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Low Cost/Free Engineering Tools 5

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flash3780

flash3780

Mechanical
Dec 11, 2009
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I'm wondering if anyone has had any experience with low cost or open source engineering tools. I've been kicking around some design ideas that I'd like to get a little bit more serious about developing in my spare time. I use Linux at home, but I'd be willing to install Windows if it were necessary to get work done.

There are a few types of software that I'm looking for, especially CAD and FEA software.

Obviously Pro/E, UG, CATIA, and even Solidworks are pretty major investments. Nonetheless, I'd like to find some inexpensive software that can create parametric solid bodies, technical drawings, and mechanical assemblies. I've been using QCad thus far, which is fine for 2D, but a 3D CAD tool would make my life much easier. I'm wondering if anyone has had any experience with FreeCAD, VeriCAD, OpenCASCADE, or Alibre. Of course, I'm open to other solutions as well. If it could generate IGES files and ParaSolids for analyses, that would be a bonus. Any experience or suggestions?

Additionally, I'd like to have some FEA ability. I don't even know if "cheap" FEA exists, but I'm aware of some free codes. The most promising that I've seen is CAELinux, which can run the Calculix solver, but I'm not sure how well it actually works. It seems as though they can handle assemblies and contact. If there were some low-cost FEA out there, I'd be interested in that as well. Most companies don't post prices unless you contact them... usually if you have to ask, it's too expensive in my experience. Anyhow, any war stories or suggestions are welcome.

A free 1D flow network solver would be great (pipe flow, etc.); any ideas?

Other than that, I've had great luck running Octave with the QtOctave front end for general problem solving. It crunches through numbers almost as well as MATLAB. The only thing missing are a few of the fancy functions and tools that MATLAB has, but I don't intend to do any heavy-duty controls work.

Thanks in advance for your help. There's quite a bit available out there, especially in the realm of CAD, but I don't want to waste time trying out something only to find that it's insufficient or just plain doesn't work. I'd definitely be interested in hearing about both good and bad experiences with inexpensive software (the bad ones let me know what to look out for).
 
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If you choose to install a substantial fraction of CAELinux's applications independently, I'm guessing you will run into Update Hell, or Incompatible Library Hell, or Some Other Ghastly Software Problem Hell.

The earlier versions of CAELinux pulled together a lot of disparate applications that were evolving separately from each other, and I think there were, if not adaptations, at least selection of specific sets of non-necessarily-latest versions of the applications for minimum incompatibility.

If you have a 64 bit computer, please do try CAELinux 2010 from the live DVD before you try installing the components.
... and please report back to us about it.




Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
 
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tygerdawg said:
Suprised to see no mention of TurboCad as an AutoCAD substitute. I've never used it, but have heard good reviews of it.
Click to expand...
I'd looked into TurboCad; it looks fairly good, but $1300-$1500 is getting up there on price. I wonder how it compares to Bricscad and VariCAD?
 
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GregLocock said:
Unless it has been improved beyond all measure the open office spreadsheet is a pathetic substitute for excel, as used by most engineers.

There is a reasonable argument that excel is abused rather than used for engineering, but that is a different matter.
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Sure, OpenOffice Calc isn't as good as Excel. But, I find that Octave is more than capable of bridging the gap in capability. I've definitely seen folks do impressive things with Excel, though.
 
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If you sign up for the TurboCAD demo, use it up, and then demonstrate a little sales resistance, the asking price becomes _very_ competitive.



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
 
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Flash3780... my copy of Bricscad was half that... and it comes with lisp, vba and a couple of other programming environments...

Dik
 
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Something to consider if you are just doing this at home on your own. Use a student edition. Usually wanting to learn the software will qualify you for the purchase, but even having a child in elementary school will work.

NX7.5 - SE - WF5 - SW -
"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli
 
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I love Turbo Cad for great 2D. I could teach my 7 year old grand son to use it. Course he can whip my butt on Call to Gory (Glory) I have never really tried it in 3D. You can pick up used copies on Craigslist or e-bay. Not sure what that does about licensing - so be careful. They are on Version 17 - I think. Only pick the odd numbered ones - 11,13,15 etc. Do not know why - but they seem to work better and keep up with the updates - they issue them frequenlty and are free.

If you can find an old version of 11 - you will love it!!
 
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MiketheEngineer said:
You can pick up used copies on Craigslist or e-bay.
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Good call. I've looked into used software in the past and had no luck, but I looked up TurboCAD on Ebay and voila, $300 (one version back).
It sounds like there are some good options for low-cost 3D CAD. I wonder how they compare to one-another.
 
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I haven't used TurboCad, so I can't compare, but Intellicad has two big advantages for me:

1) Excellent Autocad compatability - if you know how to run Autocad, you can run Intellicad.

2) VBA support - so you can integrate with Excel. The object model is a bit different from Autocad, so there is a bit of translation required if you want to run an Autocad VBA routine on Intellicad, but it's not too hard.

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services
 
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A cheap (free) FEA solution to be used as a plugin in AutoCAD is AutoFEM (Lite). Havent used it yet, so dont anything about the possibilities and/or limitations.
 
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Sorry to dig up an old thread, but I thought that this might be useful to those who are looking: The Fedora Electronics Lab seems to have quite a few electronics design tools with a well-thought-out workflow. I believe that it's available on a live CD or bundled through the yellow dog update manager (yum) for RHEL based Linux distributions (Fedora, Scientific Linux, CentOS, etc.).

[tt]"yum groupinstall 'Electronic Lab'"[/tt]

Link:
 
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Fedora requires root privileges to accept the command.
Given that, you also need a large hard drive:

Transaction Summary
======================
Install 394 Package(s)

Total download size: 578 M
Installed size: 1.7 G




Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
 
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Yeah, you pretty much need root privileges to install anything when running Linux... one of the reasons that I like it.

It's definitely a big package of programs, though. I'm still playing around with it, but there are a ton of goodies in here.
 
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