Re: Student edition - worth it?

Basic question ~ Is SE worth it? My answer ~ Yes, well worth it! Here's why:

1) It's yours, not an extension of the company license, but licensed to you, for your own personal use. You merely have to figure out how to get the most out of the software without being able to 'swap' files between the commercial and SE licenses, i.e., you can't start a model at work and take it home to finish it on the SE. I've used it to work on problems I had at work. When I was at Caterpillar, I used Mechanism Design (at home, since their stripped down Foundation package didn't have anything that advanced) to produce a simplified design of something I was working on and demonstrate a problem it was difficult to explain without the motion graphs MD produces. Now that I'm in Southern California, I'm using it to answer Wildfire questions on comp.cad.pro-engineer, thus learning more about my favorite release of Pro/e so far.

2) SE has grown tremendously over the years and is now all grown up: the file incompatibility between SE and commercial versions is the only limitation. Otherwise, the software contains everything the commercial version does, including ISDX, Mechanism Design, rendering, Behavioral Modelling, Mechanica and other stuff you might never even see in your company's version.

3) It comes with a tutorial on a separate disk ~ a book plus practice models. The User area of PTC's website has additional ones, plus, if you can get to a community college with a learning edition, they will have the full range of PTC designed courses for each module. All of these can be done with SE. Lots of opportunities for flattening that curve. Also, all of these resources help conceptually to go from a drafting environment to a parametric, feature based, solid modelling environment.

4) SE hooks directly to the User Area of ptc.com through your home internet connection for access to lots of different kinds of help. Besides tutorials, there are TANs (Technical Application Notes) and TPIs which you can search through for information on problems you are having.

The people who continue the learning will do the leading. Good luck with the hard work ahead.

David Janes

Pete,

Yes, they gave us the 60 day trial version. We just started slowing down so I jumped on it for the first time last night. I was able to figure out the sketch, extrusion, holes, radii and to a small degree radial sweeps. I figured that was pretty good for my first time and w/o any help. Tonight I'm gonna play with the datums since that seems to be a key way to work in Pro/e.

I love the fact that work can be performed on a shaded model since CV doesn't do that. The order of operations will take some getting used to. Pre-selecting objects before selecting the command (or even being able to select it) is a totally new concept to me. I also like the rotate, pan and zoom options w/the scroll button on the mouse.

Crew

He's probably just getting back to school about now and just starting to get stuff sorted out. If his school phone #, I can send that privately.

DJ