Onshape CAD

Looks like there's a new free, cloud-based 3D CAD package called Onshape, apparently from the same people who originally made SolidWorks: see: **LINK**

Seems very impressive at first glance - needs an internet connection of course but the free account looks completely uncrippled for features. You are limited to five active 'Documents' but as far as I can tell each of those can contain as many parts and/or assemblies as you like!

Just tried signing up but their 'early adopter program is full'.

Anyone managed to try it?

Might be just the thing to tempt me off my now ancient £99 version of Alibre, which I'm keeping an XP computer running for!

Yes, I've been on the closed beta test for the last couple of months. You may have better luck if you try later - I believe the open beta was going to go live around midday in Massachusetts.

I'll post something about it later when I have a moment. Looks pretty good for light use. You can have 5 assemblies free and beyond that the subscription is $100/mo IIRC, which pretty much rules it out for the likes of us. However, 5 assemblies is possibly enough for most of us and of course you can import and export work.

Some features are still not implemented yet (eg drawings and some mates) but it's pretty close. There is supposed to be a CAM offering coming along later on.

Murray

Here's a couple of screenshots.

This is an assembly I imported into OS from Solidworks (in Parasolid format). I didn't have time to make the parts in OS as I've been quite busy of late. They aren't actually mated yet - the mates can't be brought in when you import an assembly. You can see the various mates available on the toolbar under the title.

This is a ballscrew, showing the rather fine rendering of the (cosmetic) thread.

Here are the various toolbars that you use.

And this is what the screen looks like when you are making a part.

One of the biggest issues I found was the current lack of support for the 3D mouse I'm used to. The other programs (SE, SW, Inventor etc) support them but OS hasn't implemented it yet. The right button and control button do rotate and pan.

I'm planning on adding all the mates back in to the assembly next.

I quite like this and if you can manage on no more than 5 assemblies, it's free.

Murray

Thanks for that - looks awesome, especially for £0

The problem I have with "the cloud" is that nothing is ever privately owned

If "you agree to use a cloud service" you give up all rights to anything original that could be construed as belonging to you which you created via their software etc

Apart from that, it's fine

Of course the cloud doesn't require you to give up all rights - they wouldn't get a single customer if they tried that! If you pay the subscription, you get 100GB of secure private storage and of course you can back it up by exporting it to your own archive if you feel the need. I don't think you quite understand cloud storage - although I'm not sure which bit you are struggling with.

"With the Onshape Free plan, you can designate up to 5 private documents as active at a time which enables the document for editing. We don't limit the number of private inactive documents or public documents that you have."

Sounds fair enough to me - if you have more than 5 documents, you either make them inactive (and still private) or public. Bear in mind that a "document" can be a complete assembly comprising many parts, not just one simple part.

Murray

Yup I'm not concerned about the rights issue at all. More of a possible concern is reliability of the internet connection - it only works online - but it's improved a lot here in the last few years, so I'm willing to give the cloud a try.

If you lose the connection, you just go back in and nothing's lost. They have server farms (one in Ireland for us) that handle all the computing power, so you no longer need a powerful graphics card and Xenon workstation with licence manager etc etc to do CAD. Stuff like PDM / PLM is already part of the concept in OS whereas in SW etc you have to pay another few grand a year for it. Of course, several of the competitors already use cloud storage for that (oops).

There's also an app for iPad and iPhone(yes!). Technically you could edit or even draw stuff up on the iPhone for a bet though I suspect you'd be better off attempting that on a tablet. Handy for showing people what you are up to and possibly even for first look design reviews.

They have also implemented a collaborative working structure that allows several people to work simultaneously on the same assembly or even the same part. I know, I know, all sorts of nightmares come to mind but the alternative is that the various collaborators branch off and you have a nightmare merging again (or only one person can work on it at once), so in fact a successful solution has a great deal to recommend it. Hardly an issue for most of us here but unless you are working on a small product, one guy at a time, it's a handy feature.

Murray

Just got an email saying they've activated my account so I'll have a play with it later

Collaboration
Would this enable several model engineers who were interested to spread the load of converting an old design to metric? Problems of privacy on the essentially copyright design admitedly.
It would also be nice if people did 3D representations of some parts of designs where people have difficulty in visualising off the drawing.

Is it totally 'in the cloud' ie does it avoid even any tiddly runtime .exe that I can't load on my work computer?

