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Those that know me understand that my path to becoming an FFL came from my fascination with the mechanical and electrical world (where I started my career in the military as an Airborne Electronic Warfare technician). In the past, I've used 3D tools like Autodesk Inventor and now 123D Design to make mechanical designs that can be 3D printed (have my own 3D printer coming in December!).

The Autodesk 123D team just announced the 123D Circuits simulator, which will let you design your own PCB layouts and run simulations on Ardiono emulation setups. It's a great way to tinker with electronic control systems, if that tickles your fancy!

More than 20 years ago I used AutoCad and Generic CAD (before autodesk bought them to eliminate the competition) but it's been so long now that I am not sure I could start the program much less find the 5.25" floppies. And no reason to use CAD now.

Kind of funny, after my time as a Technical Support Engineer for the phone company, I was selected as an instructor/course developer at Bellcore Technical Education Center in Lisle IL. As "course developers" we were supposed to "blue line" (write down a synopsis of the material and describe graphics in words) and submit it to the "course designers" who would work up a rough draft and submit it, at which point we would "blue pencil" it and send it back for revisions.

This was not always an easy task, as the course designers did not necessarily have the telecomm knowledge necessary to even understand what they were writing about, and going back and correcting numerous revisions could be so tedious that inevitably mistakes crept through that were always caught by "gotcha" students.

Describing the function of an "Add/Drop Multiplexer" in a "self healing ring" is tough enough, but describing what to draw to represent a series of pictures showing the functionality is darn near impossible. So I wrote my own text and submitted it to course design so they could review it for formatting and such, and did my own graphics.

I was asked, by the boss of the CD group, how I got such crisp and colorful graphics and how I accomplished the multiple layers necessary to show the steps in some processes.

"Simple" I told him "I just draw the graphics in my CAD program, and port them into an intermediate software package that can read the draw files and convert them into graphics to insert into PowerPoint." He wandered away mumbling to himself about geeky techies.

Not my last use of CAD, as I became a Technical Support Engineer again for a while after that, but that was the most fun.

I learned CAD in the mid 1980's and promptly forgot it.

I learned Autodesk Inventor in 2003 and used it for while at work.

Work switched to SolidWorks in 2006 and the transfer from Inventor to SolidWorks was fairly simple. I still use SolidWorks at work but I am not as involved in it as I was a few years ago since I have moved to management. I like SolidWorks, it was used to do everything from design, to prototyping, to creating work instrucitons. Inventor has some tools that work better and SolidWorks has some tools that work better - I could use either and be happy.

I haven't heard about 123Design, I need to look it up and see what it can do. I would like to have Inventor or SolidWorks for personal use, but the cost is just too great so I only use it for work (or work on personal projects after work).

Thanks for the tip.