Cad/Computer facilities at your school?

[Storbeck]

After seeing the machine shop thread I wondered about cad and computer facilities available at other schools.

Our school has PC and Sun labs. The Suns run Unix and have I-Deas, catia, unigraphics, and pro-e, the pc's have Catia and unigraphics, everything you can possibly do with a pc works better than on a Sun. When asked why the school has Sun's the usual respons is "they're more stable" which is odd, since nothing works very well on them. All freshmen are forced to learn the very basics of I-deas in a very half assed first year BS class.

I-Deas in particular is a huge pain, it baffles me why it is tought to freshmen. On our Sun computers I-deas is vary shaky, crashes a lot, just doesn't work very well in general, I have recently been learning Catia and it is a breath of fresh air. Everything just seems to work so much better, getting constraints and sketches to do what you want seems so effortless. Modifications result in modified parts rather than random lines and errors, parametric modeling actually works. It's just so incredibly much more user friendly. I wonder if it's the ideas program or the sun computers that suck so much.

Unfortunately Catia even on the PC's has a nasty habit of completely shuting down the computer at random times. It's not as bad as the i-deas crashes though because you usually get all your data back, you just have to remember to save often. This just happened to me, it's what prompted this post, very frustrating.

Do other schools have similiar headaches, is this inevitable? Do people usually do thier modeling on school computers or thier own personal computers?

Does somebody out there have a cad program/ computer combo that just works the way it's supposed to without any headaches?

[raska]

We share some of the same frustrations, although we now have access to unigraphics for about 14 hours a day in labs. Most modelling has been done on personal computers.

[RiNaZ]

All of our workstation in school have CATIA on it. And we share the same frustration too. I myself save my drawings as often as i can ... and that, pretty much every 15 mins.

It crashes alot, and it takes a while to render some drawings. A friend of mine who is really good in making movies with CATIA, usually leave the lab for cigarette break whenever he renders a movie.

We have our CATIA on Windows 2000 NT. Our linux computers have CD-Star (CFD) and no CAD software, so i dont know if it would've worked better in a Linux environment

[Pico2]

I've been working with I-Deas for awhile now and I haven't found a completely stable platform.
At work, I've use both Sun and PC's but both experience crashes(although the Sun's are noticeably worse). Within an average 8 hour work day, I get something like 3-4 crashes unless I'm doing complex surface manipulations, which gives me more like 15 crashes in a day.
I haven't used Catia, and I've only touched upon Unigraphics so I can't comment on those.

[Agent4573]

all the work stations we have through the school have Pro-Engineer, ANSYS workbench, ALGOR, and Autocad on them. We also have personal computers with SOlidworks on them also. Our schools facilities are open from about 9AM to midnight. I think our software package works extremeley well. In the past our team didn't put a whole lot into CAD for the car, but this year almost every part on the car had to be CAD drawn and FEA'd a shit load.

[B Hise]

We use I-Deas here. I'm now used to the program and I like it alot. It crashes every now and then, but isnt a huge problem (we run on Win2k). The learning curve for new people is always a pain but they tend to figure it out after a while. Do other teams have problems with people making crap models?

[Denny Trimble]

We have PC's in the ME labs, with SolidWorks, Pro/E, CATIA, ANSYS, and FeatureCAM installed. We also have our own small lab tucked away in a corner of our Faculty Advisor's lab. We have a dedicated file server and a couple computers we've purchased in there. It's nice to have our own lab for the project, I can't imagine what we'd do without it.

They teach SolidWorks to all the engineers here, so that's what we use.

[DY]

They "teach" Pro/E Wildfire here. However, the team uses Solidworks. All the modeling is done on PC's we have in a corner of our lab. Some FEA is done in the department's computer pod which is student accessable 24/7.

[Travis Garrison]

What release of Catia? And what service pack? V5R13 SP1 actually seems to crash at very predictable intervals (not that this makes it less annoying)...but I believe SP2 helps quite a bit...the WWU guys might even be able to give you a specific time between crashes (although its probably processor dependent)

Most of the releases I've used are fairly stable...bug your school about getting service packs...

-Travis

[Jersey Tom]

60 network licenses of SolidWorks, not sure how many of ANSYS and COSMOSworks (full blown package).

Lot of the small industry in our area is geared for SolidWorks and Inventor, and of course Pro/E. SolidWorks is the only CAD platform taught here. Used to be I-DEAS but they migrated a few years ago, and I'm glad. Easy to use, not that expensive, and fairly powerful once you learn the ins and outs of it.

My only complaint is that with '05 they've made it too user friendly. My personal preference leans towards Inventor which used to be standard where I work. Very streamlined, functional interface while still easy to use and having powerful functionality.

ME CAD lab is open 24/7.