Re collaboration, there's a good video showing how it works if you scroll down a bit here. And as far as I can tell yes, it is completely online, so will run on just about anything that can run a reasonably modern web browser.

got this email

"Hi ,

Thanks for requesting an invite to Onshape. We will send you one as soon as possible."

Almost instant response so at least their front end server is not the usual ZX81 on a tea break.

However it does say Internet Explorer is not supported. I assume that means they are Firefox geeks or something. Also the tablet version mentions an APP.

Edited By Bazyle on 10/03/2015 18:13:16

Hi Bikepete,

How long did it take from registering to getting "activated"?

Best part of a day - applied yesterday afternoon, got the 'accepted' email lunchtime today. Think I got in quite early after they announced the public beta, though, so the wait might even be longer now. Not had a chance to try it yet but they've already sent two more emails full of links to 'get started' guides etc.!

Received my "invite" today, and have just ploughed my way through the license agreement!

... Interesting to see that you have to be at least thirteen years old to accept this.

Also found an introductory video, here.

MichaelG.

Yup and there are some good videos on the Onshape site too.

Not had long to play with it so far, but am reasonably impressed with what I've seen. The interface is pretty clean and 'sparse' so it's not immediately obvious sometimes how things work (no reassuring texty menu to delve into) but after watching some of the tutorials it becomes clear and is actually quite elegant. I think organising the parts and sub-assemblies within each 'document' will take some getting used to, to keep everything manageable and clear and not ending up with a gazillion tabs. I've also yet to get my head around how its assembly constraints ('mates' ) work - it's not like Alibre in that respect (but otherwise the modelling process seems very similar really).

The graphics all work fine, and I'm using it on a pretty bog standard Windows 7 office computer without any fancy graphics cards or excessive RAM (4Gb) and a quite high res screen (1680x1050). Even the most complex sample models (e.g. the lightweight CNC router) can be rotated/zoomed etc without noticeable lag. Only if moving some of the parts within that assembly did the display lag seriously. Then again my old Alibre CAD works fine too on the same machine.

The system is a bit slow sometimes to load up models, but once they're up it's fine.

I don't think the 'five active document' limitation on free accounts will be a serious one at all - each can contain unlimited parts and sub-assemblies. There is a file size limit (5Gb) for free accounts too of course - but can't be sure if that might eventually be an issue... my initial test doc has only used 1.5 Mb so far...

They are still adding features quite rapidly - think an update just went through and when I logged on just now there are now 'gear mates' for assembling working gear mechanisms .

Edited By Bikepete on 13/03/2015 22:00:45

Can someone please explain how the 'invitation' works?

On my screen the texts are almost totally unreadable (too weak) and/or outside the usual display limits. It starts with the page after 'Request beta invite' which is not totally viewable, I have to make it smaller with the '-' key. Next, I saw a single input field and supposed they want my email address. Did this and immediately got a field 'Sign In', and the email address still in the input field, Clicking the 'Sign in' produced an error message (invalid password I guess).

If the interface of this program is as bad as these login screens (and if I can trust the examples I see above and in the video it is so) then I'm afraid it is unusable for me.

OK, while typing this I received an email, they will send me the 'Invite' asap,

Let's see how that goes on then...

Regards, HansR.

Hans,

I successfully applied for and received my invitation about 12 hours later.

However it looks like it is very sensitive to browsers and other packages so would try your application using Firefox (which I can confirm works fully or with Opera (which works for the application form but not the application itself it seems). I am not an IE fan so I only use it when there is no option but I suspect this is your problem.

You will only be able to use Chrome (which I didn't test), Firefox (which works perfectly for me) Opera alegedly (but which I could make work) and I think something else but not IE.

All in all, deeply impressed with my initial playing, I have a reasonable amount of 2D experience and virtually no 3D but this had me drawing the beginner's tutorial object in less than an hour and I now have a long list of boxes and 'thingys' to do as source for a newly acquired 3D printer.

Simon

Hi all,

Received the response to my request for an invitation and am waiting for the activation.

Can anyone advise whether the program will work on a MacBook running the latest version of OS X Yosemite.

I am already aware of the IE conflict but am using Safari so that should not be a problem.

Best regards,

Mike

Well I can get all the way through to creating a document but then it just does into a continual 'loading' mode. Same with demos.
Anyone know if it is doing something funny that needs a special plug in or firewall setting?