People here often go talking about CAD of the non-cardboard kind, but I haven’t seen anything online for any good looking CAD software. I know it’s possible to build a robot without, but it seems like it would be useful. I’m new here, still building my first robot (which I’ve just given a new theming idea internally).
Definitely isn’t a requirement, you can do building with pen and paper design or cardboard prototyping for sure.
Probably the most popular desktop CAD software in the is fusion 360.
Web based onshape does the job, If you want something simpler then tinkercad is a way to get started.
All have lots of good YouTube tutorials to get you started.
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Fusion 360 is what I use but I started with tinkercad but quickly found it wasn’t powerful enough. I took me a bit of time but fusion 360 is the way to go
I should probably say my budget is… £0. I’m also looking for something that’ll run on the chromebook I got from my school.
All the softwares mentioned before have a free version. For Fusion it is the personal/hobbyist license (non commercial use and limits a few of the rarely used features), Onshape is free for non-commercial use and Iirc tinker cad only has one version as it is web based and that is free. I think they should all also run on a chromebook although Fusion 360 might struggle with more detailed designs/larger assemblies.
If you can up that budget from £0 to £9/mo you can get solidworks which is the supreme option but perhaps not the most friendly for a kid or someone just starting out.
Fusion 360 is super strong and is probably the most intuitive software with any respectable engineering capacity.
It might be worth looking at educational licences as Autodesk have always been pretty good for that. I milked a student license copy of Inventor for a good decade before they cracked down and asked to see proof of enrollment.
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