Free alternative for MathCAD and CATIA?
Hello,
a friend of mine studies mechanical engineering / engine construction. He wants to free his computing, but he doubts that there exist free alternatives for some CAD programs they use at university.
Especially MathCAD and Catia.
The first one seems to be some kind of numerical calculation program with an implemented way of arranging the calculations in visual way for presentations, but I don't know if I got it right.
The second one seems to be a well established CAD program; for this, I told him to try out librecad, but I don't know if it's any good.
Do you know any conveniant alternatives?
Salome-Meca could be an alternative. But I've no experience with it.
http://www.code-aster.org/V2/spip.php?article303
It is a combination of Code_Aster (as the analysis engine) and Salome platform (as pre- and post-processing unit)
more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SALOME
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Aster
LibreCAD and QCad are not used for general finite-element analysis. They are mainly used by architects and civil engineers (like me ;) ) and is an alternative of AutoCAD. CATIA is a horse of a different color.
Le Sun, 2 Jun 2013 17:12:11 +0200 (CEST),
name at domain a écrit :
> Salome-Meca could be an alternative. But I've no experience with it.
>
> http://www.code-aster.org/V2/spip.php?article303
There's FreeCAD that seems quite good as a CATIA alternative. I tested
it some time ago. It seems promising.
I am a member!
hi i did an industrial engineering degree, i problably did not go as in depth as your friend in mechanical engineering. but here goes my two cents.
he seems convinced that free software is the way to go. this is good librecad and freecad will do the job as catia alternatives. it has improved greatly and with python scripting he can do amazing stuff. it does work differently to catia.
mathcad is new to me. but a quick search showed alternatives http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_computer_algebra_systems and http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_numerical_analysis_software
this is how i normally look for alternatives. i then look for gpl or similar licence cross platform avaiability and if the project is live.
this brings me to a selling point.
at uni you get the student version of this propiraty soft and you get trained on using it. you then go out to the world and licence is worth thousands of euros and your company can only afford certain number of licences you can get network floating licences but there is always bound to be bottlenecks. and working away from the company becomes a problem. plus even in the most basic packages you are paying for stuff you will never use. and then there is the issue of another company going down the cheap route using an old version to not update then he cannot open your files even if you use the same software package.please also do not be fooled with the fakse sense of comminity. a long time ago these engineering programs take the best thing of free software community support and use it to make their life easier and lock in more users
for this reasons we are moving away from labview where we can and using arduinos. for example
i used proengineer at uni. at work they asked me to use solidworks and I did. i am now fighting to get some of my personal time to learn freecad,librecad and others.
Thanks to all of you! I collected your advices and sent them to my friend.
I will post his experiences with this alternatives and if he managed to make the jump, but this will probably take some time (at the moment, he has much to do with tests and so on).