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Joey Holliday edited this page May 8, 2020 · 1 revision

What is Onshape?

Onshape is a web browser CAD software that we will start using for the 2020 year. It does not have as many detailed functions, but it covers the scope of this project while also being easy to use, download, and share files with others.

Making an Account

  1. Go to Onshape.com, and click "Request Trial" on the top right.
  2. Fill in the information requested, making sure that you say that you are a student of Vanderbilt, thus giving you the educational license.
  3. You're done... you can now start messing around with Onshape, and you should ask a member of exec to add your account to the team!

Overview

As of 9/9/19, no one on the team has used Onshape for more than a couple weeks, meaning that our experienced members will not be able to answer as many questions as we would like. That said, Onshape is a simpler CAD software than Autodesk, and there are 3 specific resources I would like to highlight. As a sidenote, the ability to figure out how to answer your own question is important for almost every facet of your engineering career, not just Onshape.

Tutorials

https://learn.onshape.com/?hsCtaTracking=16b0fd02-5c6a-4de0-b601-450cddec399d%7C302b2b1d-859f-4b26-bd63-e22982b55033 is a probably where you want to start if you little to no CAD experience overall. One tutorial I particularly recommend is the one on document history and versions, to learn how Onshape's version control works.

Forum

If you have a more specific question or just don't want to go through the entire tutorial, search on the Onshape forums. It's almost guaranteed that someone has had the same question/issue as you.

Search Tool

Know what a mirror is but can't find the button for it on the interface? Use Alt-C to open the search tool, and it will highlight the corresponding icon on the hot bar and give a short explanation of the feature.