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it is _ALWAYS_ "when" -- the bigger they are the harder they fall) or just decides they don't want to support that outdated weirdo anymore when they have a newer one or suddenly want 10x last year price...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 ...

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. :-) )

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.

yeh, any kid can get pro level tools for free and for just a few dollars get multi layer PCBs professionally made and assembled in a week

it's not that many years since that would be prohibitively expensive unless it was going to make you money

And yet some still insist on spending more money for not more functionality.

Except for hobbyists, the software has always been cheap compared to the cost of people.

So it hasn’t been keeping up with SolidWorks? Not really a good substitute, then.

Make that “most *proprietary* software”.

Does it have fly-through/walk-through modes?

That’s not a big deal any more.

Seems like it’s still around, but it’s gone cloud-only.

Apparently KiCAD got some investment money from CERN.