DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

Not a single ‘answer’, but a suite of them

It’s happened: PTC have pulled out all the stops to launch Creo – what it believes to be the future of CAD for the next 20 years.

A super suite of ‘Apps’ launching next summer is what PTC is hoping will answer the “four big problems” facing CAD users today, and it was undeniably rather impressive (apart from the amateur dramatics production of Chicago to begin with and some cagey ‘stage banter’ you’d usually find on QVC).

The Creo suite is set to run under the banner of the four solutions: AnyRole Apps; AnyMode Modelling; AnyData Adoption and AnyBOM Assembly.

Read more…

Trade shows: Human interaction, carrier bags full of stuff, and free pens; what else is life for?

I’m pretty sure that after the weekend a lot of you are sat shivering in an icebox office right now, so what better way to warm up your digits than a little cardio-clicking with this week’s poll?

First though, here’s last weeks results as analyzed by Martyn Day, looking at the amount of CAD packages you use:

“Why have one CAD system when you can have five!!?

“The vast majority of our readers run 2 or more CAD systems in-house (76%). This is hardly surprising, given that in all our previous polls on this subject multiple CAD systems have always been the dominant strategy, whether this be a legacy system and a replacement one, different departments having an individual selection, or for compatibility with clients.

“The sweet spot is certainly in the 2-3 systems area (60%), while a fair percentage (11.02%) claim to use 5 or more. Despite the cost of running multiple systems, it seems that the benefit to these companies make the expenditure worthwhile, or a necessary evil.” 

Having spent a small part of last week pacing the halls at a trade show we thought it apt to find out why, in this multimedia age, people attend such events? This is not to say we can’t see the point of them - we like them as it’s a great way to meet readers, generally network with all different segments of the industry in one echoing hall, find out news and rumours, and come up with great ideas for future features - but why are you there, shuffling between stands and paying small fortunes for inadequate coffee?

As always, leave your comments, questions and any other reasons that we may have missed off in the comments section below.

This is new territory for Delcam, who has always concentrate on its own tools and ensuring they work together in a pretty nice manner where appropriate and fleshing out various special purpose tools when there’s a market requirement. So, this is the first time that the company has developed a CAM system that’s built into another vendor’s design system.

Delcam for SolidWorks takes Delcam’s tools and knowledge from both FeatureCAM (for feature-based and automated machining) and PowerMill (for handling complex geometry and machine tools) to bring SolidWorks users a range of tools from 2.5 axis milling, through al; manner of things including 3 axis, up to mill/turn and 5 axis continuous, with full machine simulation, feature recognition where needed and such. It’s just been given certified Gold Status as a partner application, which is a validation of the quality of the integration - and it’s something that’s particularly rigorous for a new vendor entering the partner programme.

So, who’s the target market? The answer, according to Delcam, is this:

• A company that loves SolidWorks.
• A company that has a tight link between design and manufacturing.
• Anyone that has a combination of machining centre, turning and mill/turn facilities.
• Looking to streamline their resources and increase employee skills.
• Finally, not job shops that are just machining parts.

We’ll be taking a look at Delcam for SolidWorks in the January issue of DEVLEOP3D but in the meantime, here’s one of those sketchy conference videos, complete with the obligatory gentleman standing in the way for a good 30 seconds or so - my apologies for that.

I find myself in Pune, India - this job brings you some strange things, but the ability to dash off and visit a new country is one of the nicest of them. Why am I here? To attend, for the second time, Delcam’s Asian Technical Summit, where a collection of the press from around the asia-pacific region (and me) take a couple of days to sit and learn about where the company is at, how its performed, what its customers are doing and of course, what’s new in its increasingly wide ranging suite of products. If you’re unaware of the Delcam name, the company’s roots lie in a research project between Cambridge University and the Delta Group to create the, I believe, first system that could cut tool steel using 3D geometry as the base for tool-paths.

