This is my team’s first year starting ahead of our true competition season (we are all sophomores) and I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for a good 3D modeling program that’s free. I already have SketchUp but I don’t have the files for the VEX parts.
This is mainly for myself and my team members to have a good visual with our designs that we put on paper. When school starts for us, then we will have access to SolidWorks which already has the VEX parts library within it for our engineering classes.
If you think we should just stick with paper and pencil, that works to.
Any comment is appreciated
EDIT: I think we might have Inventor instead. I’ll have to check with our mentor. Regardless, I just need a simple one for a laptop even if it’s for a couple months
I would use Inventor - a few forum members have released part libraries for it. Autodesk offers free education licenses for students.
I would recommend the parts library VEX has as part of their curriculum. Don’t worry about the “Inventor 2013” part; it should work fine with a later version of Inventor.
No the library’s have all of the parts that vex sells. I’m not certain but some of the newer stuff may be missing it’s been awhile since I’ve had to download the files from vex but when I did it all of the parts were there.
Many people are going to tell you to use Auto Desk inventor but I am going to recommend https://www.onshape.com This website allows users to create cads very easily. Also the website is completely cloud based so there is no downloads at all.
If you have questions on how to use Onshape to create vex robots PM me!
Onshape is web-browser based, so I don’t get the best performance as I do in Inventor. The performance difference is noticable with just a few parts (doing tutorial).