Grabcad Workbench (Beta): Browser-Based Project Management and Collaboration App
Grabcad, cofounded by Hardi Meybaum, is best known as an online community, a popular destination for like-minded designers and engineers to share their models and collect feedback. With an emphasis on friendship and professional networking, Grabcad has so far been more social than commercial. But that’s about to change.
Grabcad’s new product Workbench (currently in Beta) is a cloud-hosted, browser-based project management and collaboration application. No installation, no download, no thin client. Once you’re logged in, you’ll find yourself in the project hub with a list of files managed in Workbench and the latest notifications. Continue reading
Leave a comment
Dassault Debuts HT Body For High-Tech Electronics Design
No longer considered mainly a utilitarian device, consumers are actively engaged in a love affair with their electronics gear, upping the ante for product development teams now tasked with creating seductive designs on top of the traditional engineering challenges.
Call that an opening for Dassault Systemes, which is aggressively trying to promote its wide and varied 3D design, digital mockup, and PLM tools under its 3DEXPERIENCE umbrella into integrated solutions for specific industries. The latest in Dassault’s string of such offerings is HT Body, a broad-reaching platform aimed at engineers and designers in the electronics manufacturing sector and with a specific focus on the enclosures and chassis that are the most obvious hallmark of such devices. Continue reading
Leave a comment
Cloud-Hosted STEP File Storage with MyCadbox
What would a version of Dropbox customized for CAD users be like? It would probably look like MyCadbox, a cloud-hosted virtual storage space for STEP files. The online product comes from the same company that developed and released CadFaster, a viewing and markup program for CAD users. Like CadFaster, MyCadbox is three complementary offerings — a private storage online, a desktop client app, and a mobile app — that form a single product. Continue reading
Prelude to GTC: GPU-Based Rendering Speeds Up Visualization
Matthew Gueller chuckled when I asked him if he does rendering, as if to say, “Do you even need to ask?”
Being a professional visualization artist and surface designer, Matthew sees a large chunk of his time consumed by rendering. “Some of the images we have to render — they’re one-to-one ratio, at 72 DPI poster resolution — can take up to 16 hours to finish,” he noted. “Lots of materials involved, large data sets — they’re very CPU-intense.” Continue reading
Leave a comment
Prelude to GTC 2013: GPUs Are Not Just for Pretty Visuals
The GPU was initially conceived as a device to boost visualization, but it has evolved so much beyond its origin that the term graphics processor seems like a misnomer. Today, GPUs are a big part of parallel computing, also called high-performance computing (HPC). They’re fueling large-scale simulation, analysis, and number crunching in scientific research, space exploration, weather prediction, and more. At the upcoming GPU Technology Conference (GTC), NVIDIA plans to expose many other use of the GPU beside producing pretty visuals with dense pixels. (Note: DE is a media partner of GTC.) Continue reading
Leave a comment