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Miscellaneous Questions
philip_prendeville
Member Posts: 8 EDU
I've worked with a company who use SolidWorks and I am currently back in college doing a dissertation of tailoring agile to machine building with a secondary goal of determining whether or not agile can improve communication.
I have several questions. I hope here is the best place to post them.
Can a company with a CAM package like SolidCAM or AlphaCAM use this with onShape or is it only the CAM apps that are compatible?
How does OnShape work if a broadband connection is down? Is there a minimum recommended broadband speed for using it?
Can files lie saved locally?
How does IP work?
Can SolidWorks files be uploaded to OnShape or if necessary can OnShape files be loaded onto SolidWorks?
Will a huge file, 500MB plus open on an iPad with ease? I was trying to open a 192MB file on an iPad air and it was slow although my broadband is only around 300-400kbs. Does it all depend on my broadband speed or is it hardware dependent when using the app?
Producing parts lists. How does this work on OnShape? I worked in a machine building company and the parts list/BOM is one thing that really causes a lot of pain.
Thanks,
Phil.
Best Answer
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philip_thomas
Member, Moderator, Onshape Employees, Developers Posts: 1,381 
@philip_prendeville - Hello.
I will get the ball rolling with some first-order answers to your questions.
Please consider this the start of any discussion and not a set of be-all-end-all answers (as i am not sure i understand the intent of some of your questions.
Can a company with a CAM package like SolidCAM or AlphaCAM use this with onShape or is it only the CAM apps that are compatible?
While there are many well known CAM solutions in the app store - you can use any CAM product simply by exporting any compatible file format. The two most common would be Parasolid and STEP.
How does OnShape work if a broadband connection is down? Is there a minimum recommended broadband speed for using it?
Onshape is a professional grade full-cloud solution. An internet connection is required (think Facebook).
There are no 'minimums' (i regularly tether to my phone and use 3G) - home internet speeds are more than adequate.
Can files lie saved locally?
Yes - you can export parts, assemblies and drawings locally in any number of supported formats.
https://cad.onshape.com/help/Content/translation.htm
How does IP work?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol
Can SolidWorks files be uploaded to OnShape or if necessary can OnShape files be loaded onto SolidWorks?
Yes - Onshape can read and write SolidWorks part files.
Onshape can read SolidWorks assembly 'pack-and-go' zip files
The easiest and most reliable format for data exchange with SolidWorks is 'Parasolid'
(Onshape and SolidWorks use same underlying kernel - Parasolid)
Will a huge file, 500MB plus open on an iPad with ease? I was trying to open a 192MB file on an iPad air and it was slow although my broadband is only around 300-400kbs. Does it all depend on my broadband speed or is it hardware dependent when using the app?
Very hard to answer this question - its a bit like saying "my journey is 300 miles, how long will it take if my car has a 2.5 liter engine?".
First - 400kbps is VERY slow - this is slower than 2G cell phone speed. This is not suitable for Onshape.
There are no files, but if the data transfer requirement is 500MB (4x10^9 bits) then the (theoretical) transfer time (at 400kbps) is 4x10^9 / 400,000 = 10,000 seconds. Someone will jump in and tell me my math is wrong, but either way, that's a really long time (nearly 3 hours). An iPad is a fine device and with a reasonable connection, should provide a reasonable Onshape experience (an iPad and iPadPro are better obviously)
Producing parts lists. How does this work on OnShape?
There are many Bill-of-Materials applications in the app-store.
For a free, professional grade solution, check out OpenBoM.
Phil - I hope these answers get the ball rolling for you.
Please feel free to ask any additional questions.
Many thanks - Philip . . .
Philip Thomas - Onshape1
Answers
I will get the ball rolling with some first-order answers to your questions.
Please consider this the start of any discussion and not a set of be-all-end-all answers (as i am not sure i understand the intent of some of your questions.
Can a company with a CAM package like SolidCAM or AlphaCAM use this with onShape or is it only the CAM apps that are compatible?
While there are many well known CAM solutions in the app store - you can use any CAM product simply by exporting any compatible file format. The two most common would be Parasolid and STEP.
How does OnShape work if a broadband connection is down? Is there a minimum recommended broadband speed for using it?
Onshape is a professional grade full-cloud solution. An internet connection is required (think Facebook).
There are no 'minimums' (i regularly tether to my phone and use 3G) - home internet speeds are more than adequate.
Can files lie saved locally?
Yes - you can export parts, assemblies and drawings locally in any number of supported formats.
https://cad.onshape.com/help/Content/translation.htm
How does IP work?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol
Can SolidWorks files be uploaded to OnShape or if necessary can OnShape files be loaded onto SolidWorks?
Yes - Onshape can read and write SolidWorks part files.
Onshape can read SolidWorks assembly 'pack-and-go' zip files
The easiest and most reliable format for data exchange with SolidWorks is 'Parasolid'
(Onshape and SolidWorks use same underlying kernel - Parasolid)
Will a huge file, 500MB plus open on an iPad with ease? I was trying to open a 192MB file on an iPad air and it was slow although my broadband is only around 300-400kbs. Does it all depend on my broadband speed or is it hardware dependent when using the app?
