I want to use CAD for designing robots but when I have tried in the past I have ran into the technical limitations of my hardware. Last year I put together a few pieces in an assembly to make X drive brackets and Solidworks nearly ground to a halt. It was taking 30 seconds to compute some mates. This poor performance was in stark contrast to the moderate to good performance I had creating parts.
My computer is fairly old but was high-end when it was new.
Specific Computer Specs
I am using a Dell Inspiron 17R 5721 from around 2013
Intel Core i7-3537U, 2Ghz, 2 Core, 4 Thread
8GB Ram
Intel HD Graphics 4000
I am using solidworks as that is the software I know best although I do have access to Inventor and Fusion as well.
Does anyone have any ideas or tips for how to use CAD to help design within the limitations of my computer? I did have an idea that might help: I could crate my own simplified parts catalog to reduce rendering complexity. Thanks for any help.
I think Fusion would be a better choice because it is cloud-based (I don’t think Solidworks is). I have similar specs to yours, and it works pretty well on my computer. I was able to CAD a basic robot with very minor issues.
In my experience, onshape runs very well even on very slow computers, as long as you have a good internet connection. It’s also pretty similar to fusion 360, so if you have used that you should be able to get used to it pretty quickly.
I use inventor, and find that it does much better than fusion 360 for handling large assemblies on the same computer.
If you’re looking for something similar to Solidworks, Onshape is your best bet. A little bit of backstory, when the original inventors SolidWorks sold the rights to Dassalt Systems, the owner of Catia (which is another popular high-end CAD system), they started the Onshape program, which explains the similarities.
I’ve found solidworks to be the most intensive cad software. Fusion is a lot better, but in my experience inventor runs the smoothest. I was able to run inventor well enough to make a robot with on my old laptop with similar specs to what you have, but solidworks was completely unusable.
Consider using onshape, the interface is similar to that of solidworks’ and it is cloud based, meaning your computer performance doesn’t matter as much.
From my experience solidworks have the best performance when compared to fusion 360 or inventor. Our entire school uses solidworks and the standard laptop is a lenovo yoga (diff gen i7, intel uhd graphics). We are able to CAD our entire tipping robot on it, my sister team did their change up robot with an even older laptop, and we are able to view our frc robot (which has a couple thousands of parts) on the computer as well. On the other hand, my old computer couldn’t run fusion or inventor smoothly.
If your computer can’t even run solidworks, maybe it is time to get an upgrade.