SolidWorks is cool, sort of

Why not try something without “all the insane licensing nonsense”.

I don't want to do mechanical design myself. I have two guys who do that, and they use Solidworks.

All I want is a viewer for various SolidWorks files and Step files and DWGs and DXFs. Edrawings is pretty good but needs a painful re-licensing ordeal roughly twice a week. For every computer you use it on.

I'd rather not do CAD entry of schematics either. I have a drawing table for schematics and guys to enter them too.

Is it really a good idea to have all the work you have done locked up in a proprietary format under the control of someone else?

Perhaps ask them what they think of open-source alternatives like FreeCAD?

Especially when you are not even able to BUY that software, only rent. Not just it gets extremely expensive after couple of years like it is now with e.g. Altium Designer -- its cost PER YEAR is now the same as I paid for my PERPETUAL license when those were still available and "subscription" was (still "is" for me as mine only expires in 2027) something like 1/4..1/3 of that and not mandatory. The biggest problem is what are you going to do when the company goes bust (it is not "if", it is _ALWAYS_ "when" -- the bigger they are the harder they fall) or just decides they don't want to support that outdated weirdo anymore when they have a newer one or suddenly want 10x last year price...

STEP files are ASCII and not proprietary. Any good 3D program will import STEP. So we archive everything as native SolidWorks and as STEP.

But SLDASM files look nicer. Pretty colors.

They do beautiful work, so I'm not about to tell them how to do it.

Does FreeCAD import and export STEP?

Maybe they’ve heard of FreeCAD already (if they are competent in keeping up with their field, they will have), and they are waiting for you to raise the topic. Just ask if they’ve heard of it.

If it’s an open, industry-common format, then yes.

I’m sure you can figure out how to find out more for yourself ...

We use PADS, Logic and PCB. It works fine. It's made us a couple of hundred million dollars sales, so its cost is in the noise.

We've used it since the DOS days when there was basically nothing else, and never bothered to get something else. We will if we have to some day.

People are expensive compared to the cost of SolidWorks. By about

They like it and design beautiful stuff fast. I'd be an idiot to annoy them to save a few dollars.

Back in the early aughts I worked for a company that bought me a Solidworks license. At the time, one seat allowed for three installations: One on the work desktop, one on a home desktop, and one on a laptop -- with the proviso that only one instance would be active at any time. This was explicitly spelled out in the license, and afaik was not enforced by any kind of "phone home" tech.

The company I was working for went bust, and I still have and use my "home desktop" version of Solidworks. I have to keep an XP machine around to run it on, which is not difficult for me (you should see my garage! :-) but I believe I can convert it to a VM without breaking the license check, and that would run on modern hardware.

I'm sure SW has been extensively updated in the past couple of decades, but the 200x version I have does everything I need.

It does. I use it to check the STEP models KiCad generates, and for other purposes. (I'm still more comfortable using OpenSCAD for creating 3D models from scratch or modifying existing models...been meaning to get more up to speed with FreeCAD, but it's a bit like eating an elephant. :-) )

The problem is not the codebase maintenance. You can happily live without forever as long as you still have hardware it runs on.

The FUNDAMENTAL difference is that unlike [almost] ALL modern commercial software the older software had PERPETUAL licenses and OSS doesn't have any at all. Those will NOT stop working in a year because your license expired and it is too expensive or impossible at all to renew it for another year. If this happens you'll end up holding a bag -- all your work done with those tools is useless now and you can't do anything to something you still have to support. Not just some ancient stuff but something one year old or even newer because your tools stopped working and there is no way to make them work again.

About all the consequences of lock-in: one can lose everything in a flash.

One can store models in formats that all such tools are capable of importing and exporting. so one isn't totally trapped.

What I used for a while was Alibre, this having been recommended by mechanical engineer colleagues, as the best choice for personal use and self-teaching. I learned a lot on how these things are structured; this is necessary to be able to create 3D drawings in the first place. It isn't obvious.

