Some of you might have heard of an app called “Protobot” in the past as a CAD alternative that is meant to be a lot more beginner-friendly and created for V5 but the creator stopped updating it a little over a year ago leaving it in a usable state but missing a lot of parts/quality of life
Recently though @DaveG (The creator of Protobot) made the project open-source on GitHub here allowing me and some others to create a fork we’ve named Protobot Rebuilt adding a bunch of new features and parts to the application that can also load any Protobot (legacy) saves
Shaft collar has a working second hole now for your cross-bracing needs
Advanced mechanics and motion kit parts
High Stakes Field, with and without wall variations
Linear motion kit
Rails
Credits section in splash screen
A few other small bug fixes
There’s a lot more to do and in no way is this a finished task but we’re trying our hardest to make Protobot Rebuilt as good as possible if you find any bugs or have a suggestion please post it on the GitHub Issues page here as it makes keeping track of issues easier if you’d like to contact me my tag on discord is @breadsoup but we also have a channel in the VEX CAD discord server feel free to ping me I don’t mind
Glad to give fresh air to this tool again and hope you enjoy Protobot Rebuilt
Do you think gear chains and flaps are possible to re-create in this app? Although they are hard to implement (I don’t know C#, but I can tell it will be), I think they would be extremely useful for the upcoming High Stakes season.
I would eventually try to add motion. I’m gonna be honest as someone trying to make a dr4b in fusion 360 it’s hard, so if you added motion in protobot I would imagine lots of people would switch (maybe even me).
Im not sure how other CAD softwares generate the chains, but that is something that we will add to a list of things to do. I am a developer thats adding the newer parts, Besides the coding i don’t think it would be too hard.
For most of the parts we’ve downloaded the cad models from vex’s website and imported it into the unity project and added all the scripts eventually I do want to create a unity SDK to allow for custom parts then eventually be able to import 3D models directly inside of Protobot but we’ll see what happens
The best alternative you would get is Onshape or another CAD software. There are libraries with the parts. Protobot is basically one of a kind, there aren’t any other vex dedicated CAD softwares to my knowledge. I recommend checking out the Vex CAD Discord server for the other options and some further help. Good luck!