CAD programs for Macs - Suggestions, anyone?

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by xman206

Try Autodesk Inventor

I think you should read the OP.

[richtop]

OnShape should work on Macs just fine. See related post http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=138751

[akoscielski3]

I will second OnShape. It was made by the person who originally created Solidworks. It's free and runs on browsers.

I have not used it yet, but since it was made by the same guy who started Solidworks I will assume (No facts to back this up) that it would be easy for students to transition from OnShape to Solidworks. This is a good thing because most people who have/use CAD software use Solidworks.

[inventor_phild]

Originally Posted by HelloRobot

Hello everyone!

I'm co-captain of a rookie team, and we are looking for CAD software to use this season to design our robot and parts. Our school is lucky enough to have MacBook Pros for every student, so, ideally, we want whatever CAD software we use to be able to run on Macs.

Right now, our team members can get Autodesk Inventor Pro from their website, but that does not run on Macs. We put Inventor Pro on a few Windows computers the school owns, but they sometimes take a while to load, so it's not really reliable. In addition, not a lot of our members have their own Windows PC to take to robotics meetings.

Bottom line is CAD software for Macs would be optimal for us. So, if anyone has any suggestions, we would greatly appreciate it! Thank you!

As noted by a number of other teams Fusion 360 is available on both PC and Mac platforms. For obvious reasons I would recommend you have a look!

http://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/overview

Let me know if I can be of any assistance.

[Mechvet]

I'll also recommend Fusion. This is the result of about an hour of playing around:


Compared to Inventor: It's a little limited. The lack of a sheet metal workflow is annoying, but they make up for it by including CAM/toolpathing out of the box.

Compared to Solidworks: See above.

[sawhneyjalaj]

My team uses Solidworks as our CAD program. I'm the CAD guy so in my personal opinion, using Solidworks is hard work but if you can get efficient, it is extremely helpful. However, Solidworks is only for Windows so I recommend getting funds together and getting one or two CAD laptops with a decent Windows OS. 8 gig of RAM is extremely necessary although if you have a SSD then 4 gig can work but it will be slow with large assemblies. And if you choose Solidworks, do not solely rely on the tutorials. They aren't that helpful and it teaches you ways to do things that are quite inefficient. There are dozens of ways to do anything in Solidworks and some ways are faster but unreliable in some situations while some are slower but always reliable. Try to find a balance between the two. Good luck!