From Shop Floor to Software : SolidWorks

SolidWorks World 2009 -- Day 1 & 2

Leslie_Gordon — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:22:00 GMT

According to CEO Jeff Ray, over 4,000 people are attending the SolidWorks World 2009 event being held in Orlando, Florida over the next few days. Although times are tough, that is not evident at this show. Attendees are upbeat and the theme "innovation" predominates. The Great Depression spawned nylon, car radios, and everyone's favorite -- SPAM. Today's big problems can be addressed by yet more innovative designs. Take for example modern windmills, which came out of a need for sustainable energy. Many people don't want them in their back yards and the devices are expensive. Still in the concept phase is a 3 to 4-ft tall windmill that would fit on a house rooftop and generate enough energy for the house. Another problem: many people in the world lack access to safe drinking water. A company has invented a device that bombards drinking water with UV light, cleaning the water without the use of chemicals or chlorine. Fifty of the devices are currently being deployed near N.Y.C., enough to fill the Empire State Bldg. eight times a day with water.

Sir Richard Branson spoke on the first day. For a guy worth billions of dollars, he is quite personable, humble, and has a wicked sense of humor. He has started another company -- Virgin Galactic Airways -- because he thinks commercial space aviation will become a reality. His suggestions for combatting a tough economy:

-- Expand out of it instead of contracting. If you can afford to, continue to innovate.
-- Before just laying people off explore the alternatives such as job sharing. There might be employees who would really appreciate only having to work a few days a week such as ones with small children.

Branson says America is quite protectionist, which translates to anti-innovative. "We must get rid of all the barriers in the world," he says. He is a big fan of Obama.

Day Two, Jon Hirshtick, the former CEO of SolidWorks, spoke on what he says will be the technologies most important in affecting CAD in the future:

-- Touch and motion UIs. A lot of industrial designers already use Wacon Tablets, like a big computerized drawcuesing pad that imports Photoshop files, and draw directly on them.
-- CAD will become a hardware business again in that more and more users will be using hardware specifically designed for CAD such as the 3D mouse.
-- Online applications will get even more prevelant. Already have an application on SolidWorks Labs (labs.solidworks.com) to create 2D drawings which can be accessed by many devices including cell phones.
-- Video gaming technology will get increasingly prevelant in CAD. Features such as ambient occlusion are already in CAD that have been borrowed from video games. Many graphic gards now have more transistors on them than CPUs.
-- 3D printing will become a key part of the design process and be used iteratively.

Other speakers mentioned how industrial design uses "styling cues" from other areas of society to get ideas for designs. Industrial designers choose a "form language" they are interested in for different products.

Check out smoothon.com for material that lets you rapidly mold things using, say, a 3D printed mold.

BoardCAD.com is a free download for making surface models for things like surfboards.

More than just user-centric, design nowadays must be desire-centric. This even applies to machine design which can borrow techniques from consumer design.

SolidWorks 2009, Barcelona, Spain

Leslie_Gordon — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:25:00 GMT

SolidWorks just held its annual Media event in Barcelona, Spain to showcase Version 9. The city is a pastel jewel full of palm trees, international travelers, and mind-blowing architecture by Gaudi. I took a stroll earlier on the boardwalk by the Mediterranean Sea. People here are quite sophisticated -- a topless beach nearby brought not one single stare. There are plenty of long-haired Spanish beauties, but to balance things out, there are also millions of buff young hulks.

Back to business....SolidWorks CEO Jeff Ray in his opening speech says in a global economy with new players such as India and China, the best products have a high quality, low manufacturing cost, new fuctionality, better performance, and high customer satisfaction.

He also explains that the recent company name change -- SolidWorks is now officially Dassault Systemes SolidWorks -- symbolizes a closer working relationship between the companies. Dassault can benefit from SolidWorks' strong reseller channel, and SolidWorks can benefit from Dassault 3D and PLM technology. Although SolidWorks and CATIA are each CAD programs, they target different markets, says Ray. "CATIA is big in aerospace and some automotive. You have to respect the way the customer does business," he says. "You can't get caught in the trap of believing your own bullshit or marketing hype."

Ray notes a convergence between gaming technology and design, so the company is buying a lot of gaming IP. The goal is customer satisfaction, and -- always -- profit. "Profit is an instantiation of the customer's belief in you," he says. Ray also says soon computing will be done "in the cloud," with programs such as SolidWorks online.

