Coming attractions from Desktop Engineering:

April 2010 issue (sent to printer last week)

• On the cover, racing towards better performance in cd-adapco’s STAR-CCM+ v4.06
• Special visualization supplement
• DEM Solution’s EDEM, how it helps an asphalt manufacturer design a better dryer
• Anark Core 3.0, for collaborative product development

In May 2010 issue (currently in development)

• Rapid manufacturing machines, just in time for Society of Manufacturing Engineers’ Rapid Conference and Expo
• Geomagic cofounder and CEO Ping Fu’s commentary on extracting design intent from scan data
• Review of Lenovo ThinkStation D20
• New section on mechatronics, embedded systems, and sensors
• Predictive Engineering’s use of Femap with NX Nastran

Lenovo ThinkStation D20 review, coming in May 2010 issue

At Virtual Desktop

• FIRST Robotic Team 2220, Blue Twilight, from Eagan Highschool, Minnesota, discovers 3D printing with Solido’s help
• Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology 2, features for sheet metal and stress analysis
• MSC Software’s Patran 2010
• SmartGeometry Conference and Workshop in Barcelona, Spain

For more details, listen to the podcast above (6.5 mins)

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Left to right: Alan Belniak, PTC's social media director, Sandy Joung, PTC's senior director of product marketing, and Brian Shepherd, PTC's executive vice president of product development.

PTC Windchill ProductPoint, a product development platform with many features commonly found in social media.

Some hardcore engineers may cringe at the mere mention of Facebook or Twitter. Others may admit to browsing YouTube for snippets of TV shows and animals doing tricks once in a while, but can’t see a purpose for it in professional life.

But PTC, known for Pro/ENGINEER CAD software and Windchill product lifecycle management (PLM) platform, is fully embracing social media. The company believes this teenager-inspired phenomenon has a legitimate place, not only in its own customer outreach initiatives and recruitment efforts but also in the product development cycle of its own customers. So much does PTC believe in social media that it recently appointed someone as its social media director.

Last year, at its annual user conference, PTC User World Event 2009, the company unveiled a new offering called Windchill ProductPoint. Based on Microsoft SharePoint, it incorporates WiKi-creation, model sharing, presence detection, instant messaging, and many features found in social media platforms. It is the offspring of PTC’s vision called “social product development.”

In this podcast (roughly 16 mins), Alan Belniak, PTC’s newly hired social media director, Sandy Joung, PTC’s senior director of product marketing, and Brian Shepherd, PTC’s executive vice president of product development, discuss what social means to them and why they’re banking on it.

• PTC’s Social Product Development blog
• PTC on Facebook
• PTC’s social media director @abelniak on Twitter

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CEI's enSight CFD 2.0 now runs as native application in Mac Cocoa.

Symscape's Caedium supports Mac OS (Leopard and Snow Leopard) for the first time.

At Macworld 2010 (Moscone Center, San Francisco, California), amidst a sea of iPod skins and audiovisual gadgets, it was all too easy to overlook the lone analysis software developer CEI, right across the aisle from The New York Times. While the respected newspaper was vociferously peddling subscriptions of its digital edition (to be delivered on Apple’s newly launched iPad), CEI demonstrated volume rendering, a new feature now available in its EnSight CFD 2.0 software.

EnSight is described as a “visualization solution for your structural analysis problems, including thermal, vibration, acoustic, and mechanical … a complete post-processing and visualization product for CFD (computational fluid dynamics), FEA (finite element analysis), FSI (fluid-structure interaction), and engineering data.”

Commercial versions are available in Lite, CFD, Standard, and Gold editions (for a comparison of features, study this chart from CEI). According to the company’s blog, Ensight CFD 2.0 and later versions will be made available in native Mac Cocoa graphical user interface (”A Native Cocoa Mac GUI? Really?” Dec. 4, 2009). This paves the way for CEI’s other products (Lite, Standard, and Gold) currently on X11 (X Window System) to follow suit eventually. Newer versions running natively in Cocoa environment are expected to make better use of Mac OS features.

Along with the new version, the company is releasing a free trial version of EnSight with some limitations. For example, the free version won’t read all file formats, and produces results with a watermark. Volume rendering, however, is available in both the free version and the paid version.

A few weeks after Macworld wrapped up, Symscape, which declares “affordable computer-aided engineering software” as its mission, released Caedium v2.1, the first version with Mac support. Previous versions support Windows and Linux; the latest version adds Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard) to the list.

