CAD Revision Control

FIRST General Forum
#34

I recommend PTC’s Windchill. It is ‘web-based’/‘cloud based’/easy to set up and great technical support over the past year.

I am not sure how I set the account up now, but can tell you the link:
FIRST Robotics Windchill
EDIT: The person to contact at PTC about setting up a Windchill account for your FIRST Robotics Team is Cosmin Pana - cpana@ptc.com

The best part is that it can be used by any of the most popular modeling software plateforms (Inventor, SolidWorks, Pro/E - Creo, Catia, MathCAD, etc) with free plugins directly from PTC.

Also, this can be used for more than just CAD revision control. PTC also has direct plug-ins for windows and windows office suite. Now you can upload and control documents without ever leaving Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. There is also a plug-in for MS Project, but I haven’t used that too much; I am sure it is great though.

Part of The RoboBees have been using Windchill for a year as a test bed, but I plan to launch it team wide in a few weeks. I have been using the direct plug-in for SolidWorks for sometime now, and have had zero issues.

Feel free to contact me through a PM, or on this thread so others can learn as well.

#35

We have had experience using Windchill, too. It has been pretty reliable over the years. I definitely reccomend it to other teams.

#36

Does Windchill preserve the parent-child relationships in Inventor or SolidWorks the same way the “native” version control system would? As I understand it, the really powerful thing about any version control software is its ability to update dependent assemblies or drawings automatically and seamlessly. I suspect that using a third party version control system (like Windchill) for version control with, say, SolidWorks wouldn’t be much better than using a program like Dropbox.

#37

DampRobot,

To my knowledge and understanding of your question, yes Windchill does preserve the parent-child relationship. I will give a few a few examples from SolidWorks: I am able to update the sizes of bolts on the fly through configurations and design tables (generic -->instances), update a part and the assembly changes based on those modifications, drawings remain linked to parts for autoupdating. These are also available for Windchill for Pro/E (now Creo). I use Winchill/Creo at work and Windchill/SolidWorks for robotics.

The other difference between a PDM software (like Windchill) and something like DropBox is easy revision control. With a few minutes of setup by the admin of the Windchill server, user permissions can be created such that only selected people can delete parts, roll back versions, etc. In order to make changes to a part, a user has to “checkout” the part/assembly/document from the Windchill server. This prevents other users from changing the part as someone else is. Windchill keeps track of every upload incase something is needed to be rolled back. Then the part can be “checked in” for others to use. Once a design is decided on, the part can be locked such that people can download and use the part, but not make changes to it. If the part is changed by an authorized user, it will updated in all places that it is being used.

EDIT: Take a look at this link for Windchill for SolidWorks. I have never used Windchill with any software packages other than Pro/E (Creo) and SolidWorks. I have Inventor 2012 on my computer, and I will give it a shot as well in the near future. I would assume it is very similar to the Pro/E and SolidWorks counterparts.
/EDIT

I can explain in more detail some “library” practices in further detail if needed.

Note One thing that most people view as a downfall for Windchill is the limitation of only having the same name on the server once. Meaning if you made a part called “arm.prt” in 2012, you could never name another part “arm.prt”. I would recommend adapting sometype of numbering convention that includes the year to avoid these problems.

#38

In the SolidWorks 2012-2013 Sponsorship package this fall we will provide SolidWorks Workgroup PDM. This is an easy solution to revision control.

You can do it now in 2011-2012. We created a couple of videos to help on YouTube. Here are the instructions.

You do need one computer to act as the server.

Always try a simple solution first. Marie

#39

I know it was only released recently but, has anyone used Google Drive? I am using Inventor.

We are trying it right now for our offseason robot. I will post whether is works or not.

If it doesn’t work, we will go back to Dropbox.

#40

Yes, DON’T USE DROPBOX FOR CAD.
I had to redo our drive base 3 times, the ball lifter 2 times and the main assembly even more times. This was when I used Inventor with just two users.
Vault seems good for Inventor.
What’s the simplest and best syncing tool for Solidworks?

#41

I use PTC Windchill. It is online based and doesn’t require a server to be set up. See some of my other replies in this thread for more info.

It seems like SolidWorks is going to provide their version of this software this year. It does require a server though. I also have not tried this, so I can’t really comment on it.

I really do recommend Windchill, it works great.

#42

Interesting, we synced dropbox between 6 computers/users this year. We never had an issue with syncing. How we handled it was:

-We split up the robot for people to work on.
-If they were gonna work on a portion or save over everything we made sure all revisions were closed by sending out a text or tweet.
-We updated a google doc as a fake “checkout”
-Also tried decently hard to work on it only in the shop so that did make life easy.

We honestly never had a problem, our robot did have a lot of parts this year :stuck_out_tongue:

-RC

#43

At the PTC Booth in St. Louis I was introduced to Windchill, and my preliminary experiences with it have been good. Although, our team does use Inventor instead of Solidworks; does anyone know if Inventor integration is on par with the level of integration that Solidworks has with Windchill?

We’ve considered using Vault, but setting up a server was too much of a hassle for our tech department due to logistical reasons…

#44

I will look into this for you and get back to you on it.

