easy way to find your robot weight.

[Andy A.]

OK. Autocad is great, and its been in use forever. But, as soon as you try to use it to draw something 3d, your digging a hole with a stick. It's old, archaic stuff. It's not even in the same class as Inventor.

Yes, you can use it to go 3d, but why? Inventor or Solidworks were made from the ground up to do parametrics. Autocad was made to make flat things, like floor plans and such, which is why it's still used by architects. The last time I checked, you still had to make holes using Boolean subtraction (make the plate, make a cylinder, subtract the cylinder from the plate and you have a hole. Need to move the hole? Fill the first hole back in with a new cylinder, then subtract another from the new location. Inventor is as easy as drag and drop).

If you have to make a 2d design, Autocad is fast and will beat Inventor every time for speed (although inventor certainly can do it, it just needs a better spline tool). As soon as you try to make something more complex then a flat piece of sheet metal, drop autocad like a ton of bricks and boot up Inventor. There is no way you could pay me to draw up a drive train in autocad. I'm sure some people do it, but there's no reason to anymore. I would be amazed if the teams shown used autocad to do anything more then lay out the design.

On a side note, Inventor is geared for small to mid sized business. Something like Catia costs tens of thousands of dollars to implement (not just the software, but the computing power needed). So programs like Catia and Pro-E are used almost exclusively by large companies that need that kind of power. For the rest of us with more like four thousand to spend, there is Inventor and Solidworks (the two major players, there are probably others). Inventor is made by the same people who make Autocad, so you would think that with the massive built in user base Inventor would just own the market. But, Solidworks has taken a big lead and is mopping the floor with Inventor. Both are pretty good programs, but preference is for solidworks.

-Andy A.