I received an excited email from Autodesk last week, offering to share some news under embargo. What was the news? A new Autodesk logo. I wondered, why does this matter? What does it have to do with delivering value to customers. Here’s what Autodesk’s Chris Bradshaw has to say on the corporate blog: “The new Autodesk […]
Simulation for medical devices
It’s no surprise that simulation is becoming more mainstream. Advances in technology, plus better integration with CAD software make that a foregone conclusion. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been seeing an increased number of submissions accompanied by simulation data. That sounds good on its face, but what if the simulation data is […]
50 Years of CAD
by Evan Yares, Senior Editor & Analyst, Software The first CAD system was created in the early 1960s. Modern CAD programs have never caught up. In January, 1963, Ivan Sutherland, a PhD candidate at MIT, submitted his thesis, titled “Sketchpad: a man-machine graphical communication system,” describing his work in creating what is now recognized as…
Meshing 101 – The Basics of CAE Meshing
Meshing for FEA and CFD is simple: Just start with your CAD model, break it up into a bunch of small pieces, and you’re all set to go. Provided, of course, that you don’t mind getting totally bogus analysis results. It’s more fair to say that the general concepts of meshing are simple, but that…
Cyber-Physical Systems: A call to action
NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has just published a trio of reports on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). “CPS go well beyond today’s ‘embedded systems,’ which are largely task-specific machines that operate under computer control. Anticipated CPS uses such as intelligent vehicles and highways and next-generation air transportation will be significantly more ambitious, diverse […]
CATIA’s latest design win: The Iranian F-313 stealth fighter
A few days ago, Iran announced a new indigenous stealth fighter: the Qahar 313. Theaviationist.com has covered the plane in quite a bit of depth. The prototype of the F-313 was presented to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then displayed publicly. The FARS News Agency provided a large number of photos of the jet, showing many […]
SolidWorks 2014: No obvious surprises
There was a time, years back, when SolidWorks users complained because the annual updates of the software included so many major new capabilities that it was hard to keep up. SolidWorks is a mature product now, and the pace of adding major new capabilities has slowed down quite a bit. Now the big emphases with […]
The roots of CAD, part 2: The design process
In 1959, Douglas Ross, Steven Coons, and John Ward, along with their colleagues, started the MIT Computer-Aided Design Project, and planted the seeds that grew to define modern CAD. At the 1963 Spring Joint Computer Conference, Steven Coons delivered a seminal paper on CAD: An Outline for the Requirements for a Computer-Aided Design System. A […]
The roots of CAD, part 1
The term “Computer-Aided Design” was first coined around 1959, at MIT. While it was likely Douglas Ross who first came up with the term, Steven Coons and John Ward were also involved in the earliest stages of what ultimately became the MIT Computer-Aided Design Project. In 1963, Steven Coons wrote about the beginnings of the CAD […]
MSC Software at 50
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy said that the U.S. does great things, like going to the moon, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” and “because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” In 1963, Richard MacNeal and Robert Schwendler founded MacNeal-Schwendler Corp.,…
Mathcad for free
Mathcad, from PTC, is one of my favorite computer math systems. It’s one of those “just right” programs for engineers: It’s far better for doing engineering calculations than Excel, but is a lot easier to learn and use than Matlab. Here’s a splashy video that shows what can be done with Mathcad: PTC has just […]
Simulating from the beginning
Historically, the primary role of simulation has been in optimization and validation—things that tend to be done late in the product development process. It’s been generally recognized, for quite a long time, that there is real value to be gained in moving simulation up earlier in the process, to the detail design phase. Many commerical…
Geomagic Spark: 3D scanning meets 3D CAD
It’s not easy to convert 3D scans into usable CAD models. Software that can do it is an excellent example of the iron triangle rule: Given the options of fast, good, and cheap, you can only have two. If you’re lucky. Up until now, engineers and designers have been faced with a choice between cheap (or […]