#45

I know this is a step back from where this thread seems to be going and rehashing something that’s been said a few times but I’d really like to see more Vault access available to teams as well.

Autodesk offers a great suite of tools to first teams, but without vault you’re forced to manage your design infrastructure in a (pretty archaic) fashion (flash drives/dropbox)

I have very extensive SVN experience and use it in work and with our team, but since SVN has no knowledge of the type of file being stored it doesn’t offer the same potential that vault does.

For any teams considering trying to use vault (or any other software that requires either a linux or real windows server) you can run a windows instance on the Amazon EC2 cloud for extremely competitive, hourly and usage based rates (very affordable to leave on 24/7). Amazon EC2 also provides tools to assist in backup and management of servers and I highly recommend for anyone wishing to host their own SVN server, website, or any other thing you would like to have running on a computer permanently.

#46

I don’t have any experience with Amazon EC2, how much would it cost to run a vault server 24/7 for a year? Just enough space to host a few seasons worth of CAD files, 10GB max.

#47

It depends on alot of things. The way Amazon EC2 does pricing can be somewhat confusing at first. They offer concepts like ‘spot instances’ to allow websites to rapidly allocate additional non persistent serving potential.

They also offer ‘Reserved’ Instances, which allow you to pay an up front annual, or three year fee to allow for cheaper hourly rates.

To run amazon vault, I imagine at least a ‘small’ instance would be required.

If you took advantage of the annual leasing option, a small instance would be $69 up front, followed by $0.059 per hour, adding up to an average of 47 dollars a month, or $573 for the full year.

However, if you only wanted to run the server during competition season and not pay the upfront fee, it’d cost ~$82 a month.

Memory costs wouldn’t be your problem, a small instance comes with 160 GB of storage space, however amazon charges bandwidth after the first gigabyte of out/inbound traffic at 12 cents a gigabyte. Depending on your use case/how efficient vault is this could run you a bit. IE if you have 40 work stations that all view all of your 10 GB worth of content… etc :stuck_out_tongue: .

It isn’t free, but it is viable. It’s also plausible that multiple teams could share a vault server.

#48

A newly created Amazon Web Services account is eligible for a free year of a certain class of service. It should be possible to run a “micro” instance of a Windows server for a year at no cost. After that year, however, you’ll have to pay.

#49

Micro instances are even cheaper than the above, though I have some concerns that a micro instance might be unable to run Vault.

For any other purpose, micro instances are exceedingly convenient.

#50

If we use SolidWorks, does that mean that my options are Windchill or PDM?

PDM requires a server, and I don’t want to mess up our school’s server.
Unfortunately, our school’s tech support will not help us. (I asked last year)
EDIT: found the video tutorials…I could do it, but only if Windchill doesn’t work out.

Windchill sounds great, so I signed up my team, but have a few unanswered questions. Does anyone know how long it takes PTC to email you back? Are there speed issues? Were can I get the ProjectLink for Solidworks?

We used external-hard-drive-style organization last year, and it was terrible…especially when updating trivial features. I don’t want to go back.

#51

You could also try posting questions here, there are plenty of Windchill users on Chief Delphi. There is also a user group for PTC products with very active forums at ptcuser.org. (I’m the portal admin and on the Board of Directors.) There is also a Community on PTC.com as well.

#52

I don’t want to say that your only options are SolidWorks PDM and WindChill. I am not too familiar with any of the other options.

WindChill answers:
How long it takes PTC to respond, it really depends. They are essentially setting up the server for you, so the initial response could take a few days. Other than that, I have had good response from them, usually the same day or within 24 hours. They don’t really operate over the weekends, so you may experience more of a delay then.
Speed Issues - You will notice that WindChill may seem a bit slow, but do realize you are uploading content to a server somewhere else other than a local place. The speed is by no means slow, but it is lower than having a local network server. I have not noticed any performance issues with the speed from WindChill.
ProjectLink for SolidWorks - once you have been given a login to WindChill youwill be able to download it. Go to “Quick Links” in the upper right hand corner, and from there choose “Software Downloads”. Click Accept and then a list of products to download appear. You will want to download “WindChill Workgroup Manager”, which should be the last option.

I hope this answers your questions.

As a side note, the other options in the downloads are pretty neat as well. The plug-in for MS-Office is really handy, this is called “WindChill Desktop Integration”. It allows you to save and check-in documents withouth leaving word, excel, powerpoint, etc. The plug-in for project will allow for a single schedule to be uploaded and synced with the project.

Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns.

#53

Just as anticipated, yes the integration of WindChill into Inventor is good to go (as far as I can tell, i didn’t completely battle test it but it does have the same feel). PTC is the maker of Creo (formerly Pro/Engineer) and WindChill is a PTC product. The integration to the ‘third party’ software packages are the same for the most part.

I use PTC’s Creo and WindChill at work. There is a little bit more functionality with this set up than the ‘third party’ applications. I was very pleased with the WindChill implementation of SolidWorks; and now Inventor.

Look through this other thread for my other posts on how to setup a WindChill account for the team and download the workgroup manager for Inventor.