Very hard to answer this question - its a bit like saying "my journey is 300 miles, how long will it take if my car has a 2.5 liter engine?".
First - 400kbps is VERY slow - this is slower than 2G cell phone speed. This is not suitable for Onshape.
There are no files, but if the data transfer requirement is 500MB (4x10^9 bits) then the (theoretical) transfer time (at 400kbps) is 4x10^9 / 400,000 = 10,000 seconds. Someone will jump in and tell me my math is wrong, but either way, that's a really long time (nearly 3 hours). An iPad is a fine device and with a reasonable connection, should provide a reasonable Onshape experience (an iPad and iPadPro are better obviously)
Producing parts lists. How does this work on OnShape?
There are many Bill-of-Materials applications in the app-store.
For a free, professional grade solution, check out OpenBoM.
Phil - I hope these answers get the ball rolling for you.
Please feel free to ask any additional questions.
Many thanks - Philip . . .
Thanks very much for answering my questions. I'm a bit ignorant of a lot of the issues I've raised so I'm just looking to get an idea of how things work like CAM for example. I don't really know is CAM something that you just import a CAD file into and it does all the work for you after that or is there a bit of manipulating to it. A lecturer told me that some CAM packages can cost from between €7000 up to €20000 and maybe a recurring license fee of 20% of this cost. I don’t understand how it can cost this much. Would the apps available for OnShape be comparable in quality with the high end software packages at a fraction of the cost?
By IP I mean Intellectual Property, how safe are your CAD files in the cloud. Again, speaking to a lecturer and a guy in the medical device industry, who both have a lot of experience, they were saying saying they know of no company using cloud based software for manufacturing or CAD. There is definitely a move towards that elsewhere like email, documentation etc. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, I’m 99% sure it does, I’m only relaying what these guys with much more experience than me are saying to me.
Broadband isn’t very well developed in a lot of places here in Ireland. It’s pretty good in most cities but out in the sticks it's not so fast. 4G isn’t available in most towns from my experience. 3G was never that fast in the first place, 400kbs is about as good as it got for me I think and I don’t complain with that. Even fibre broadband will only get you about 1mbs from what I have seen. I’m still not sure though do files that are larger take longer to appear on the screen and have the possibility to cause freezes?
In terms of BOMs an old colleague of mine who does a lot of documentation control finds the BOM can be very frustrating to keep updated. Everything has to be entered manually and there are several people who add data to it or at least are supposed to add relevant data but that doesn’t always happen. I was involved to a certain extent with it and consider myself disciplined enough to do the manual work required but even at that there was always something I made a mistake on whether that was quantities or markng parts as being shipped our for surface finishes and then re-integrating them etc. It was a never-ending process of data entry and ultimately futile. Just having a quick look at open BoM and just having a little thumbnail of the part looks really cool. I suppose the best thing to do is experiment with it.
"What we find with CAM software is that it is giving better indications of cycle time, because you can program it in a different way, volumetric material removal per tooth as opposed to linear distance to travel, you can be much kinder to your spindles over time. Therefore there is less machine maintenance, better tool life, better surface finish and that’s where CAM packages are coming in. I’m not sure if the online CAM packages have that level of sophistication built into them."
Direct quote from my contact in manufacturing? Is there as much capability in the CAM packages on the app store?
To answer your question about internet speed: The amount of time it takes to load a model and apply new features to the model is dependent on your internet speed. The slowest load should be be the initial load of the model, and subsequent changes to features should be a little faster, but it all depends on how much your feature changes the model. Once the model is loaded your internet speed should not affect the viewing (rotate, pan, zoom, selection, section view, changing view modes, etc) until you make another change to the model and it has to load again.
TL;DR internet speed will affect load and modeling time, but will not create 'freezes' between operations.
If this is a major concern for you, why not create a free Onshape account, upload a big file from thingiverse.com or grabcad.com , and see what kinds of delays you experience. Make sure to download one of our supported file formats here https://cad.onshape.com/help/Content/translation.htm It would be better to use something that is internally a BRep (.x_t, .stp, .igs, .sldprt, etc) rather than a mesh (.stl, .obj). grabcad is nice in this respect as it lets you filter by available file type (just pick parasolid and you'll be fine).
Ill chime in on your CAM question.
Typically, a user will import the solid model or wireframe geometry into the CAM software. The user will then define a machining strategy based on the part. Nothing really happens automatically. There are CAM packages that have feature recognition, and will attempt to create tool path to match the feature but they usually require human intervention to get things just right.
After the part is programmed, a post processor is used to generate code that the CNC machine uses to machine the part.
There is a big difference in an economical CAM software and a top-tier software package.
No CAM software just does all of the work for you.
It can take anywhere from 10 minutes to program a simple part, or 10 hours for a complex situation.
There is plenty of conversation about IP in the forums, in short if you don't have requirements by law (for example to know exactly where the data is geographically situated or so) you should be fine. Actually IP is more secure because you don't need to ever send models by email and you can share things read only and stop sharing anytime.