Professional Design Engineering Tools and Resources

Professional design engineering tools and resources like those from RS DesignSpark can help students, makers, and every level of professional design engineer improve their technical knowledge and boost their productivity.

Other online engineering tools popular with engineers include EEWeb for electrical and electronics engineers, Engineers Edge, The Engineering Toolbox, and My Engineering Tools for process engineers. In fact, there are so many online engineering tools available, finding the most useful one for you and your current project could take hours away from your design and development time. And that’s the last thing you need when you’re trying to streamline your learning and engineering tasks.

For greater efficiency, you need to know which tools align with your specific engineering discipline and project requirements. To help you understand the differences and quickly leverage the tools that can optimize your productivity, collaboration, and innovation, I’ve introduced each these offerings below.

RS DesignSpark

RS DesignSpark provides engineers with an extensive range of timely, relevant, and accurate technical resources, tutorials, and trainings in addition to design tools, information about more than a billion products, and an online community of over one million engineers that they can share ideas and knowledge with. It is one of the most feature-rich collections of professional design engineering tools and resources available today and is suitable for users spanning students and casual makers to professional engineers at every stage of their career. As part of its most recent evolution, RS DesignSpark launched three new subscription levels — DesignSpark Explorer, DesignSpark Creator, and DesignSpark Engineer — to provide members with an enhanced and increasingly personalized experience.

As part of its most recent evolution, RS DesignSpark launched three new subscription levels — DesignSpark Explorer, DesignSpark Creator, and DesignSpark Engineer — to provide members with an enhanced and increasingly personalized experience.

DesignSpark Explorer provides members with free access to the online engineering community and a comprehensive suite of design tools and product resources and can help students, makers, and professional design engineers alike quickly make the leap from concept to prototype. Standard features include educational content, public forums, and training resources like the Grass Roots Education series for beginners and early-career engineers and the Super Skills Masterclass series, which focuses on the skills needed to be a well-rounded engineer. DesignSpark Explorer members also have access to more than 100 million parts in 2D and 3D CAD libraries, a suite of design tools, and the newly expanded Product Design Center, which offers over one billion manufacturer part numbers and more than 40 different kinds of content, including product data, basic lifecycle and compliance data, 3D models, footprints, and schematics. Design tools include:

• The award-winning Design Spark PCB rapid-prototyping tool for circuit design, which is backed by prebuilt component libraries and tools to ensure error-free PCBs and allows users to create unlimited schematic sheets and PCB layer counts, export them to mechanical design software and SPICE simulators, create plots (e.g., Gerber, Excellon, drill) and reports (BOMs, generic netlists), and check and edit design rules.

• DesignSpark Mechanical, a direct modeler that enables the rapid prototyping or reverse engineering of any physical object and allows users to freely create and modify geometry even if they have no prior experience with 3D CAD software. Users are allowed unlimited projects and design size and access to pull, blend, fill, and combine tools for manipulating complex shapes and geometries. They can also generate a bill of materials (BOM), get quotes, import PCBs in IDF format, and leverage equation and constraint-based sketching tools and measurement and quality tools to check specifications including mass properties, draft angles, curvature, and deviation.

• DesignSpark Circuit Simulator, which provides a design, modeling, simulator, and analysis environment for electronic and mechatronic circuits and systems, including analog, digital, mixed-signal, and multi-domain systems, as well as access to partner-provided SPICE and VHDL-AMS models, unlimited public designs, and closed groups for collaboration.

All of these tools are simple and intuitive to learn and use and are well supported by tutorials and trainings, dedicated DesignSpark PCB and DesignSpark Mechanical forums, and how-to articles.

DesignSpark Creator provides members looking for even more advanced tools and resources with access to additional features for just $11.99 a month. Ideal for more serious makers, creators, and SMEs, it offers access to all Explorer-level tools and resources as well as enhanced versions of DesignSpark PCB, DesignSpark Mechanical, and the DesignSpark Circuit Simulator. It also reveals enhanced lifecycle data and parts risk assessment information in the Product Design Center.

• The Creator version of DesignSpark PCB additionally includes a BOM composer, integrated SnapEDA CAD library, and advanced design rule checking (DRC) (e.g., for undrilled pads and via-to-SMD pad distance).

• The Creator version of DesignSpark Mechanical additionally includes a 3D mirror tool, detailing tools for annotating parts and creating manufacturing drawings in compliance with JIS, ISO, and ANSI industry standards, cosmetic threads, and enhanced part libraries that provide further intelligence on component capabilities and status. It also allows users to reverse engineer solid models from 3D scanned mesh (e.g., STL), import and export STEP, IGES, and AutoCAD DWG and DXF formats, and edit 3D objects from drawing sheet views.

