Re: SolidWorks is cool, sort of (but FreeCAD might be better)

On Thu, 19 Jun 2025 01:36:44 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro
<ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Wed, 18 Jun 2025 17:21:27 -0700, john larkin wrote:
>

On Wed, 18 Jun 2025 23:58:45 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro
<ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
 

On Wed, 18 Jun 2025 07:45:27 -0700, john larkin wrote:
>

People are expensive compared to the cost of SolidWorks. By about
100:1 or so.

>
So why are you bothering with that extra “EDrawing” tool? (Or
whatever it was called.) With all the trouble it takes to set it
up, why not just use another copy of SolidWorks for viewing those
CAD files?

 
Edrawings is the free SolidWorks viewer. It displays .dwg and .dxf and
.step files too.

>
But you said “Edrawings is pretty good but needs a painful re-licensing
ordeal roughly twice a week. For every computer you use it on.”

Not really twice a week. It times out in about a year, and it also
refuses to open .SLDASM files that were created by a more recent
version of SolidWorks.

But most software and things like security camera services and many
web sites are increasingly annoying. They want you to fill out a form
with your life history and have a password and get a text message with
an auth code to enable things until you have to do it again soon.

Some semi vendors require all that just to see a data sheet! I buy
something else.

>

SolidWorks is expensive ...

>
My point exactly.

Not too expensive for my guys to use to design things. Just too
expensive to use as a viewer. They could send me screen shots, but
it's fun to zoom and spin things around myself, which Edrawings does.
And it has the measure feature, so I can verify dimensions.

It does all that cool stuff apparently instantaneously, even on the
wimpiest laptop without fancy graphics hardware.

>

One coold thing we do is design an enclosure and a PC board together. We
can export a .dxf file that shows all the mechanical details of the PCB,
which PADS can import when we do the real pcb layout.

>
What do you use for the PCB?
>
<https://www.kicad.org/>

We use PADS. We've been using it since the DOS days when there was
basically nothing else.

It works fine. We'd cut over to something else if we had to, but we
have a lot of people who are used to it, and some add-on tools of our
own.

Many other pcb programs will import native PADS files, and PADS can
output most anything, actually everything, in ASCII.