Hey everyone! 166 is switching from Creo to Solidworks for the upcoming season. One of the nice things about using Creo was the file sharing platform Windchill. For those teams who use Solidworks, how do you store/share files throughout your team? I would love to know!
Thanks!
My team is just starting to try it out but you can integrate GrabCAD and solidworks together. I’ve heard good things in the past about it.
4415 uses Solidworks PDM. In the past we used Google Drive, that’s not recommended of course.
is PDM free for FIRST teams?
Highly recommend GrabCAD. Works seamlessly, and the online viewing and collaboration features are a nice bonus.
We are doing the same switch this year to Solidworks as PTC cut the money they were giving us. GrabCAD has worked great for our offseason projects. However, there is no checking out as in Windchill so I do think that you will have to be careful.
I think it comes with the standard Education Edition or whatever that comes along with a sponsorship? Although posts like this don’t list PDM… All I know is that we’ve had access for the last few years. Currently running 2016 or 2017.
If not, GrabCAD looks great judging from all these recommendations.
I will also add to the growing recommendation for grabcad. I was introduced to it through my vex u team and have actually started to use it for myself to deal with having solidworks on multiple PC’s.
What we did on my frc team was install a network based drive in one of our computers that all robotics related cad files would be saved. Each person would have their own folder and then only when authorized to do so the mechanism they were working on would be moved to the official robot files.
I wrote this recommendation of GrabCAD when a similar question was asked a few weeks ago
It is important to note that the grabcad workbench is broken in the newest version of solidworks. This means you will no longer be able to individually upload files within solidworks. The software is still usable with their standalone app and my team will continue to use the software, it is just a bummer to see that feature not be updated.
I contacted support and here is the answer I received which doesn’t look too positive.
Workbench licenses component technologies from our partner companies, who cannot begin development until after a new CAD version is publicly available, so there was some delay in this process that is beyond our control. Additionally, our development resources are almost completely focused on our newer product GrabCAD Print which makes it difficult to release any new features to Workbench. That being said, we are completely supporting Workbench in its current state for the foreseeable future but it will take some time to add support for the new CAD Systems.
With that said I do think it is a great system. It is also great for revision control as you can roll back versions online. In addition you can also sync non cad files. We sync everything from motor calc spreadsheets, gcode, analysis documents etc.
I don’t want to turn this into another CAD debate, but if you’re switching, why switch to Solidworks over Onshape?
319 (and other teams, I’m sure) would be glad to help with getting up to speed with Onshape, and your file sharing issue would be taken care of.
Our team uses an SVN repository for all our CAD and Code. Works really well for us.
But I would recommend GrabCAD. It’s the easiest solution I’ve come across so far.
Grabcad for sure.
Great question Ty, we are switching to Solidworks for a number of reasons. The main reason being that our school offers 2 CAD classes both in Solidworks. Our recruitment for our CAD subteam has been fairly poor for the past 6-7 years so switching to Solidworks would enable us to expand the subteam. We did look at Onshape over the summer but the general consensus from both students and mentors was to go to Solidworks.