I spun to a stop for a few years due to the demands of my day job, but still maintain a licence.

Joe

OK, can you tell how can one pick an OLDER "perpetual" Altium Designer version (actually license) if he didn't have it before? I do have a perpetual license and grandfathered subscription valid until the end of March 2027 so my last version will be whatever is out before that subscription expired. However, if you didn't have a perpetual license before where are you going to get one?

And I'm not only running Windoze 7 for some older stuff, I even have XP

If you were using it before you can still use it forever. If those flaws was making them unusable you wouldn't have been able using it before. All your old designs that were made with that tool clearly tell it was not unusable because of those flaws and you need that tool to either reuse whatever you did (less likely) or to support it by fixing bugs and whatever else (more likely). You will be not able to do either when you tool ceased to work.

I paid for my perpetual Altium Designer license the same price they charge now for one year time-limited one. I was also been paying for "subscription" which is 1/4..1/3 of that price per year that gives me access to all new versions but I won't lose any functionality when it expires and I don't want or can't renew it. It will just leave me with the latest version available before it expired. And that last version will be still working forever.

This is an option, yes. And good guys do offer that. E.g. Toyota allows you to purchase a Techstream (absolute necessity if you want to do anything more complex than tire replacement on a Toyota/Lexus vehicle) licence in WEEK increments for a very reasonable price. You don't need it everyday unless you are in auto repair business so that is reasonable. They don't insist on purchasing a full year "subscription" for a ridiculous price. However, there is no guarantee they will behave like this forever so I also have an old laptop with Techstream (the older one but my Lexus LS460L is not the newest and fully supported by that version; however you still need their FULL version with Internet connection to the mothership if you need to re-program some ECU). Not a COMPLETE solution but better than nothing and it allows to do almost everything except a few things that require tethering to the mothership.

The problem is you might be not able to get it in 5 years AT ALL, no matter what's the price you are ready to pay. And paying "rent" for all those 5 years does not guarantee anything -- when (not "if") the company that made that tool goes bust you are fried. It is not even like buying vs renting your house -- you can find a different one any time unlike those tools that are all unique and once they gone there is no replacement.

That was only good in early naive days where everything was extremely simple and there was no Internet. Many tools these days won't even start if they can't connect to the mother ship to check your license. Which is also a great simplification, it is more complex than that and gets even more sophisticated by the day...

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?

It’s because SolidWorks really isn’t that cheap, that’s why. Isn’t it? But the extra work you have to do to save money is itself incurring costs for your business -- hidden costs, compliance costs and licence administration headaches, opportunity costs (time wasted not earning revenue), all that.

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

SolidWorks is expensive and has a big learning curve. I do mechanical stuff with pencil and paper and give it to my guys to make real in SolidWorks. I can view it with Edrawings.

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.

No more writing down dimensions from the mechanical design and placing parts on the board from that.

Lots of machine shops now accept the SolidWorks files to bend metal and make enclosures too.

It all works very well.

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.”

My point exactly.

What do you use for the PCB?

I quite like Fusion360 especially the CAM part. There is a free version with some limitations for private use and small startups. The full version is ~$700/year which for professional use is peanuts

ye, even Kicad can do that, import dxf and make it a board outline or even artwork. And as long as your components have step files assigned you can instantly bring up a 3D model of the board with components. You could even make a dummy component with your enclosure so the 3D view is with enclosure

quite a few of the cheap Chinese PCB/assembly houses now also offers 3D printing/CNC/sheetmetal. Upload a step file, choose process and materials and you get an instant price

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.

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.

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.

It's so much easier to design stuff than it used to be.

I barely remember when draftspersons would draw schematics on vellum and tape PCBs on Mylar. I am too young to remember inked drawings on starched linen, and inked PCB layouts too.

It was adventurous to run a trace between two pins of a DIP ic.

I still have one tape-on-mylar 4-layer PCB layout to show the kids. It used to take two people two days to check a layout against a schematic; I fell in love once doing that. Now it takes seconds.