Today’s guest blog post comes from the Kit of Parts Team:
Some pieces of the Kit of Parts are kept under lock-and-key until Kickoff (that’s why we call it the Kickoff Kit). FIRST Choice opens on November 25.
But it doesn’t make sense to hold off on all software tools until Kickoff. In fact, it’d be better if you could get them downloaded now so you can start learning them and make sure you’re ready to go at Kickoff!
We are excited to announce that the following Suppliers have donated software tools to each team as part of the 2015 Virtual Kit: PTC, Autodesk, SolidWorks, Altium, GrabCAD, GitHub, and Tableau. Details on how to get started with each of these tools is available at the Kit of Parts website.
To be clear, this is not a release of the robot programming environments. The FRC specific 2015 updates for those will be made available with the rest of the Kickoff Kit.
Thanks to all of our Suppliers for helping make this year’s Kit of Parts bigger and better than ever.
Extremely excited to see GrabCAD on board. If you haven’t already I would definitely check it out, GrabCAD Workbench is a fantastic piece of software for CAD file management. Serves a similar function to Git, but targeted specifically at CAD, not tied to any one format, and adds a host of really nifty web integration and collaboration tools.
The Solidworks document doesn’t contain a link to the application we’ve used in the past. I’m presuming that the process for requesting licenses hasn’t changed, but omitting that link is, perhaps, a curious oversight.
I’m really excited about GrabCAD being on board as well-- I haven’t had a chance to use Workbench myself, but everything I’ve seen of it looks much more intuitive that alternative (especially coming from PTC Windchill, which, though I love it dearly, is much better suited for industry than team use).
I too am quite glad to see them on board. One really cool thing is that with the use of their app, I can view my cad models on my phone and tablet now.
We have been looking at setting up PDM for a little while, but now with the GrabCAD sponsorship we will be trying out workbench. Very excited to see them added to the list of sponsors.
Thank you to all the sponsors that provide software packages to students and teams, it’s a huge help.
Nope. Sent them an email, took a couple days to reply. Great product, working really well for the team. Far superior to any other pdm solution we worked with.