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Comment by neltnerb | Hacker News Reader

Hoping that others will find this useful. This represents about a week of work to figure out for an expert user of EagleCAD, a moderately experienced user of SolidWorks, and a Linux user of 12 years. If you have any other suggestions definitely comment either on the post or here! I'm willing to pay some money for software, but not $7k/year per head for Altium...

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Excellent write up, appreciate it!

In your experience, what is the "best" open source alternative to SolidWorks? I'm kind of interested in contributing to a project, but haven't played with them in a while.

I'm afraid I haven't found any of them to be good in terms of actually offering similar functionality, but I haven't looked all that seriously.

To me, the key features that make SolidWorks (and Autodesk Inventor) stand out is the use of constraint driven assembly creation. Everything else seems to me to mostly be possible to work around. SolidWorks and Inventor have many, many added nice features like integration with CAM software, ability to assign materials from a database, ability to add things like fasteners and so on. It's a big list, and why people pay so much for it.

But if all you had was the ability to make sketches (using constraints and dimensions) combined with simple feature creation (linear and rotated extrusions, sweeps, and linear/circular/mirror patterns) to make individual parts, along with the ability to assemble parts using constraint driven logic it would be good enough for 90% of what I do as a non-professional mechanical designer.

If anyone knows of such a thing I'd also be interested in trying it... but I have not encountered such a thing yet.

I'm curious:

Why does Solidworks justify the price tag but Altium doesn't? They are in the same pricing ballpark. Your description of Solidworks sounds very much like why I would choose Altium over Eagle.

First, all of my design experience is in EagleCAD, so there is some vendor lock-in. If Altium had been available at a price I could afford when I was first starting work on electronics, it could have gone differently for sure. Additionally, when I was first getting into circuit board design (2004 or so) the people I knew using Altium constantly complained about how poorly it worked.

Mostly, I haven't run into a problem I couldn't solve with EagleCAD other than this MCAD/ECAD interoperability stuff. And I can live without that additional feature which makes it a luxury upgrade. On the other hand, without SolidWorks, I seriously doubt I could produce mechanical designs to send to machine shops for manufacturing.

That all said, I already have Solidworks available because my roomate is a professional mechanical designer. It's also readily available at the local hackerspace computer lab. I'd actually love to try Altium, and if my company ever makes enough money to justify it I would not hesitate to consider it. I'd be very excited to see what I'm missing actually!

> That all said, I already have Solidworks available because my roomate is a professional mechanical designer. It's also readily available at the local hackerspace computer lab.

Is that...legal? I mean, sounds like you're happy to use solidworks for your commercial endeavors as long as you don't actually have to pay for it?

To the best of my knowledge. It's not an educational version, and only one license is in use at any time. If I didn't have access to a commercially licensed version, I wouldn't use it anymore.

There was a post on the EEVBlog recently about how Altium is probably going to introduce a hobbyist/hopefully free version of their software.

I've seen some videos of Altium and know PCB designers who swear by it. Seems like very good stuff and I'd be excited for something available to me: I am not a professional and so couldn't reasonably buy it at the current price.

We've been using Blender[0] for electromechanical rendering. Lots of importers available, and Python backend to hack. We've had some fun using Shapeways[1] for 3D printing of Blender models.

[0] http://www.blender.org/

[1] http://www.engineering.com/3DPrinting/3DPrintingArticles/Art...

I had the opportunity to use the educational edition of SolidWorks for a few weeks a year or so ago. It seemed to have a fair number of the extra features included with it, one of which was CircuitWorks. I generated a model from a CircuitWorks example board and it turned out really well. When I tried to generate a model from one of my own Eagle projects it didn't look as good. From what I remember if there is no model of a component in the library, CircuitWorks just drops a bounding box in it's place which you can replace with your own model of the component. I had a deadline looming so I ended up using a photo of a prototype board as a texture on the part for the renderings I needed to do. This [1] help page mentions a lite version of CircuitWorks being available for all SolidWorks users, but I haven't tried it myself so I'm not sure about it's limitations.

[1] http://help.solidworks.com/2012/English/SolidWorks/circuitwo...

sigh. Have been an Altium fan all along until I know the pricetag..

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