Probably one of the most interesting customer presentations was that of PAL Technology in Abu Dhabi. It has developed a humanoid robot that walks, talks, sits on chairs, holds a cup and pours coke in it, and the like. The robot also recognizes faces, self-localizes, and plans its path to avoid obstacles. Check out the robot

New surfacing mathematics

Leslie_Gordon — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 02:23:00 GMT

A few other things gleaned from SolidWorks 2008:

-- One conference theme was that of teaching kids engineering through robotics. Robotic contests mentioned included ROBOCON, FIRST, and ROBO Cup. Kids can use 3D ContentCentral, a free service on the SolidWorks Web site for locating, configuring, downloading, and requesting 3D parts and assemblies, 2D blocks, library features, and macros.

-- Tulane University has closed it Mechanical Engineering Department.

-- Check out Gliffy, a nifty drawing program that works on a hosted Web site.

SolidWorks CEO Jeff Ray says it would be good to apply Creative Commons to product design. CC defines everything between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved.

Today, CAD is all about design intent, not just geometry. Scott Harris, co-founder of SolidWorks says there are now new surfacing mathematics that are better than NURBS. There is said to be a new kernel in the works for CATIA. Basically, a kernel is software code that solves topology.

A last view from my hotel window shows why Ione might be tempted to move to San Diego!

Rules to design by...

Leslie_Gordon — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 23:01:00 GMT

Day Four, Live from SolidWorks World 2008

Don Norman spoke today on how to tie engineering and emotional design. He showed us an images of salt and pepper shakers as an example of bad design. They were burnished stainless steel. One shaker had a hole in the top, and the other shaker had five holes in the top. Norman asked the audience, "Which one is the salt shaker and which the pepper?" Answers were about 50/50 for both. His point: Each side had its good reasons why it picked one over the other. But in the final analysis, it doesn't matter what you think, but rather what the person that filled the things thinks!

Which is for salt and which for pepper?

So his rules to design by are:

1. Think about people. Put people in the designs that are part of the model so you can analyze things such as reach, limits, canter of balance to see if people can actually use the objects you design.

2. Make it usable. Examples of bad design come from common machine tools in machine shops. People have to be contortionists just to run the machines.

3. No signs. A product that needs signs on it is badly designed. People don't read signs anyway.

4. Make it beautiful. Make even things like forklifts beautiful. In a lot of ways, when it comes to design, LOOKS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN REALITY.

View from my hotel room.....

Conduit "creatures" that walk the beach

Leslie_Gordon — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:06:00 GMT

Day Three, live from SolidWorks World 2008:

Announced today at the opening session of the SolidWorks 2008 show was a new program called 3Dvia Composer -- formerly Seemage -- that Dassault recently purchased. It is a Web-based product that works with SolidWorks to deliver 3D content for non-engineering personnel such as marketing and sales.

A few customers highlighted in today's presentation include medical companies such as Still River Systems Inc, which makes proton therapy systems (used instead of the more-intrusive X-ray systems). The systems use particle-beam accelerators to fire electron in a precise manner towards tumors. Another one is Taga Innovations in Israel which designed a device called the "Rewalk." Quadriplegics can strap one on and walk for the first time in their lives.

Danny Forster from the Discovery Channel's Big it Builder show spoke on how as an architect he designs in nothing but 3D. One recent project was the Glenville Stadium in Arizona which has a retractable football field. This makes it easier to grow fresh grass on the field, as well as allows it to be used for activities other than football. In the past, stadiums were designed as a structure with the design then wrapped around it like wallpaper. It was decided that this building should look like a snake coiled on itself because of its desert surroundings and because the snake is the Patriots logo. So, the stadium was engineered as a hyperbolic curve bent in on itself.

But of all the presentations, the one that truly blew my mind was one from a kind of mad genius named Theo Jansen. He engineers "creatures" that live on the beach -- what he called "new forms of life not made of protein." The creatures' protein is cable conduit, while their "muscles" are conduit that pumps air into a soda bottle for reuse. "Nerve cells" made from inverters trigger the muscles. Three inverters make a dynamic system or a computer that is the beginnings of the brains of the animal. The creatures get their energy from the wind and do not have to compete for food. Jansen's vision is that they will eventually live on herds on the beach.

Check out this video of the incredible creatures.

A creature taking a nap

Big trends in the future of CAD

Leslie_Gordon — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 03:23:00 GMT

Day Two: Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks, says the show has so far drawn 4,400 attendees. In the future, he wants to see more sharing between DS technologies and SolidWorks. He says software developers cannot afford to "fall in love with their own technologies." Companies should never think that they own customers. Nobody does. Customers can pick whatever they want whenever they want. Ray also says Latin America is SolidWorks' fastest region of growth, even faster than China.