I want to say there's 4-6 licenses of MasterCAM around in various places, which aren't available at all hours, though that may change.

[Cement Legs]

We have access to the AutoCad serires and Unigraphics. Except for the recent upgrade to UG NX3, (all of the functions seem to have been moved to different menu locations http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_frown.gif ), the computers with CAD software run quite stable.

[Patrick W. Crane]

They teach autocad to second years here, but our team uses solidworks with cosmos/flowworks add ons. we have an office, but for the most part we use our own comupters. I've only demoed catia (seems remarkably like solidworks), never used pro e, and i hate autocad with a passion.

As to reliablility solidworks crashes on me maybe once a week and i use it 8 or more hours a day - so can't complain at all. (i use it at work as well as for fsae)

[rjwoods77]

We use solidworks but only have one computer. I prefer 2004 to 2005 personally. My buddy works at a place that switched to the latest verison(beta?)of 2005 and he told me not to switch. Said it isnt as stable when you get into decent sized assemblies. I really dig 2004 anyway. I was trained a bunch on pro-e 2001 and dont really like it. It will blow away other midrange platforms (solidworks,inventor) based on the level of complex surfacing you can get into, the file sizes are a bunch smaller, and it is more of an enginnering tool than a 3d modeler but it loses out because the sketcher sucks ass, you have to say yes to everything and it is menu driven. Wildfire supposedly fixes some of these problems but pro-e will always be pro-e. I think solidworks has to be the best suited for fsae based on ease of use, turn around times and the cheap prices. Then again you can get wildfire for the same price these days. Mold makers and plastics design companies are better off with pro-e.

[Jay Fleming]

Our team has one specific cad lab which houses 12 pc's i think. We also have numerous labs with probably 200 pc's with pro/e, solid works, ansys, adams, cosmosworks, mastercam, autocad, etc. I think we're pretty fortunate.

[jack]

MS Paint.

don't nock it till you try it...

oh, and a TI-81

[ReadySetGo]

We have Solidworks '04, pro/e wildfire, autocad, matlab, nastran, working model, and a few other various software packages the civils use (water+dirt=mud).

Most of the team is on the solidworks bandwagon. Easiest thing to learn. Parts look great. Works great with Nastran if you want to do model simulation. I'm told its good when making cnc code. Export pro/e, iges, catia, and a few more. Only prob I've had is with '05 when you smart dimension a hole made by the hole wizard. Seems the mighty wizard likes to turn off solidworks if you smart dim the hole and out smart it. Or something like that.

Not bad for a State school eh.

damn its late...

[James Waltman]

When I started here, we learned IDEAS in the department's introductory class and Pro/E 2000i in the second class. Rhino had just been phased out. A few renegade students started learning CATIA in the spring/fall of 2002. Our FSAE and Baja teams had fully switched to CATIA by the fall of 2002. I can't remember when CATIA replaced IDEAS for the introductory class but it must have been fall of 2002. Fall of 2003 we also got a few seats of Pro/E Wildfire but didn't have many computers fast enough to run it. Now the second class used Wildfire.

The main department lab had about 30 computers with P3 400MHz. I don't think they even had video cards. This summer that lab got upgraded to P4 3.xx GHz, 128MB video card, 1GB RAM and dual monitors.

We have two and a half computers in our shop for the teams to use –
AMD about 1.2GHz, ½ GB RAM, No video card
AMD about 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, No video card
POS about 0.0GHz, 0GB RAM, Video card that is worse than none (we rebuilt this one ourselves)

We have a few members with decent laptop computers and one guy that works on stuff from home. We have Wi-Fi through most of campus and some of the shop now. Wi-Fi is the greatest. We can get to our server from anywhere on campus with it. Nothing makes Liberal Studies lectures fly by like working on CAD for an hour in the back of class.

Right now we are running CATIA V5R13. It used to crash about every 33 minutes. It doesn't do that anymore and I suspect that it wasn't all CATIA's fault. I still work with my left hand always on ctrl+s. Now it crashes once in a while, usually when you ask it to do something really complicated on accident (like calculate 200 hours of CNC surfacingat once).

Omar, sleep is for the weak...

[John Bucknell]

Just a comment on solidworks being like catia - you know dassault owns both? Catia V4 is totally different - mostly surfacing oriented for aerospace. ProE was kicking the $hit out of catia in the solids department, so IBM/Dassault bought the nearest competitor. Funnily enough, V5 was already quite a ways along by the time this happened - I think they bought solidworks to avoid lawsuits....

oh, and jack - you know mspaint is installed on all of DCX's XP machines just cause it rocks

[John Bucknell]

PS I met the Aukland FSAE team at the WRC starting ceremony - then again on special stage 7. WRC rocks..