The Mac Appeal
Darin McKinnis, CEI’s VP or marketing, said, “The appeal of the Mac platform is partially based on the fact that it offers the combination of a large commercial software library and the good technical underpinnings in the kernel. The commercial software library includes MS Office … Adobe products … and Apple applications … The UNIX environment with shells, X11 (X Window System), etc. makes Linux/Unix appealing to the technical development community.

“Whereas with Windows, it’s more difficult to replicate that Unix/Linux environment. So if customers are demanding Unix or Linux as an option, there will not be that much difficulty also in supporting the Mac … a segment of the market will be looking for that. Some of this also seems to be driven by the academic markets need for laptops and mobility — engineering and scientific academics are much more likely to use Macs than the typical desktop bound worker

“Another appeal is the platform’s strengths in consistency of applications written for it. Since printing, fonts, PDF creation, and other mainstays of modern computing are part of the built-in experience of using a Mac, it’s much easier to adopt new Mac applications for your workflow. This also makes it easier to develop applications on the Mac. And features like CoverFlow, Xgrid, etc. make it easier to make applications that are intuitive and engaging for the customer.”

Newton’s Apple in Research and Academia
“One advantage the Mac has over the Windows,” noted Richard Smith from Symscape, “is the relatively stable and limited range of machine/software specs, which makes for an easier software porting and testing cycle … Caedium’s architecture was carefully designed to be cross-platform right from its initial beginnings. The main concerns for a cross-platform product are the GUI and the 3D visualization … Also the Mac has a strong following in academia, which is an important market for Caedium.”

CEI’s McKinnis said his firm started supporting Mac in 2003 because of the release of OS X in 2000. According to him, “That finally gave Apple the robust Unix/Linux underpinning that seemed to really drive a lot of support. We also had the good fortune to hire a young developer who had a passion for the Mac … [Furthermore,] we had long supported Unix and Linux and we were starting to get requests from customers in the academic and government CAE market asking for a Mac version.”

McKinnis may have been personally responsible for the development of Mac-supported Caedium, because he “graciously donated a Mac [to Symscape] for porting,” recalled Smith. Similar products available for Mac include Tecplot (for CFD post-processing) and Pointwise (for meshing and grid).

One research organization that once placed a bet on the Mac platform for analysis was NASA Langley Research Center, which developed a tetrahedral unstructured software system, known by the abbreviation TetrUSS. According to its creators, the software is “a time-tested computational aerodynamic capability servicing the configuration aerodynamic needs of NASA’s airframe and exploration programs.”

It was named NASA Software of the Year in 1996 and 2004. It also grabbed the Best Apple Design Award for Scientific Computing Solution in 2004. But the staleness of the product’s home page suggests R&D resources once devoted to the software may have been diverted elsewhere. Site log indicates it hasn’t been updated since August 2006.

Recently, at SolidWorks World 2010, SolidWorks made waves (perhaps more than it intended to) by revealing R&D efforts in progress to explore Mac support. But contradictory statements from company officials make it nearly impossible to assess SolidWorks’ true commitment to the Mac platform. (Read “SolidWorks: Exploring Mac OS But No Timetable For Delivery,” Feb. 23, 2010.)

Most high-end analysis and simulation software product — such as those from MSC Software, NEi, and cd-adapco — remain almost exclusively on Windows. But renewed interest in Mac, as illustrated by the releases of CEI’s EnSight CFD 2.0 and Symscape’s Caedium, suggests at least some developers think the platform is worth a second look.

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Terry Swack, CEO of Sustainable Minds, points out to design something to be compliant with environmental regulations means it is "barely legal," not the same as designing a product to be more environmentally sustainable.

Terry Swack, cofounder and CEO of Sustainable Minds, likes to point out, “There’s no such thing as a green product — only greener products.” All products, she explains, uses energy, requires raw materials, and produces impacts on the environment, so they cannot be wholly green, but some products are greener than others by comparison.

Swack also distinguishes between designing something for compliance and designing something to be environment-friendly. To borrow a phrase from the building and construction industry, to design something for compliance, or to design it to meet the requirements and standards of the industry and region, is to be “barely legal.” But to design or redesign a product to be truly sustainable is to innovate.

Traditionally, a product’s bill of materials (BOM) encompasses raw materials, part numbers, supplier information, and other items needed to manufacture the part — “cradle to gate,” as Swack puts it. But to design sustainable products, Swack encourages engineers to consider system BOM, encompassing a product’s entire lifecycle — “cradle to grave or cradle to cradle.”

That means taking into account not only raw materials and part numbers but also the energy required to acquire and transport the materials, the pollution that might come from the manufacturing process, and end-of-life treatment (Can the product be recycled? If not, what’s its impact when it’s disposed in a landfill?).

