[POLL] What CAD Program does your team use? [2020]

[LordPeaches]

• Solidworks
• Inventor
• Fusion360
• OnShape
• PTC Creo
• Other

Annual poll seeing which CAD programs are the most popular.

[cmot]

We (well really I) are using Fusion this year but plan to switch due to poor performance with large assemblies.

[MrForbes]

why no “none” option?

[ShnizelInBag]

We use SolidWorks for CAD and Fusion for CAM

[tweirtx]

We use Inventor because that’s what the engineering classes teach. People interested in CAD have generally taken or are taking an engineering class, meaning there’s little to no training required on our part. The school district also gives us a few workstations with Inventor on them that are mostly capable (the older ones tend to have trouble with the big assemblies), so that also influences it.

[Aurgia]

We(as in I) use solidworks for most of the CAD work we do. Seeing as most new members also take engineering, which teaches Solidworks, its been the natural program we use. I am looking to at possibly switching to something like Inventor in the future though seeing as on my machine solidworks doesn’t run that great.

[LordPeaches]

@Aurgia

We(as in I) use solidworks

Shameless post boost for more data.

Also, I am consistently surprised by the amount of teams that use Solidworks as their CAD program of choice. I use it at my university, but it has a much steeper learning curve and is more difficult to get into (in my opinion). If your school teaches it though, I can understand.

Part of the reason I moved to OnShape this year is it was a lot easier to get the students onto a browser-based CAD program on their school tablets, rather than being forced to download a CAD program onto their personal computers or laptops.

[jtrv]

OnShape’s appeal grows more and more every week. The accessibility of a web-based CAD program (even if it is not at feature parity with Inventor or Solidworks) is super beneficial to an educational program like FRC, especially for teams who don’t have access to decently powerful CAD workstations regularly.

[s-neff]

@LordPeaches

it has a much steeper learning curve

I find my students can do part work in SW almost instantly, but getting them to do things with clean fundamental approaches (paying attention to where their assembly origins are, fully constrained sketches…) takes much longer before it pays off in healthy robot assemblies. I assume you’re referring to the second step here?

I don’t find healthy robot assemblies to be a requirement in FIRST, just a nice to have, which drives sticking with Solidworks in our context.

@jtrv

The accessibility of a web-based CAD

Our district-supplied internet goes down often enough on evenings & weekends that we can’t move to OnShape, and a measurable percentage of my students don’t have internet at home

I recommend it as a first choice to other teams, though.

[Drakxii]

@Aurgia

I am looking to at possibly switching to something like Inventor in the future though seeing as on my machine solidworks doesn’t run that great.

I would not recommend this, I can’t speak for everyone but I have found Inventor a pain to use compared to solidworks or onshape.

[TyMi]

I’ve used quite a few 3d modeling softwares(Inventor, SW, Fusion, Rhino, Blender), and onshape, for me is the hardest to adjust to.

[JonathanBurton]

We used Solidworks in the past but this year we switched to Onshape as it can be accessed on school issued laptops (we aren’t allowed to download anything on them). We are loving it so far! Mk Cad is just amazing and having everything in the cloud, makes integration 10 times easier.