it's been available to FIRST teams longest. I don't like it and it is not used in industry much, so if you're interested in giving your kids a marketable skill, it's a bad choice.

Solidworks is what I use for my team (and professionally) and we were able to secure 25 licenses by filling out this form -- http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=91132550276

There is good support among the FIRST community for both Inventor and Solidworks with respect to available KoP models and people who know what they're doing to help you out.

[Jim Zondag]

Joe,
I have jumped back and forth between Inventor and Solidworks for several years. It used to be that I preferred Solidworks because it ran better on my laptop than Inventor, but then I got a better computer that no longer mattered. Both now run equally well on most moderately equipped PCs with assemblies of 1000 parts or more and both have a similar suite of features. Both are available free for FRC members with minimal red tape. Its almost like a Coke vs Pepsi thing now. The differences are down in the realms of personal preference.

Personally, I prefer Inventor, mostly due to my own familiarity with it. The built in tutorials are very good now and it is pretty easy to teach. I have taught numerous students how to use Inventor. Some of the advanced features like the Dynamic Simulator and FEA modules are very powerful once you figure out how to use them. If you want to make really pretty pictures, I think Inventor is a bit better.

All of these newer CAD platforms can export and import geometry to and from one another, so compatibility with suppliers or other teams is not really a big deal anymore either.

[EricH]

If it was up to me, I'd go with Solidworks.

I have learned both Inventor (FRC) and Solidworks (college), and attempted to learn Pro-E twice (back when I was on an FRC team).

You already know some Solidworks, which is good. (OK, so you knew it, but it's not that hard to pick back up again.) It's easier to learn than Pro-E (or whatever they're calling it now). It's also used a lot in industry. For the students, it'll be better. Jack is correct on the name of the Solidworks contact; I'd also figure that she'll be posting in this thread in a day or two.

[Cory]

I started with Inventor, used it for 4 or 5 years, switched to Solidworks, was instantly more productive, probably only took a few weeks to get fully up to speed. Used Solidworks for the last 6 or so years, loved it.

We switched from Solidworks to Inventor at work last week...it has not been a happy transition. Going back to Inventor is incredibly frustrating. Things take more clicks, are convoluted, or just function in a manner that I do not find logical. The user interface is all over the place and requires clicking through too many tabs for things that should be available at all times (for example, the mini toolbar under the actual toolbar in SW that has all the 'view' tools).

I would highly recommend Solidworks, as it is free, more widely used in industry than Inventor, and just easier to use.

[Tristan Lall]

I've learned Pro/E, Inventor, SolidWorks and AutoCAD, and have used them all for significant projects in industry (as well as Pro/E and Inventor in FIRST). However, I'm a little out of practice with the latest versions, so maybe things have changed.

I still like Pro/E* the best, but you've got to be a bit of a perfectionist and quite industrious to make it really work nicely. When it's configured well, though, it's great. I love the responsiveness of the Pro/E sketcher compared to the others. But it has a bit of a mean streak—regeneration will always fail at inopportune times, and early datecodes of every version tend to crash suddenly—which may be a negative for teaching purposes. Pro/E integrates well with Windchill (version control), but in my experience, I'm the only one who bothered to try to figure it out. (And I was actually quite disappointed with the Windchill web interface. Lots of potential, but full of awful UI and, at least on the free PTC-hosted server for FIRST teams, exceedingly, unusably slow.) I don't think it's really too difficult to learn Pro/E; it didn't take me long at all, back in 2003.

I never really liked Inventor. I could deal with it, but its interface was always counterintuitive, and like Cory said, it takes way more clicks to do things. It was a resource hog when I last used it regularly (but that was about six years ago). Vault version control sucked; I thought they'd replaced it, but I don't know with what.

SolidWorks was always decent. It's probably the most marketable as a job skill these days, in small and medium engineering businesses at least. They always struck me as the most willing to create a product that's great for engineering schools, and presumably great for high schools too. If you're worried about Pro/E, then this is the CAD software for you.

AutoCAD is not the way to go, unless all you want it for is toolpaths. It can do much more of course—but it's just not worth the aggravation.

In any case, they're all free to FIRST teams (and university students), so that part of the decision is easy.

*I still can't get used to "Creo". It seemed like a strange marketing move, throwing away name recognition...but maybe they wanted to shed the "hard to use" stigma.

[Joe Johnson]

Okay. I am thinking that SolidWorks is the best choice for us. Thanks.

By the way, I am surprised that nobody has mentioned the BIGGEST drawback of them all: Every CAD system has a different set of button clicks to zoom, pan, and rotate!!! If you switch between software often, it drives you crazy.

Ah well, my brain has managed to figure out how to switch between ProE during the days and Alibre at night (with an occasional 3D PDF in the mix as well*). Somehow, my brain will have to force my fingers to drive SolidWorks. I'll manage...

Joe J.

*3D PDF's are really useful if you don't know what they are. When I was consulting I would often export the CAD to a 3D PDF and send it off to my client. Anyone in the company could then open the file and see the CAD in 3D without having to have any special software installed -- yeah, I know that there are tons of free CAD viewers out there, but seriously, who is going to install all those views? You may have your qualms about Adobe, but they do manage to get their software on people's PCs...

[thefro526]

Just to throw another opinion out there: From my experience, it doesn't matter what system you use as long as you're comfortable using it. I'm relatively competent with each of the big three; Inventor, Solidworks and Pro Engineer (Which is now Creo after WF5, I think) and have very few issues switching between the three.

ProE is probably my least favorite even though it's the only program I have formal training on. I've always found the interface to be a bit counter intuitive (especially when learning), but it's more powerful than Solidworks or Inventor so I guess it's a worthwhile trade off.

My personal favorite is Inventor because I know it the best and I think it's easy to learn and/or teach.

[Akash Rastogi]

I would agree that Pro/e or creo whatever they are calling it is overpowered for FRC. I personally agree that Solidworks is much faster to pick up and agree that productivity increases when switching from Inventor to SW. New CAD resources from 1323 are also a big help.
http://www.atomicrobotics.com/resources/cad/

[Brandon Holley]

For teaching a group of new students how to CAD, I would definitely advocate for SolidWorks. It's used industry wide, and is very easy to pick up (yet still has some powerful tools for more advanced users).

I think your inclination to go with SolidWorks is a good one. We switched from Inventor to SolidWorks now 4 years ago, and we haven't looked back.

-Brando

[Jim Zondag]

Joe,
#1 thing to do to get around the whole which button orbits, pans, etc is to get a 3-d Mouse. It takes a little bit to learn but is a huge enabler.

http://www.google.com/products/catal...d=0CHIQ8wIwBw#

Once you get one of these, the interface can be the same on every CAD platform.