Sustainable Minds is a founding partner of the Design and Sustainability Symposium, a regular feature of the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software (COFES). Swack and COFES organizers will be at the symposium to continue the discussion on lifecycle assessment (LCA) and its implications. They invite you to share your ideas.

For more, listen to the podcast with Swack below (roughly 10 mins).

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Christopher Boothroyd, CEO of AfterCAD, was cutting it close, to say the least. A day ago, as he headed out to the airport for San Francisco, he and his colleague Kenney Wong (not the same as this blogger) were still troubleshooting the interactive application he was planning to debut at Game Developers Conference (March 9-13, San Francisco, CA).

The application, dubbed Immersion, is in Alpha code, not even Beta, so it’s bound to be unpredictable. Today, while he was demonstrating it to me on his laptop at JW Marriott hotel, his screen went dark. To his relief, the cause of the mishap turned out to be low battery, not the software.

Still, during his presentation and during my own independent testing, the code exhibited shortcomings inevitable in Alpha release. At times, Immersion was slow to respond to mouse commands. Depending on the number of simultaneous users interacting with the scene online (which could make for a dizzying experience), it might stall or take a long time to load. Boothroyd and his team would need to figure out the right number of users they should accommodate for each collaborative navigation session. He thinks it might be between 5-10.

Immersion, delivered in the form of a Facebook application, is made possible by a combination of technologies. In the company’s home page, Boothroyd explains, “This is accomplished by the combination of server- and client-side rendering with client-side Ajax UI coding and differs in the approach taken by Onlive, OTOY, and other PC-Over-IP efforts: there is no client-side application to install; it simply works immediately in the web browser …”

Boothroyd calls Immersion “zero-wait state 3D,” meaning your interactive 3D experience begins the moment you land on the hosted data in your browser. As we tested out the application at his hotel, we were accessing 3D data and software hosted remotely somewhere in a server in Vancouver, Canada, he explained.

Immersion is also powered by Unity, a game development technology provider. This allows you to drag and toss 3D objects within the scene and — perhaps the most entertaining part for those of us with a destructive streak — watch them collide into one another.

Boothroyd’s company recently struck a partnership with Open Design Alliance (ODA), whereby ODA members will be given the option to license AfterCAD’s Renderjam web-based visualization platform. Since ODA members include several major CAD and PLM software developers, it opens doors to browser-based CAD viewing solutions. Furthermore, it also suggests the possibility of developing 3D experiences that combine professional purposes and entertainment purposes, delivered online, on demand.

To try out Immersion, visit this link:

For more, watch the video clip below:

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Jon Peddie from Jon Peddie Research (www.jonpeddie.com) shares his thoughts on cloud computing. He is scheduled to give a presentation on the same topic at the upcoming COFES 2010.

Jon Peddie from Jon Peddie Research (JPR) thinks our current way of keeping up with technology — cyclical hardware updates to make sure we can run the latest software releases — is doomed. He predicts, in the future, we would draw as much — or as little — computing power as we need from the cloud, much in the same we we draw electricity from the grid today. The basic premise of his argument makes sense to me. After all, we don’t go out and buy a new generator whenever we need more power. In fact, we don’t — well, most of us don’t, at any rate — own generators; we just pay our local provider for the volume we use. That, in essence, is his argument in favor of cloud computing.

Peddie is scheduled to give a presentation about the topic at The Congress on the Future of Engineering Software 2010 (COFES, Scottsdale, Arizona, April 15-18). He invites you to bring your own theories in favor — or against — cloud computing.

“Bring your arguments and an open mind — thinking allowed,” he said. He would like to humbly request that you refrain from bringing tomatoes and eggs to throw at him.

For more on his thoughts, listen to our conversation here (roughly 10 mins long), the first in a series of podcasts with COFES presenters.

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FIRST Robotic Team 2220: Blue Twilight is refining its robot to enable it to grab onto the central tower and dangle there for additional points.

The robot was designed in PTC's Pro/ENGINEER.

Team members figuring out how to attatch the gate latch to the robot.

In February, First Robotic Team 2220, dubbed Blue Twilight, discovered that their robot had a knee problem.

Ed Anderson, one of the team’s mentors, summed up the issues:

• The knee joint absorbed too much energy.
• The use of a pneumatic piston as primary energy source was inadequate to deliver a powerful enough kick in the first place.

So Blue Twilight settled instead on a simple pivot kicker, powered by elastic tubing. “The tubing gets energized by the pneumatics,” explained Ed. ”

The other issue was  the piston placement. “Our first choice of an anchor point for the piston was nixed because it turned out that the [sub-team designing the lifter] needed to mount their motor right there,” explained Ed. “Our second choice turned out to be suboptimal because mounting it there would have required the drive [sub-team working on the drive train] to disassemble and reassemble their two gearboxes [a procedure estimated to take four hours].”

