I thought I would share this here as I have found it through solid professor, a new cad tool called Onshape, it is fully cloud based and is free, it is in beta right now and improving by the day, I like it because it runs in a browser, (not internet explorer) you do not need any software on you machine, it's fully functional for parts and assemblies works like direct modelling. It will run on an iPad or iPhone will soon be supported on android.
It's well worth a look even if you just use it to translate files from one format to the other, it supports solid works part and assemblies just no drawings yet but they are working on that, the free version only allows you to have 6 documents loaded at any one time but they are easy to toggle on and off. They have loads of tutorials to get you going.
The site is Onshape.com

oops, I just posted a similar thing starting a new thread :-(

This is just awesome. I am doing my design in DesignSpark Mechanical which is free but had a hard time hacking the native .rsdoc format to extract the solid geometry data as the free version only exports in mesh formats. One solution is described on FreeCad forum but you only get halfway through with free tools.

So as I was stuck with a .SAT file no other free tool would convert into .STEP or .IGES, this came as an unexpected surprise:

Quote
https://www.onshape.com/faqs
Q: What CAD formats does Onshape support?
A: Onshape can read native CAD (SolidWorks, Pro/ENGINEER, CATIA, NX, DWG, etc) and neutral CAD formats (IGES, SAT, STEP, ACIS, JT, Parasolid, DXF etc). Furthermore, Onshape’s unique multi-CAD capabilities store the original native CAD data as well as the Onshape translation. It all gets versioned, shared, and is available for download.

This really sounds like the future for CAD.
Thanks for sharing.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/22/2015 08:35PM by realthor.

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