That was then sold to Volkswagen and things kicked off. The company has been through several key phases in the last two decades. from the move away from its original DUCT system to the windows platform, the establishment of its core systems, PowerShape (for complex geometry modelling), PowerMill (for advanced machining) and PowerInspect (for inspection and metrology). That’s since been fleshed out with CopyCAD for reverse engineering and triangle modelling, ArtCAM (for artistic decoration design) as well as a whole host of tools for the medical sector - speaking of which.

Healthcare Division - A year on

Last year’s event saw the establishment of Delcam’s Healthcare division. A year later and it seems that the group is going great guns. Delcam quoted sales figures moving upwards of 200% in many areas - of course, you may consider that the division only started a year ago, this is no great surprise, but some of the systems (such as DentMill) has been available on the market for a couple of years - all that changed is the tools are now within their own business group and have clearly been given specialist attention, in terms of branding, of marketing, of establishing a board of advisors from the medical world.

The solutions differ from Delcam’s industrial offers as they’re intended to be used by practitioners and healthcare professionals, rather than CAD or CAM users. The users interfaces have been tuned to the requirements, in terms of ease of use and terminology for the specialists and in use, they’re impressive. For someone with a feint fear of the dentists chair of doom but an inherent curiousity in how things are designed, seeing the process of designing custom implants to replace teeth, featuring implants screwed into your jaw bone, gives a macabre type of delight.
One thing that is interesting is that Delcam’s also been developing hardware to go alongside it’s software offering in the field - namely, two scanners that again, are specialised, for both scanning feet (for orthopedic purposes) and teeth (using dental impressions). Considering that the idea was thought up around the time of the event last year, to get from idea, through design, into production and shipped to a good number of customers, in a year, is pretty impressive.

Core Systems

PowerShape & Parasolid: I won’t labour this one because we discussed it in a review a while back, but PowerShape has been rebuilt on the Parasolid platform and that’s giving the company something of a boost in terms of both interoperability with other systems as well as a more robust set of solid modelling tools which are now starting to trickle into the system to complimenting the existing and impressive set of surface modelling tools

PowerMill: PowerMill has been through something of a change over the last 12 months, as you’ll discover if you have a look through our overview from a couple of months ago. It’s seen the system become multi-threaded in many areas (the ability to use multiple cores is used where you can get the most bang for the buck), now supports background processing, so that tasks can be carried out why the system is chunking through tool-path calculations.

During the presentation, the team showed this rather fascinating vimeo of a turbine blade being machined from both sides on a Mori Seiki NT4300 using the technique of pinch milling described as a “method for machining long slender workpieces.” By machining from both sides simultaneously, means the radial forces on the part are cancelled out, giving a much smoother finish, and allowing for heavier cuts to be made. Creating the toolpaths for 2 different tools simultaneously, one doing a semi-finishing job and the other a finishing job (which can be in full 5-axis) - and anyone with any experience in machining will know that programming a task like this isn’t a trivial job.

News from the event is the release of PowerMill Robot. This is something that’s been coming for some time. many have scoffed at the idea of machining with robots from the likes of Kuka, ABB, Fanus, Motoman but there’s people doing it and doing it well (this article by the SME is a good place to start). The new system takes the tools and knowledge from PowerMill and applied it to allow the programming and simulation of robots with up to 8 axes in both linear and rotary motion.

A customer, Southern Spars, based in New Zealand presented at the event to talk about how they had adopted robot-based machining to assist with finishing the advanced carbon fibre masts, spars, spreaders and other components for the high performance yachting industry. This helped them make their processes more efficient (having previously relied on manual processes that meant a lot more hand finishing. They’re now using the Kuka-based (with PowerMill creating the toolpaths) set-up on a lot of processes having worked out the kinks in the programming process, their preferences in terms of cutters.

To give you an idea, the whole process to create a spreader trimming operation; from start of programming, set-up and machining now takes about an hour - compared to a day and a half’s work and when you consider that most of the companies products are custom, then there’s very little in the way of reuse and each is a one-off. That said, the team now has nailed their process and they’ve got their operation programming time down to between 10 minutes to an hour depending on the complexity. In the future, the team is going to be looking at producing extremely huge masts for super yachts in the region of 78m tall (to give you an idea, that’s a fair bit taller than the Taj Mahal and 18metres wide than a 747’s wingspan).

