What is everyone using for CAD this year?
- Fusion 360
- Inventor
- Onshape
- Protobot
- Solidworks
- Blender
- I don’t CAD
- Digital V5 Parts (VEX Notebook Template)
- Other
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voters
Wanted to post this here in case anyone is not on vcad, this “survey” has been filled out across many years
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For the people that answered protobot, Is there a specific reason why? I’m interested to see why protobot is still widely used.
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It’s really easy to use and is good for quick prototyping.
Since it was recently made open source, the community has restarted development. It’s a lot simpler than a lot of the other cad softwares and much easier to use.
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I agree with it being easier, however, the barrier to entry into industry CAD is pretty low too. It’s not easier by much. I don’t see a reason not to use something widely used and not proprietary to vex.
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I’m seeing a distinct lack of Tinkercad, which is wideley renowned as the true engineers cad software. I would recommend fixing this immediately.
That was a joke
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I 10000% agree with this. The only actual reason I could see someone choosing protobot is
- Inadequate hardware (I got protobot working on a gt 710)
- You don’t want to learn/ You don’t have time/ Your lazy
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For me I chose onshape as our school does not allow us to download any additional software onto our school laptops. Also, it seems a lot easier to learn compared to the looks of other cadding software.
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My team actually used tinkercad to CAD our robot during TiP, (when we weren’t using minecraft as our CAD platform). The “finished” model is actually available on thingiverse.
Holly crap! Why did over 100 people download this?
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Here are the results of the same poll from 2022.
Since then, Inventor usage has been tapering off. Fusion 360 is about the same. Onshape is making big gains, and so is Protobot. Solidworks and Blender are hanging in there. Still no Tinkercaders.
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I would be interested to see if these polls being on the forum influenced the results, I know some people say that quality of vex forum has been declining in the recent years meaning less top teams are active on the site. So perhaps it is less people moving away from inventor (a more advanced tool) and more the demographic of the forum changing. I still think the forum is a good resource btw.
I can’t entirely agree with the notion of inventor being more advanced. Certainly, it is more advanced than protobot and onshape, but it’s less advanced than solidworks. I can see both sides of weather or not fusion is more or less advanced than inventor. Fusion has more ability to simulations, but isn’t as intuitive.
I guess what I’m basing my statement on is people using it for professional work. Inventor is very good at what it does and fusion is ok at a lot of things. Which is why inventor is used professionally and fusion isn’t.
I would argue that solidworks, inventor, and fusion are all advanced, however, they have slightly different use cases. Fusion is best for collaboration, Inventor is best at large assemblies (if you have the hardware to support it. I don’t have as much experience with solidworks, but one of my mechanical engineering friends does. We went head to head in a couple of different CAD challenges and both of them can do almost everything the other can do. Sometimes a feature might be more intuitive on one platform over the other, but overall very comparable. Both Inventor and Solidworks hold a significant market share of the CAD space, so I wouldn’t consider either to be more advanced than the other. At that level, it comes down to the experience of the person using the software, not the actual software itself.
Quite interesting to see how much onshape took off, especialy since it launched it’s educational license was only introduced in mid-2016.
Also note how much inventor has fallen.
I literally only cad in thinkercad. No joke. It works ok and the easy colors make it easy to distinguish different types of pieces in the notebook. It is not bad. I have been able to cad all of my full robots down to even the screws and nuts relatively quickly. The only things that would make thinkercad better for me is auto hole alinement and a measure tool but I found easy and quick alternatives.
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I completeley understand! While I was kinda being sarcastic in my comment about it, go right on ahead if thats what you like!
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