Autodesk Fusion 360: The future of CAD, Pt. 2
Imagine, for a moment, that you worked at a major CAD developer, with massive technical resources, and more than a billion dollars in the bank. Next, imagine that you were given the task to develop a next-generation 3D mechanical CAD product. No need to generate short-term revenues. No requirement to build on the existing generation […]
Autodesk Fusion 360: The future of CAD, pt. 1
This week, at Autodesk University 2012, Autodesk unveiled Fusion 360, a new cloud-based mechanical CAD solution. What they didn’t do, however, was tell everyone the real significance of Fusion 360. They actually intentionally underplayed it. Here is the real story: Fusion 360 is a major generational change in CAD. It represents Autodesk’s best thinking on […]
The Global Product Data Interoperability Summit
Technically, it’s called the Boeing/Northrop Grumman Global Product Data Interoperability Summit (GPDIS). It’s a conference run by Elysium, primarily to benefit Boeing and Northrop Grumman, and secondarily to benefit others in aerospace and related industries. There is no attendance charge for industry professionals and supply chain partners in aerospace, automotive, shipbuilding and academia. The costs […]
Understanding Dassault Systemes 3DEXPERIENCE
Understanding Dassault Systemes corporate brand positioning has been a real challenge for me. While I have minimal difficulties understanding their product lines—CATIA, ENOVIA, DELMIA, SOLIDWORKS, and all the rest are competent, competitive, and (so far as engineering software can be) straightforward to understand—it’s their corporate brand positioning (marketing messages) that I’ve struggled with. Consider the […]
DARPA FANG: Social product development gets serious
There are some interesting social product initiatives out there. GrabCAD, LocalMotors, and Quirky come to mind. Yet, each of these initiatives only addresses a small part of a big problem. What if you wanted to tackle a serious problem—one that required not just design, but serious engineering as well? Let’s say, just for fun, that […]
Will they build the CAD system of future?
Last Thursday, I was out getting a Torta for lunch, when my phone rang, with a Massachusetts phone number. It was Scott Harris, one of the founders of SolidWorks. Scott doesn’t normally call me, though we’ve known each other for 18 years or so. In this case, he wanted to tell me something: that morning […]
Why Validation is important to SolidWorks users
What is your product master? Is it a paper drawing? A digital drawing? a 3D model? No matter what it is today, it’s likely that, in the future, it’s going to be a 3D model. According to NIST, there are some big advantages of using a 3D model as master: Faster design revisions Build and […]
CAD at a distance: Using Citrix for workstation virtualization
Sometimes the conversations you have in the hallway are the most interesting. Earlier in the year, I was at the Collaboration and Interoperability Conference in Denver, and was chatting with a man who works for Boeing. He mentioned that the company’s main CATIA infrastructure for the 787 Dreamliner is located in Everett, Washington, where their […]
A Real World Design Challenge for high school students
How do you get high school students interested in science, technology, engineering and math? Why not give them a real world design challenge to solve? In the 2013 Real World Design Challenge, students are asked to tackle a couple of serious engineering design problems. And, thanks to the generosity of a couple of engineering software […]
3D PDF viewing goes mobile
One of the reasons 3D PDF is an important file format is because it doesn’t require a special viewer. If you have Adobe Acrobat Viewer on your desktop computer, which most folks do, that’s all you need. But what about mobile? Adobe has versions of its reader for IOS (iPhone, and iPad), and Android. But, […]
CAE on the cloud
By Evan Yares, Senior Editor Will the availability of the high-performance cloud computing help drive use of CAE tools? The biggest problem with Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) is that too few people use it. There are several good reasons, but one that’s significant is money. CAE software licenses, and the big computers on which to…
Spatial, ACIS, CGM, and the future of geometric modelers
This was my first time at the Spatial 3D Insider’s Summit. It’s not a large conference—just 60 or so attendees, plus people from Spatial, with a heavy bias towards nerdy folks with PhD’s in mathematics. It is the one time each year when Spatial gets together with its very best customers, and talks about the […]