PC or Apple ?

[David Kirtley]

Do you really even want or need full fledged CAD? Simple things like Sketchup and Inkscape fill my needs quite well. Personally, I only do design work for my own use and entertainment and don't have to worry about compatibility or being able to take on more people to pick up and finish design work. If you are planning real commercial work, you are better served by the full fledged products. For home hobby work, they are pricey. For a business, they are pretty cheap and pay for themselves many times over.

Think really hard on how much and where you are going to go with CAM/CAM. It is a pretty big investment to learn one system well (far beyond the initial pricing or licensing of even the pricey commercial systems when you consider the hours it takes). Are you going to be designing parts for yourself or are you going to be doing commercial work where you have to exchange a lot of parts with other people? Are you going to be doing mostly straight 3 axis stuff? Full 3D or 2.5D (mostly 2 axis with pocketing) Do you foresee a need for multi axis? Are you going to be looking for things like unfoldable models to make things flat that will later be formed up with a press brake? Do you need other modules for things like Finite Analysis? Again as before, are you going to take on work where you might have to get more help and not have to train people to use some oddball software?

 

[Ray C]

Do you really even want or need full fledged CAD? Simple things like Sketchup and Inkscape fill my needs quite well. Personally, I only do design work for my own use and entertainment and don't have to worry about compatibility or being able to take on more people to pick up and finish design work. If you are planning real commercial work, you are better served by the full fledged products. For home hobby work, they are pricey. For a business, they are pretty cheap and pay for themselves many times over.

Think really hard on how much and where you are going to go with CAM/CAM. It is a pretty big investment to learn one system well (far beyond the initial pricing or licensing of even the pricey commercial systems when you consider the hours it takes). Are you going to be designing parts for yourself or are you going to be doing commercial work where you have to exchange a lot of parts with other people? Are you going to be doing mostly straight 3 axis stuff? Full 3D or 2.5D (mostly 2 axis with pocketing) Do you foresee a need for multi axis? Are you going to be looking for things like unfoldable models to make things flat that will later be formed up with a press brake? Do you need other modules for things like Finite Analysis? Again as before, are you going to take on work where you might have to get more help and not have to train people to use some oddball software?

Good words of wisdom and insight there David! Most folks do not need "Bleeding Edge" software and hardware. I mentioned sometime earlier that my current laptop (Win 7 with an i5 processor and a bunch of RAM) serves me perfectly well and I do run some sophisticated programs. It works perfectly well.

On the matter of software, specifically CAD and CAM, there are what's commonly called "Primary" and "Secondary" applications. For example, Alibre/Geomagic Expert or SolidWorks are "Primary" CAD programs because they have all the bells and whistles such as BOM creation, sheet metal, 2D, assembly creation, motion analysis, stress analysis, shading, real-life rendition etc. Those are features needed for CAD modeling, engineering and manufacturing because it can create all the artifacts needed to support a reliable/verifiable engineering process. Similarly, BobCAD or MasterCAM are "Primary" CAM programs because their main focus it to help a user generate tool paths and corresponding G-code. It does indeed have CAD capabilities but it's only good for working on one part at a time and not very good at working on a system of parts that must fit together. Therefore, it is a "Secondary" CAD program.

Do note, the method of CAD development among the two programs is different... Long story short, some hobbyist types might be well served with a CAM program that has some CAD ability -and there are many out there to consider.

Also, the "Primary" systems (be they CAD or CAM) aren't cheap. Typical costs are $1500 to $3000 (can go much higher) and most have licensing fees of 10% per year. I consider myself somewhat adept in the realm of computers and programming and for both CAD and CAM, each took a solid couple months of really rolling-up my shirt sleeves and digging in to start doing useful/predictable work. My current learning curve is "less painful" now but still steep. I do enjoy it and the situation has reached the point that it's time for me to consider an additional and dedicated HW platform for all my applications. I do have offsite backups but if the laptop suddenly dies, I will be hurt'n until it's replaced -and thus, this need arises.

Ray

 

[dave2176]

Windows 8 has the full hypervisor included with it that is available for free as a stand alone product from Microsft. Windows 8 includes the management components to make it easier than the command line powershell option in the standalone product.

Dave

 

[Marco Bernardini]

Do you really even want or need full fledged CAD? Simple things like Sketchup and Inkscape fill my needs quite well. Personally, I only do design work for my own use and entertainment and don't have to worry about compatibility or being able to take on more people to pick up and finish design work.

Inkscape is great to convert a photo into a machinable path (hint: take photos of your grandchildren and mill them on aluminum: granny will be happy and will complain less when you'll buy new endmills :biggrin.

Other GPL (i.e., "free") multiplatform (Win - Mac - Linux) CADs which worth a test are LibreCAD - http://librecad.org/ - and OpenSCAD - http://openscad.org -
LibreCAD is 2D, and it's very similar to the old 2D Autocad, so the learning curve for who has some experience is almost straight. An introduction video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53DOEKzL2rw

OpenSCAD is 3D and "non-interactive": if you have to create an object you must "describe" it with a syntax like «cube([100,200,20])» rather than simply dragging the mouse. It seems odd, but I find it faster when I know the size of the piece I have to work and where to place holes etc., because I'm used to think from the start in "dimensions" rather than in "images". There are many ready libraries of objects (gears, etc.) which are very useful, and the source is plain text (this means I can send a "drawing" even with a plain SMS message :biggrin: ). A gallery is here: http://www.openscad.org/gallery.html and a video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq5ObNeiAUw

Another one I still have to test is BRL-CAD - http://brlcad.org - which «For more than 20 years, BRL-CAD has been the primary tri-service solid modeling CAD system used by the U.S. military to model weapons systems for vulnerability and lethality analyses. […] BRL-CAD has been under active development with a portability heritage that includes systems such as a DEC VAX-11/780 running 4.3 BSD; DECStations running ULTRIX; Silicon Graphics 3030, 4D "IRIS", O2, Onyx, and Origin systems running various versions of IRIX; Sun Microsystems Sun-3 and Sun-4 Sparcs running SunOS; the Cray 1, Cray X-MP, Cray Y-MP, and Cray 2 running UNICOS; DEC Alpha AXP running OSF/1; Apple Macintosh II running A/UX; iPSC/860 Hypercube running NX/2; the Alliant FX/8, FX/80, and FX/2800; Gould/Encore SEL PowerNode6000/9000 and NP1; NeXT workstations; IBM RS/6000; HPPA 9000/700 running HPUX; Ardent/Stardent; Encore Multi-Max; and much more.» (the latter just in case you have a spare Cray-1 in your basement :lmao.
BTW, the initial author of BRL-CAD, Mike Muuss, is the guy who in 1983 invented the "ping" command.

Good words of wisdom and insight there David! Most folks do not need "Bleeding Edge" software and hardware.

Ray, how many guys do you know who have a cracked PhotoShop because "it's the one used by skilled pros so if I use it I become skilled as a pro too" while they are not even able to resize/rotate a photo made with the phone?
:roflmao:

 

[David Kirtley]

Another "free" one is Design Spark Mechanical. It is a design tool put out by Allied Electronics with "helpful links" to their own products in the components but from what I have played with, it seems quite nice.