Hi Folks, I was a second career teacher and after 20 years of using really nice Autodesk products I got hooked on Autodesk Inventor. The program was free to me until I retired and still wanted to work on projects; Autodesk asked for an exorbitant amount of money (thousands of dollars) to continue using the product. I finally found a product that was reasonably priced (<$100) a year and it gives access to all of the really nice tools that I had using inventor. There are two issues:
- The software is extremely picky on the configuration of the computer/video card.
- I ended up finding a used computer workstation on Amazon that had all the bells and whistles required for $600 The cost of getting the video card required itself was almost the same price.
- The software goes about design in a completely different approach and it takes a while to get proficient again.
I also have used MeshCAM [https://www.grzsoftware.com/]
(https://www.grzsoftware.com/) to create my g-code. Great program
if you can handle those two issues and not have a nervous breakdown, SolidWorks for Makers is a great product that allows for very extensive designs.