How do you manage your CAD files (SolidWorks)?

[Tottanka]

So i haven’t seen any recent discussion on this critical issue, and was wondering what some of the teams use to manage their CAD files and process?

Version control, simultaneous file editing etc…

What do you use? Why? Do you like it?

Thanks =]

[Brandon_L]

Grabcad is pretty great for version control and multiple people working together. Can’t simultaneous edit the same file but you can design different things and bring them together.

[Wytre]

There was a thread recently about SW users working from home that had some discussion of different ways of file management. This might be helpful.

Allowing Solidworks Users to Cad From Home?

We’ve been using solidworks since about 2017 and it has been great but lately several of our team members have expressed interest in being able to work on the cad at home or anywhere other than our current cad space. I been investigating using grabcad work bench and am kinda on the fence about using it. Other teams who use solidworks or other cad suites what do you guys do for file management to allow students to work on the cad from home? I have been looking at OnShape and do honestly like it…

[AriMB]

The “standard” way is using GrabCAD to handle version management. It does a decent job if you have only a handful of students editing the CAD and no one is working on related documents at the same time. Unlike version management for code where you can merge changes between two commits, CAD version management is basically all-or-nothing so it’s important to make sure you’re committing and pulling often.

For our uses, we set up a network drive connected to all the computers in our shop and store the robot CAD on there. This gives us a bit more peace of mind that edits won’t be overwritten or ignored if someone else is working on related files. By default, solidworks only lets one user have write privilege on any file at a time, but other users can open as read-only. The mechanism for allowing/blocking write access has improved in the past few years, but still inevitably causes some headache when we can’t find which computer accidentally has the file open.

[Jonathanshani]

Just adding my own question here - did anyone try working with SOLIDWORKS’s cloud based pdm (its integrated to 3dexperience)?

Its pretty new but we had some weird issues with grabcad So im trying to check different options…

[Wytre]

We use that at my work. (I gave a more detailed explanation in the other thread I linked). It takes some getting used to but I like it alot and have found it to be a pretty powerful tool. Unfortunately I think it would take more time, effort, and money to set it up for the average frc team.

Edit: I apologize I read that wrong. We just use the pdm with SOLIDWORKS, not the one with 3dexperience. I don’t know if they’re the same or not.

[Jonathanshani]

Theyre not, I would assume that some things are simmilar but the 3dexperience one shouldn’t cost money to my understanding