Also speaking was an electrical systems teacher at Long Beach Community College who has his pre-engineering students design submersible robots in SolidWorks and enter them in robotic competitions. He thinks that human-intensive manufacturing is rapidly disappearing, but we should not be all doom and gloom -- there are plenty of rich opportunities in automation. People are needed to design, build, and install robots, as well as maintain them, for example. He says a recent graduate who knows more than just one thing, say, mechanical, electrical, hydraulics, and pneumatics, have their pick of high-paying jobs.

Ex-CEO and one of the founders of SolidWorks, Jon Hirschtik gave an interesting look CAD's 50-year history. It all started in 1963 with Ivan Sutherland who wrote his M.I.T. thesis on "SketchPad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System." Back then, he even discussed the idea of doing structural analysis in CAD and applying constraints to models -- unheard of at the time. Hirschtik says the 1070's brought 3D modeling research at Cambridge University. Research in using B-reps as the basis of CAD was underway. And Alan Grayer and Charles Lang helped write the ACIS and Parasolid kernels. The name "ACIS" came from its developers' initials: Alan Charles Ivan System. The 1970's also brought some of the first commercial applications such as Computer Vision, Cadam, and Applicon, and a Unigraphics CAD-CAM system called "The Total Solution." By the 1980's, second-generation CAD was coming along with CATIA in 1981, AutoCAD in 1983, and Pro/Engineer in 1987. SolidWorks was developed in 1993, and since that time, there have been 16 major releases.

Hirschtik also discussed what he thinks are the big trends in the future of CAD:

Hosted computing -- Applications run on Web sites, not on PCs. Only the Web browser runs locally. This is already being done extensively in other areas (e-mail, online banking, and Google Docs).

Open source -- The source code is open for anyone to change. If they do change it, they must implement the changes in the original code. Current examples include Linux, Apache, MySQL, OpenOffice, Firefox, and Apache.

Video game technology -- Graphics quality, 3D user interfaces, and physical simulations are all things that CAD will exploit more and more in the future.

Touch Interfaces -- Already big with the iPhone, Wii, and 3-axis mouse.

3D printing -- Can only get bigger in the future.

Live from SolidWorks World 2008

Leslie_Gordon — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:19:00 GMT

Day 1:

Saturday Jan 19
This year's event is being held in San Diego, Calif., a city I have not visited before. I've heard many stories about its beauty, especially the colored neon lights lining the top edges of highrise buildings. An 11 pm taxi ride from the airport to the hotel showed off the cityscape at night, and the view is as neat and colorful as was described. I'm sure daylight will bring even more delights.

The next few days should be interesting. A bit unusually, the conference starts on a Sunday. Event materials say that keynote speakers will discuss topics ranging from "human-centered design" to "the design of submersible cameras." A Product Design Showcase will display more than 200 SolidWorks-designed products, with many of the designers on-site to explain the problems they solved in the course of their designs.

And, a SolidWorks Block Party is to be held one evening. It should be great: The company cordoned off part of the waterfront district for a private party for all event attendees. A flyer promises "unlimited food and drinks... live music...pool halls... nightclubs... and plenty of surprises..." Hmmmmmm!!

Do more design online, free

Leslie_Gordon — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 15:16:00 GMT

Web-based programs, downloadable software, and virtual worlds are now letting us do more and more, and all without shelling out a dime. For example, Web-based software such as Autodesk's Project Draw lets you create vector drawings for floor plans, electronic-cirtuit diagrams, user interface mockups, and the like. An intuitive interface makes using the drawing program a breeze. Just drag rectangles, ovals, and the like onto the workspace and use handles to strech and pull shapes. You can save your work in several editable formats on your server or the developer's. Export your diagrams as PDFs, JPGs, PNGs, and SVGs. At the bottom of this post is an example of a simple drawing I created in the software, which I saved on my local machine as a JPG.

SolidWorks Labs has a link to the developer's island on Second Life. I am still stuck on dial-up at home (yes, yikes!) and our company firewall won't let us interact with Second Life at work, so I can't yet explore this as much as I would like. I am ready though. My avatar's name is Pez Balut, and I am just about to purchase land so I can have a presence in the World. Are any of you active users of Second Life? If so, what do you think? Just email me or reply to this blog.

A nifty software package, available for free download is IBM Lotus Symphony. It's based on the Open Document Format (ODF) standard, so you're not locked into upgrades, proprietary file formats, and software licensing agreements. Included in the package are programs to create documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. I haven't tried the ones for presentations and spreadsheets, but the word processor is great. It has a clean, elegant, and easy-to-use UI. The software looks like Word, but better, and it works in a similar fashion.