Our team would like to involve more students with the CAD design of the robot this year. We would like to have a CAD software that students can work from home with their Cromebooks (which confines the CAD to be cloud based and the ability to model in a web browser). The team has access to desktop computers at the school we are at, we are planning to download Ansys for our CAE and Solidworks for advanced modeling. We were primarily looking at Fusion 360 or Onshape as our primary software. We would also like ability to save our solidworks files with our primary software files. I would appreciate if you would share any of your experiences with either softwares.
Onshape is your only real option for running on a chrome book. I’ve tried it and, on reasonably well spec’d chromebooks, it does work if you’re willing to accept some framey performance on detailed assemblies.
I think fusion has some options for viewing models in a browser or perhaps a chromeOS compatible app, but you’ll have limited if any editing options. The same applies for solidworks files; you might be able to work out a way to view them, but you’ll have no way to do real editing. Onshape does a pretty good job of importing solidworks files, but I’ve never had much luck with feature recognition so it’s effectively a solidbody import.
If you really want student participation from home on chromebooks, just go all in on Onshape. It’ll work ok for the students at home and works great on desktop hardware. As a modeling program it’s very well suited for FRC teams.
We are using OnShape this year as opposed to Fusion360. Sharing on OnShape worked a lot better for us, as we kept running into issues with sharing files on Fusion360.
I have not personally tried Fusion 360, but my understanding was that it would be downloaded onto a computer and using your account you could edit your model in a browser. In our case we would have Fusion on our team desktops and be able to have students access and modify their models from home in a browser.
It’s possible to edit a Fusion 360 model in a browser, but it’s not the primary way Fusion 360 has been designed to work. The browser edit capability was introduced in 2017 and as of today, the following notice is still shown…
It’s possible to do some things in the browser, but Fusion 360 is definitely not cloud-native or browser-native. You even get prompted to use the desktop version from the browser subset version.
I’d strongly recommend Onshape for FRC teams.
That being said, using Fusion 360 on the desktop for CAM with exported STEP models from Onshape is very popular. Onshape has matured nicely over the past few years, but integrated CAM is still not available.
