Engineering or drafting?

[crazykid234]

just as a general pole, does your team use inventor as an engineering tool, or as a drafting program?

[DaBruteForceGuy]

My team uses Inventor for both an engineering tool and for drafting. when it comes to figureing out clearances, geometry, COG... nothing beats having a laptop and autodesk inventor on hand. I also used INventor to fully design every part and machined component that is found on our robot this year. the machine shops that we deal with often have CnC capabilities, so i want to be able to utilize them at any notice by simply throwing the guy a disk with part files.

[Peter Matteson]

Not really answering the question exactly but:

Neither we Use Pro/Engineer and Pro/Desktop.

The Students can design and draft everything they need at a small assy or part level so they can concept or come up with a system idea. They also create drawings of basic parts so we can program them into the CNC or make them on the lathe.

The more complex integration of the systems I do in Pro/E on a workstation because the assemblies start to crash the school's computers too quickly. All the higher level assemblies come from the Pro/E model which is made up of imported parts from Pro/Desktop.

So I guess the anwer is really we do both with another software that:
A. My company uses.
B. We can give the students shareware of.
c. From my understanding is a more powerful design tool, although we use none of the high end features. I generally like the User Interface of Pro/E better, but keep in mind this last bullet is mostly personal opinion.

Also all the students have to take a product design class to participate. That is where they learn the software.

-Pete