hi!! there’s a pretty wide variety of different cad programs i’ve seen people using in the robotics community. out of curiosity, what software do you guys use and what made you choose it over others? personally i use fusion 360

Let’s do a poll:

Blender, used it for 4 years, never had a problem with it

First post here ig.
I use Inventor, mainly because it’s what was convenient for me to access, and now I’m used to it.
I’ve previously used Fusion, but wasn’t a huge fan of the slow loading times it had sometimes due to being cloud-based. I was also one of two people doing most of the cadding last year, where as this year I am the only one.

ooo i’ve heard of a few people using blender
do you do much parametric modelling on it? how does that go on blender? rly cool that the devs made parametric modelling so openly available like that

I didnt use any for robotics mostly because it was released too late and also I didnt really need it, I just have a full custom parts library that I made myself, and any polycarbonate/ custom stuff was just made using primitive shapes.
I have tried the parametric modeling stuff on blender tho and its really cool, for me with years of experience it was significantly easier to start making things compared to learning inventor

oh yeah fusion 360 used to be pretty laggy, i’ve found the majority of the lag i’ve faced is when a file has wacky and improper use of joints/the timeline/links across the timeline and the file’s component hierarchies. once i improved these things from all that i learned while cadding 7405X’s 15" bot, my files got a whoooole lot smoother. since the july update tho it’s been so so so much faster than before

I’ll mention it here just because it’s interesting, not because I think it’s super useful for robotics, any time I need to design a random 3D printed bracket or whatever I use OpenSCAD. I’ve also used it to lay out competition floorplans and design a remodel of my backyard.

It’s essentially a CAD programming language where you define everything with code. I’m a programmer so I find it fits way more nicely with how my brain works.

While it’s not CAD software (I primarily use Inventor), I also like to use Blender to animate and render my models after I build them.

I saw a video of a guy using Roblox Studio for his CAD once. He actually used it to test his odometry code, too! It has a suprisingly good physics engine.

I personally use Protobot because it is quick and easy to use.

I’m also too lazy to learn fusion, I just have it downloaded

Ive been using onshape for a while but Ive recently been trying vention which works pretty well and has features like 360 but in a cloud system it works really well

I use protobot as, 1. it’s easy to use, and 2. it requires less performance as far as i know(PC performance)