Eventually, the team attached the piston to a point below the frame. “Once again, Pro/ENGINEER [the team's primary CAD package] helped us zero in on the correct mount point and shim size,” noted Ed.

Next came the challenge to activate the gate latch trigger. “The stock latch had a very short handle that, when under pressure, was very difficult to trip,” noted Ed. “We found that bolting a six-inch strip of metal to it (a lever, in other words) decreased the force necessary to move the latch. Unfortunately, the handle was weak at the bolt points, and actually broke during the test. Alex [Ed's son and the team's designated CAD designer] had to [draw in Pro/ENGINEER] a whole new latch … with a longer handle, with more material around the stress points, and thicker.”

The initial idea to use a motor or solenoid to open the gate latch and kick the ball was also modified. “We quickly realized that, when pressurized, it was going to take far more force to open than a small motor or solenoid would be able to deliver,” Ed said. “We were already using pneumatics to load the kicker; why not use another piston to trip the latch? Again, the location of this piston would be a challenge. It had to be in proximity to the gate latch, but out of the path of travel of the top bar. Pro/ENGINEER showed that we could build a small shelf over the mechanism that would be ideal.”

Alex outlined other design modifications prompted by the tests and discoveries:

• The lift group’s original hook to grab the bar on the tower to [let the robot] lift [itself] up was made from a square beam. [This self-lifting move, if executed during contest, helps the team score additional points.] They decided instead to forge a curved question mark-shaped hook in order to hopefully prevent the robot from slipping off the hook.
• The bars along the top of the robot are there in order to allow other robots to hang off of them [another move that helps score points]; when [the team] tested it, it was able to lift two 150-pound students.
• After testing the kicking mechanism, which is powered by bungees and reset and triggered with pneumatic pistons, [the team] realized that it was a potential hazard, so [students] created a safety device, which a team member can slip on between the frame and the foot.  This prevents it from accidentally kicking someone.

On February 20, Blue Twilight hosted a mini-regional involving more than 40 teams. “The concession stand was open and bustling all day,” the team recorded in its official blog. “The mothers of our team members volunteering to run it. Music was kindly provided by Duc, a previous member of team 2220.”

The matches typically start with a 15-second autonomous found, a phase in which robots must move strictly by the programmers’ code. This was followed by the teleoperated period, the phase in which human drivers control the robots using  joysticks. In the last 20 seconds, the robots could score extra points by hanging from the tower, which Team 2220 was able to do. The short video clip below, provided by Ed Anderson, shows the thrilling moments in the mini-regional.

For more on Blue Twilight, read the following posts:

• Introducing Blue Twilight: Team 2220
• Twilight Robotic Adventures: Kick Off!

This month, with 3D printer developer Solido’s help, the team is creating physical prototypes of some of the critical parts in the machine.

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CADdepot in transition, poised to return as an online mall for CAD

CADdepot.com, a shareware site, is about to become an online storefront for about 500 CAD titles.

The new site, dubbed The CAD Super Store, will list “a wealth of products that will be of interest to the CAD, CAM [computer-aided manufacturing], and CAE [computer-aided engineering] community, including not only major CAD products, but many useful utilities, translators, viewers, and much more,” announces TenLinks.com, which acquired CADdepot.com in April 2000 and continued to run it.

CADdepot.com was founded by David Whynot (yes, that’s his real name), who described himself as a “a utility pack rat” in an interview. He has since moved on, but CAD depot lived on as part of TenLinks media network.

Roopinder Tara, CEO and founder of TenLinks.com, reveals the new online store sprung from what used to be CADdepot.com. He plans to offer “products, subscriptions, and eventually services.” TenLinks.com currently offers CAD design and translation services through Innovate3D.

“Much in the same way we bring CAD, CAM, and CAE information to the user with our other sites [CADdigest.com, CADtalent.com, and FreeCAD.com, among others], we will also bring really great programs, utilities … sometimes lifesavers to the users,” said Tara. “Our goal is have a ‘mall’ for software so users don’t have to go all over the Internet”

He confirms that IMSI/Design, creators of TurboCAD and DoubleCAD XT, has already signed on, along with other well-known publishers.

Major publishers like Autodesk, SolidWorks, Siemens PLM Software, and PTC rely primarily on authorized resellers to sell and support their titles, but the success of online stores like Novedge proves it’s possible to reach new markets through the web.

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Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology 2 challenges common assumptions about direct modeling.

