how do you design your robot with exact dimensions and...

[craig_colliass]

How much is Solidworks or similar

[kane]

Either start with a trial version or an educational version if you can get hold of one.

[Rahulvyas]

Hmm. How much time will it take for a new comer to learn?
Though i master designing tools such as illustrator and photoshop.

[Ellis]

It is impossible to answer how long it will take, as it would be like trying to answer how long is a piece of string?

It won't be hours, that is for sure. A few days might get you going and within a week or two I'd expect to be quite comfortable. That said, I have never worked with Solidworks. People like Eventorizon have, though, and he has been using the software for years. He appears to be able to create pretty much anything in the programme.

I wouldn't ignore Google Sketchup. It is very capable of helping with a first robot. I designed Tormenta 2 completely in Sketchup before building:

http://i1088.photobucket.com/albums/i32 ... 1341527432
http://i1088.photobucket.com/albums/i32 ... 1341527477
http://i1088.photobucket.com/albums/i32 ... 1341527422

As you can see the programme is capable of doing quite a lot. The final robot changed some from the CAD, but it helped hugely. Sketchup took me less than an hour to get used to.

[Max]

It didn't take me very long to learn the basics of solidworks- only a couple of hours. And you can learn a lot through trial and error.
My advise is to just give it a go

[mightymouse]

I use Solidworks at work - did a 4 day course and only covered the basics. Saying that there is so much on it you barely use 10% of it. The main feature is the ability to construct a whole assembly from individual parts - you put a hole in the wrong place you cannot assemble it in the programme. You know before you make anything it will go together. Will also give you a volume measurement for each part, combined with a relative density, gives you the weight..........

Downside....through a dealer was quoted £3000.....a year.....
There are hookey versions available but never got one working properly on my pc

My pc at work has 6gb ram on the graphics card but still slows up on large assemblies.

Despite that I love it, there is nothing you cannot do with it.

Trev

[grant_ploughbot]

I use AutoDesk Inventor - it works in a very similar way to Solidworks but I prefer some of the features and stress analysis/3D animations and genuine simulations.
Once you have the basic's of any CAD program, they all become fairly similar to use for basic things.

Here's my first play around with an animation in Inventor.


And here's a genuine Simulation with 13kg steel block on the end of the flipper running at 20 bar John Reid did that one when we were working a few things out.

And some very useful stress analysis on the flipper arm. This shows where any weak points are when the full force of the ram is pushing on it.

3D Cad packages really are worth learning. It will add a huge amount to your CV and employability if your looking into anything engineering/design related.

[Rahulvyas]

Nice. Thanks
Learning sometimes seems boaring, like I started watching Java tutorials so that I could learn how to create awesome apps to interface with arduino, but after watching the 11th tutorial of the series- I feel like shifting to Visual C# language because java is boaring