• The Creator version of DesignSpark Circuit Simulator also extends the simulator time limit from one minute to 60 minutes.

DesignSpark Engineer provides professional engineers with the most advanced tools and features. In particular, it significantly expands on DesignSpark PCB and adds comprehensive sustainable parts selection data to the Product Design Center, including export compliance data, product change notifications (PCN), end-of-life (EOL) notifications, and guidance on component alternatives, for $17.99 a month.

• The Engineer version of DesignSpark PCB additionally includes blind and buried vias, hierarchical schematic designs, differential pairs and buses (e.g., define, edit, and trunk routing), and variant manager, TestLands, and mechanical dimensions. It also offers a copper coverage report and an IPC-2581 output option.

RS DesignSpark is also on a mission to help engineers be a force for the positive, sustainable changes needed to help solve the world’s challenges. Its Activist Engineering platform has helped develop innovative open-source projects like the Environmental Sensor Development Kit (ESDK). This advanced open-source and cloud-connected platform (certified by OSHWA) makes it easy to prototype custom sensor-based solutions and is being used in multiple air quality improvement projects essential to environmental sustainability.

EEWeb

EEWeb offers free electrical and electronic engineering tools for engineers with all levels of experience. As soon as you land on their home page or Tools page, you’ll see that the site has nice, clear navigation to help you find what you need quickly. EEWeb also offers many of the same types of resources as DesignSpark, including forums and communities, design and component information, projects and videos, articles about the latest technology trends, and a range of calculators and schematic tools. The selections within each category just aren’t as extensive and some of their tools link to third-party sites, a few of which have since shut down.

Engineers Edge

Engineers Edge is another free online engineering tools site with a community forum that lets engineers ask questions and get advice from each other. The three main sections — Engineering Supplies & Bookstore, Engineering Design Forum, and Training Center Engineering — are easy to see and navigate to, but the tools and resources are only listed on the home page, and not in alphabetical order, which makes it harder to find the engineering tools and resources you need in a timely manner. Once you click through to what you’re looking for, though, the pages are better organized. For example, their Engineering, Design, and Manufacturing videos are grouped in alphabetical order by the general topic of interest. Overall, Engineers Edge offers a good amount of wide-ranging information. You just might have trouble finding what you need quickly.

The Engineering ToolBox

The Engineering Toolbox also offers free engineering tools and resources, and while there is no registration feature, there’s also no community interaction. Site navigation can be a little challenging since the resources on the home page aren’t in alphabetical order. But it has an alphabetized navigation menu and handy unit converters on the side of the home page that stay there no matter what page you navigate to, and that’s helpful.

This site seems especially useful for students, new engineers, and engineers looking to expand their knowledge and skillset. In addition, according to its privacy policy, it doesn’t collect information from site users, and I know that’s a consideration important to some folks.

My Engineering Tools

My Engineering Tools bills itself as an online handbook for process engineers, so there is no interactive community forum or registration required. This site offers a solid starting point for learning about topics that may not be part of your typical day-to-day work, but that you’re likely to come across at some point when designing or optimizing chemical, biochemical, or industrial processes, and it includes useful explanations, formulas, examples, and some Excel calculation tools. Basic topics are easy to navigate to, but finding the information you need on each of those topic pages is a little more challenging. In addition, some topics offer much more information than others.

Evolving as an Engineer

Good engineers are always learning and growing, and with online engineering tools like these and supplier partners like RS, you will never have to do it alone. The internet offers a wealth of resources for sharing ideas, collaborating, and asking for help and countless tools that can make you a better, more efficient, and more sustainable engineer. We just happen to think that RS DesignSpark is the best at helping engineers improve their efficiency, productivity, and design skills, and we know that it’s the most comprehensive and only growing more so every day, as we’re continually expanding our offering to provide peak support for engineers at all levels all over the world.

While you do have to register for full access to RS DesignSpark and it does now offer paid subscription options, DesignSpark Explorer provides students, makers, and early-career engineers with an abundant variety of free tools and resources. It also allows mid-level and experienced engineers to try all of our tools before opting into a subscription that offers more advanced capabilities and can save even more time in the learning and design stages.

In addition, if you ever have any questions, you can typically find answers on our Services and Resources page or Support Center. And if not, you can always contact a DesignSpark team member. RS DesignSpark isn’t just an RS Group side project, it’s an essential part of the world-class service and support that we provide the global industrial engineering community.

No matter which online engineering tools end up being most useful to you, use them, make a positive difference and never stop being inspired to continue the important work you contribute to the world.