easy way to find your robot weight.

[Veselin Kolev]

As a frequent user of both AutoCad 2005 and Inventor 9, I can say the following:

Inventor is for anything that has to do with motion and is 3d. You can do active springs in Inventor. In version 9, you can FINALLY stop parts from intersecting too. It's just very realistic. As for the 2d drawing part, its ok. It could be better, but for robotics its fine. If you get to know all the keyboard shortcuts and all, you can CAD really fast. But basically its best for assemblies and 3d stuff.

AutoCad is ment for 2d sketching. It is like drafting, but a whole lot faster (duh, no more pencil and graph paper). It is more powerful than Inventor, as in you can do more stuff faster, but who cares? This is robotics, not the real world (laughs). If you learn how to use AutoCad well, it is much better than Inventor at what it was made for.

In the end I prefer Inventor. I started on Inventor so I am much more comfortable using it. Also I am always dealing more with assemblies than with individual parts. Also I like how Inventor can export to a lot of different formats, especially .dxf, which you can just send right to a CNC watercutter and *poof* you have a robot.

However, for all you people that want to go to college for mechanical engineering, I would learn AutoCad as well. Because nobody uses Inventor. Though I personally think they should.