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A really powerful design tool for free

Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 6:16 am
by Jccarlton
Cocreate, a CAD company has a personal version of their excellent design package OneSpaceModeling available as a free download. This a high end professional level tool with vary intuitive interface once you understand that it works like you were laying out and machining parts. I have used this tool off and on a professional basis for over 10 years and its my personal first choice for a CAD package.
https://apps.cocreate.com/OneSpaceModel ... gister.cfm
It does require a fairly new computer, but for what it does the requirements are fairly modest.

Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 11:26 am
by MSimon
I'm going to try it out. Thanks!

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 7:28 pm
by MSimon
I'm not that impressed so far. It looks really good, but it is not easy to learn.

BRL-CAD

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 11:58 pm
by Mikos
Just use BRL-CAD. It was developed and used in production by the U.S. military for more than 20 years, now it is open-sourced. It is powerful CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry) modeling system.

And it is not only used for engineering, but one of primary purposes is also support of ballistic and electromagnetic analyses. I think it would be great CAD for Polywell. There is also really great documentation.

Re: BRL-CAD

Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2008 4:44 pm
by eros
Mikos wrote:Just use BRL-CAD. It was developed and used in production by the U.S. military for more than 20 years, now it is open-sourced. It is powerful
BRL-cad have very ancient scetching tools. I have drop three years ago idea to put qcad inside BRL-cad to do 2D scetch then extrude/revolve/etc 2D to 3D.
Nobody had done that yet.

BRL is good start point for develop good gad enviroment. Now it is quite useless in real engineering work.

Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2008 5:07 pm
by Jeff Peachman
well if you want easy to use, just use google sketchup

not very powerful though =)

Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2008 9:46 pm
by windmill
C'mon, guys. If you're going to do serious CAD, you have to spend some money. It's just the way the world works.
In my job I use IronCad, which is the cheapest "full-feature " CAD system I know of. It's also the fastest and most intuitive to use. It makes Solidworks and ProEngineer look ridiculous, unless you're collaborating on a design team of hundreds.
It costs about $3500 US, I think. Not cheap, but cheaper than the others.

Posted: Sat Nov 15, 2008 2:04 pm
by eros
windmill wrote:C'mon, guys. If you're going to do serious CAD, you have to spend some money. It's just the way the world works.
Works now, but things can change. GPL is powerfull thing if enough skilled people thinks they need free CAD they can do it.
In my job I use IronCad, which is the cheapest "full-feature " CAD system I know of. It's also the fastest and most intuitive to use. It makes Solidworks and ProEngineer look ridiculous, unless you're collaborating on a design team of hundreds.
It costs about $3500 US, I think. Not cheap, but cheaper than the others.
It is ½ price of solidworks.. But still lack linux support. I don't buy anything without (real, not wine) linux support.

Solidworks is quite intuitive if IronCad is beter, then it reads you mind..

SolidWorks student edition

Posted: Sun Nov 16, 2008 6:28 pm
by elkaim
If any of you are students, you can get the full (and I mean completely full) version of SolidWorks for $80, it will expire after two years.

As far as I can tell, available to anyone with a .edu email address.

--G