Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design,comp.sys.raspberry-pi
Subject: Re: SolidWorks is cool, sort of (but FreeCAD might be better)
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2025 01:46:26 -0000 (UTC)
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On Thu, 19 Jun 2025 13:46:21 -0700, john larkin wrote:

> On Thu, 19 Jun 2025 01:36:44 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro
> <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>
>> 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.”
>
> 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.

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

> But most software and things like security camera services and many
> web sites are increasingly annoying.

Make that “most *proprietary* software”.

>>> SolidWorks is expensive ...
>>
>> My point exactly.
>
> 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.

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

> It does all that cool stuff apparently instantaneously, even on the
> wimpiest laptop without fancy graphics hardware.

That’s not a big deal any more.

>><https://www.kicad.org/>
>
> We use PADS. We've been using it since the DOS days when there was
> basically nothing else.

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

<https://sourceforge.net/software/compare/KiCad-EDA-vs-PADS-Professional/>

Apparently KiCAD got some investment money from CERN.

<https://www.reddit.com/r/KiCad/comments/wy20gi/wanting_to_switch_from_pads_to_kicad_is_it/>