The cartwheel control lets you move or rotate faces and features with precision in any direction, at any angle.

I’m probably going to ruffle a few feathers with this observation, but I believe it’s backed by experience, yours and mine.

In general, a history-based parametric program is not ideal for concept exploration. In the design phase where you’re toying with various shapes, experimenting with numerous parameters, a CAD program’s parametric history is more a limitation than an enabler. A feature history is like a stack of dominoes, each one sitting on top of another. Every time you execute a change that violates the hierarchy of steps, you risk a regeneration failure.

So, over time, you learn to use CAD to draw with precision, to build your geometry with careful consideration. If you’re still pursuing competing ideas and don’t know how your design will look like in the end, you’re much better off using a 3D modeler that lets you build, break, and rebuild your geometry with reckless abandon (for example, Google SketchUp or bonzai3d from Autodessys).

But Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology (ST) may be an exception.

Common Arguments Against Direct Modeling Don’t Hold Water with ST
Up to this point, all my coverage of ST has been second-hand accounts: I wrote about the demonstrations and presentations I’d seen; I’d never had the chance to use the software personally. Last week, courtesy of Siemens PLM Software, I received a trial copy of the software.

Years of tech reporting makes me allergic to marketing slogans. I take into account the possibility that a technology works flawlessly during a demo only because the presenters have used sleight-of-hand tricks to impress me over WebEx. But having used Solid Edge with ST, I can wholeheartedly agree with Siemens’ claim that it “combines the best of constraint-driven techniques with direct modeling.”

Live Rules let you maintain or suspend geometric relationships while you edit.

Though the software encourages you to shape your geometry directly by pushing, pulling, and rotating faces and features, it also catalogs the features (holes, protrusions, rounds, blends, and so on) in your part.  Should you choose to go back to any of them and readjust the parameter or position (say, the placement and radius of a hole), you can simply double-click on that feature to launch the control handles (shaped like a cartwheel with pointers).

Unlike the features in a history-based parametric modeler, ST features are not order-dependent, so you can make changes to any of these features in any order. One of the commonly used arguments against direct modeling is that it’s impossible to modify your design after the fact because you created the geometry on the fly. This argument simply isn’t valid with Solid Edge with ST.

Nor can you employ the other frequently used argument that direct modelers don’t let you preserve design intent. If, by design intent, you mean the geometric relationships (the hole must remain fixed to the center of an outer arc, the inner wall must remain parallel to the outer edges, and so on), you’ll find that ST’s Live Rules can manage and maintain these associations just as well as any history-based parametric modeler.

Furthermore, you’ll be able to do something in ST that’s not so easy to do in a traditional CAD program: you can temporarily suspend some or all of these geometric relationships (for example, execute a change on only one side of a mirrored feature without affecting the opposite side).

With Solid Edge with ST, you’re encouraged to take a different approach to modeling. Unencumbered by history, you could freely use features (holes, bosses, thin walls, and so on) as place-holder objects while you explore design options. The ease with which you can modify your geometry makes it a better environment to innovate, not just document ideas.

As I dive deeper into the advanced features in Solid Edge with ST2, I’ll have more to say. For now, here’s a video review of the basics I discovered:

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Graebert's ARES for Mac (shown here with a geospatial file) is set to become available in the second quarter of the year.

Mac fans hoping for a version of SolidWorks that runs on their favorite machines will have to wait indefinitely (read “SolidWorks: Exploring Mac OS But No Timetable For Delivery,” Feb 23, 2010), but a new 2D drafting and drawing product may satisfy those looking for an AutoCAD- or AutoCAD LT-lookalike for Mac soon.

Earlier this month, just in time for Macworld 2010, German developer Graebert released ARES, a new product based on Open Design Alliance’s DWG-compatible technology. Though the software is currently available only for Windows, Mac and Linux versions are now in beta and expected to ship in the second quarter of this year.

With support for nearly 400 AutoCAD commands, popular programming languages, external tables, and block libraries, ARES offers AutoCAD users a familiar environment for 2D drawing. Spline tools let them create complex, editable objects. Customizable gradients and hatches, dimensioning tools, and DWG import/export features round out ARES.

ARES (named after the Greek god of war) comes in two editions: Standard ($495) and Commander ($995). Though it doesn’t offer the more advanced features found in AutoCAD (such as free-form modeling and direct link to 3D printing service providers), ARES could challenge AutoCAD’s dominance as an alternative that costs significantly less.

Along with Graebert’s ARES, IMSI/Design’s DoubleCAD XT and ZWSoft’s ZWCAD are also descending on the market long held by AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT. For more, watch the video review of ARES (standard version) below.

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