Budget Problem

[Dancing_Chuck]

The team (1111) has a problem. We wish to purchase a working form of AutoCad (is that what you use? we don't really know...), but we cannot find a good version that is under 1 grand. I need to know if there are any versions out there that cost any less, and if I can convert the files. Thanks in advance!

[lancerbotics]

Had you tried the Auto Desk that you get for free. Auto Desk is the company that sells Auto CAD.

[Dancing_Chuck]

Ah, well.... Apparently no one told me that we got that....

[chris31]

The kit comes with Inventor 11 which can open AutoCAD files. Give that a shot. If you still prefer AutoCAD I think AutoDesk gives copies free for educational use, if not contact them.

[whytheheckme]

You can download it at:

http://firstbase.autodesk.com

I'm not sure how the team setup works there; I'm just a student with a student account; I did not set up our account there, although I can't imagine that it is that difficult.

Jacob

[Chris Marra]

If you, or anyone on your team, is going to an accredited college (engineering or not), you can go to http://students.autodesk.com and download a free copy after registering. It will imprint a student watermark on anything you do however, but if you're just designing, it should be fine.

If you need to purchase a copy, the Student Portfolio edition can be found here for a pretty reasonable price.

As mentioned before, FIRSTBase also contains 10 licenses of Autodesk Inventor for each team.

[Dan Zollman]

Mechanical Desktop, which is AutoCAD with some extra stuff for mechanical design, comes along with Inventor.

Autodesk provides 10 free licenses of Inventor 11 Professional to teach team. Your team's main contact should have the information required to download a copy from FIRSTbase; Mechanical Desktop is when you install Inventor (if Inventor is already installed and you don't have Mech Desktop, you can install it any time from the product set up screen).