Ok - more in a bit peeps.

How many CAD programs are you running? (Elmo can’t work CAD - he’s as dumb as a bag of spanners)

Having stumbled into Monday once again we thought we’d liven proceedings a little with a little click-box polling - but first; the results from last week’s poll digested.

We shipped over the figures to our editor in chief Al Dean, who hastily analyzed the percentages in an airport somewhere in India to come up with the following conclusion:

“I was curious about this one because back when we ran MCAD magazine, we did a bit of research to find out how and why people were using rendering technology.

“One of the key indicators for me was how users were outputting their images - what was the selection criteria for the resolution.

“Back in 2007, the results indicated that 23% of users were outputting to screen resolution, with a further 24% outputting up to 2,000 pixels wide.

“That’s shifted in favour of higher resolution images, with the majority now outputting 3,000 pixels. Bear in mind that screen resolutions have changes dramatically since, with HD monitors becoming the norm for many.”

So there you have it - the more pixels the better in this modern world.

But this week we’re interested in just how many CAD programs you work with on a daily basis? Do you have a one-stop program that has all the bells and whistles you need, or a plethora of packages that you dip in and out of for whatever reasons?

As always, feel free to leave your thoughts and questions on the comments section below.

Sony, in collaboration with the WWF (no wrestling involved) and IDEO, has launched its Open Planet Ideas project: an online platform that challenges members of the public to imagine how current technologies could be repurposed to tackle environmental problems.

A collaborative project whereby the ideas put forward are there to be built upon and evolved by the community, everyone is invited to participate and contribute.

Getting involved can range from simply applauding other people’s concepts to taking them and refining the design further or even contributing a totally new concept.

Read more…

This appeared originally on maestros of 3D printing, Z Corporation’s blog a while ago and I’ve been wanting to repost it for a while and finally got hold of some better quality images from the lovely folks over at their HQ in the US.

The story revolved (ok - last pun, promise) around Andy Berlin, Senior Formware Engineer’s Groovy.exe project. Essentially, he developed a nifty little app that converts an audio file into a 3D printable surface. As someone with both an interest in 3D printing and the world of vinyl records, this is one story I couldn’t resist. So, here it is.

3D printing of appearance models is used to convey visual information. For this project, I explored a non-traditional way in which 3D printing could be used to encode information. I wrote a program that converts an audio file into a printable 3-dimensional model that vaguely resembles a record album, and hacked a record player to generate an audible signal from the printed model. Before getting started, a quick calculation revealed that for the resulting model to reasonably fit on a record player, the audio file would have to have 8-bit sample depth, limited by the .004” Z-resolution of the printer. And to play the record at 45 rpm, the best sample rate I could hope for out of a 10” diameter record would be about 6 kHz. The resolution would suffer even more as the record played, because the samples towards the centre of the record are closer together that those near the outer edge. This might work, but it wasn’t going to be high fidelity.

Version 1 of the program created a monochrome .STL file. The outer edge of each groove is smooth, to provide a surface for the tracking needle to ride along. The inner edge contains peaks and valleys which correspond to the audio data. In version 2, the program outputs a .ZPR file, where each sample is both coded by colour as well as height. High amplitude signals could then be lighter colour that low amplitude signals, further enhancing the signal for the optical playback mechanism. Craigslist provided a cheap, hackable turntable. The tone arm was modified to accommodate a 1” tall printed model. A pin replaced the needle to provide mechanical tracking, and an LED and optical sensor, remarkably similar to the LED/sensor module the ZPrinters use for auto-alignment, provided the playback signal.

While this modern version of a 45 may not be directly useful, perhaps it might inspire other creative or other non-obvious uses for 3D printing. If you’re wondering whether it was a success, well… if you listen really hard and apply the aural equivalent of squinting, you can just about hear over the noise the Beastie Boys belting out a rhyme from the 21 seconds of ‘Time To Get Ill’ that I printed.

Of course, it’s worth noting that the audio can’t be held in the video because it’s copyright, but in case you were wondering what it should sound like… Kick it!