Cost efficient CAD - ideas please

[JohnRMoore]

Our DT department uses a set of laptops for students learning CAD/Simulation. We keep it light, eg Yenka, 2D Design and willing to use cloud based 3D modelling. Out laptops are getting increasingly unreliable, now able to use perhaps 15 out of a theoretical 25, mostly due to worn out batteries. They are also 6 years old, sluggish and gradually falling to bits. I requested a quote from out IT department for a class set of 30 laptops, which came to £16,000. Out business manager has indicated that will never happen, but signaled that half that might be acceptable. What I would like help on is the most cost effective, prudent way to continue delivering CAD in the department in the long term. This could involve upgrading our failing stock of laptops, it could involve hiring, going fully cloud-based, using different types of device, anything. I am fully willing to compromise, but I either find a way of providing a sustainable CAD facility or I will have to inform the school that we can no longer deliver it, which would be a shame, and the first step to not delivering offering DT at all

 

Any ideas gratefully received!

 

PS if there is a more appropriate forum to use, please let me know where!

Edited June 27, 2017 by JohnRMoore

[Snoochieboochies]

Autodesk does free Software for education but it is very power hungry.

[synaesthesia]

Refurb laptops from the likes of @ICTDirect_Dave - fitted with solid state drives. You should be able to hit £7k for 30 laptops depending on what they have available and get some decent solid machines more than capable of that task. Edited June 27, 2017 by witch

[dhicks]

I requested a quote from out IT department for a class set of 30 laptops, which came to £16,000. Out business manager has indicated that will never happen, but signaled that half that might be acceptable.

 

£8,000, 30 devices, £260 per device, assuming you have suitable laptop storage in classrooms / corridors already. You could buy new ChromeOS devices for that amount, or refurbish your existing devices and convert them to ChromeOS by installing Cloudready. When you say "falling to bits" if you mean the keyboards, those can be replaced for maybe around £30 each, batteries for about the same, and you could upgrade to a small SSD for possibly about the same. A perpetual license for Cloudready plus Google console management license is around £60, so that's around £150 per device. That's £4,500, which would leave you £3,500 to buy a 3D printer.

[ICTDirect_Dave]

Refurb laptops from the likes of @ICTDirect_Dave - fitted with solid state drives. You should be able to hit £7k for 30 laptops depending on what they have available and get some decent solid machines more than capable of that task.

Correct!

 

Dell Latitude E5430 2.60GHz Core i5, 4GB RAM, 120GB SSD - £240 each (£7,200 for your class set )

[localzuk]

£8,000, 30 devices, £260 per device, assuming you have suitable laptop storage in classrooms / corridors already. You could buy new ChromeOS devices for that amount, or refurbish your existing devices and convert them to ChromeOS by installing Cloudready. When you say "falling to bits" if you mean the keyboards, those can be replaced for maybe around £30 each, batteries for about the same, and you could upgrade to a small SSD for possibly about the same. A perpetual license for Cloudready plus Google console management license is around £60, so that's around £150 per device. That's £4,500, which would leave you £3,500 to buy a 3D printer.

That doesn't really cover the whole "CAD" part of it all. Very few CAD systems for Chrome that I know of. Certainly nothing standard really.

 

My question would be - why does the department need a dedicated set of machines just for CAD? Can this not be something you use the general IT suites for, whilst getting a smaller number of machines specific to DT for those more complex things? That's how I've seen it done in most schools.

[dhicks]

That doesn't really cover the whole "CAD" part of it all. Very few CAD systems for Chrome that I know of.

 

The refurbish-the-laptops-you've-got method should work equally well for Windows laptops - maybe add a larger SSD than you would have done for ChromeOS, maybe add some more RAM, but if you're paying for a Microsoft volume license of some sort anyway it's probably not going to cost anything to upgrade them to Windows 10. It sounds like the laptops might be being labeled as "slow" for things that it's actually relativly easy to fix (new SSD, fix the keyboards, new batteries, fresh install of Windows). Your get-DT-specific-machines advice is a good idea too - if the original poster can spend some money on refurbishing an existing set of laptops, then spend the rest of the money on some ICT-direct desktops and some large monitors to use as DT-specific workstations, that might work too.

 

I got the impression from the original post that they weren't necessarily looking for something to run a full version of Autodesk, but would consider "cloud based" CAD in some way. I've not tried Tinkercad, but it looks promising:

 

https://www.tinkercad.com/

 

And of course there's SketchUp-in-a-browser:

 

my.sketchup | SketchUp

 

The above is in beta, but I think some people on these forums have been using it already, so they might be able to give an opinion on how good it is.

 

There is always something like RollApp, which will let you run Autocad or whatever via a virtual desktop. I looked at pricing for RollApp and it was a bit expensive for schools, although it might be worth asking, depending on how many users will be using it at the same time. Of course, if a school has its own remote access server it might be possible to run your CAD software on that.

 

Edit: Ooh, Onshape looks pretty good, too:

 

https://www.onshape.com/

Edited June 27, 2017 by dhicks

[angrycomputingteacher]

We're installing NaroCAD instead of AutoCAD this year. It's free and does most of the same stuff.

[fiza]

What about onshape? https://www.onshape.com