What program do you use to share CAD models?

I use Inventor so I use A360 to share the CAD models with the mentors and rest of the team. I was wondering what everyone else uses?

*GrabCAD
*Onshape (built-in) - this is what my team uses
*Export as STEP
*3D PDF

5052 uses Grabcad Workbench to share parts between our CAD workstations in real time

GrabCAD for our SolidWorks files.

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PLEASE, NO! NOT THE 3D PDF!

In all seriousness, we transitioned to Onshape this year. We don’t have any students with any CAD experience at the moment, so we’re using it mostly as a sharing system. The great part is it runs on all of their chromebooks, though not incredibly quickly. We’re planning to get a lot more trained up using the program for next year.

This may be of interest to you.

The 3D PDF was a joke, but I included it for completeness. :wink:

I found Vault to be the absolute worst pain in the behind to understand or obtain, to the point where I gave up trying.

We use GrabCAD. Used it for several prior seasons with SolidWorks and it worked well. We switched to Inventor this year. When I evaluated Inventor in the fall GrabCAD only supported Inventor 2017 so that’s the version we’re using. Now the GrabCAD website says they support 2018. No issues with GrabCAD and Inventor so far. I turned off saving a local Old Version since GrabCAD prompts you to upload these files each time and they are redundant since prior versions are already saved on GrabCAD.

We use GrabCAD, but I’ve been really disappointed by GrabCAD’s lack of support for Solidworks 2018 files this season.

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We use GrabCAD. Very simple, but I dislike it tbh. Its rather difficult to get new people on to use it and understand it, and it doesn’t like working when multiple people try to update the same files or mechanism.

I found GrabCAD to be incredibly easy to use, after years of terrible file sharing experiences. Just hit “Upload” when you’re done with something, and un-check the boxes for parts you didn’t work on. Hit “Download” at the start of the day. If there are any conflicted copies, the owner of the repository can sort it out very quickly.
No CAD program, save OnShape, will like it when multiple people work on the same file independently. GrabCAD handles these conflicted copies really well compared to other programs like Dropbox or SVN.

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Been using GrabCAD for 4 years now. It is great only is the several minute login times for the desk top app.

My team uses Solidworks and GrabCAD. It’s been very effective over the past 4 years since we started using it. It allows us to let everyone on the team, (students, mentors, and parents) to see the parts on the online viewer and it helps them understand what is happening and what things will look like in the future.

We like self-hosted solutions, so we use SVN for our graphics, code and CAD. While it may not provide the same level of CAD optimization as GrabCAD, it’s actually perfectly fine. The TortoiseSVN windows shell plugin makes file management a breeze (something I found GrabCAD lacking in) and the granular r-w control is a boon for making sure that people don’t accidentally commit over our main assembly.

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We do CAD in Inventor and we actually just use Google Drive and “Google Backup and Sync” (the desktop client). It functions better than A360 desktop ever did and gives us very good control over our files.

We turn off syncing while working to eliminate any weird file possession errors that happen when syncing while editing a file.

We have to be careful not to edit the same files that other people are working on, but with a small team sitting in the same room, it’s a very low overhead solution and I think we’ll be sticking with it for some time to come.

GrabCAD

We have been using Vault for several years now. It keeps the relationships straight in Inventor. It simplifies working in groups. It has a steep learning curve. (I still on the steep part of the curve) and poor documentation. But it does work.

We use Fusion 360 for CAD and use it’s built in cloud storage to share files with everyone on the team.

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My team uses Fusion 360 also, and that cloud storage feature is the nicest thing ever.