Articles tagged with Reverse Engineering

The original StormTrooper helmet. Image courtesy of Curventa

Found this fascinating, it’s a story about well known UK-based industrial design firm Curventa and how they helped a client, RuRoc, take its ‘Storm Trooper’ snowboarding helmet from the slopes to the autosport world. The helmet helped launch RuRoc back in 2007, with it’s integrated google, facemask and of course, head protection. What’s interesting is that RuRoc have now been asked to provide the product to the Formula One racing world as safety gear for pit crew.

Image courtesy of RuRoc Racing.

As Director at Curventa, Ian Murison said, “Crews usually wore motorcycle helmets, but a lot of the mechanics found them too hot and heavy to wear during races. In 2008, the Red Bull team contacted RuRoc and said they wanted to use the snowboarding helmets for their crews. We made some modifications and added flame retardant materials to the helmets, and they broke on the Formula One scene last season. Pretty soon, the McLaren team ordered chromed helmets for their pit crew. Now RuRoc has distributors in North American, Canada, and Europe selling to other motorsport teams.”

The original StormTrooper helmet. Image courtesy of Curventa

Curventa did the design work for RuRoc founder, Rob Gavin, when he came to the London firm with a rough physical model of a snowboarding helmet that protected faces from extreme cold while venting enough to prevent goggles from fogging over. Curventa laser scanned the helmet design then entered the data into SolidWorks following physical mock-ups. “We created the early designs in blue foam, and once approved by the client we laser scanned them into SolidWorks. From then on, we were designing and detailing on the fly within SolidWorks,” Murison said. “We did a lot of adjusting inside SolidWorks, tweaking the helmet design to adjust how it fit in the back, for example, or how it moved when the wearer turned their head. SolidWorks really held up well during that process.” There’s also another little nugget of info in the press release, in that the design team made heavy use of the Freeform feature in SolidWorks during the design process.

Image courtesy of RuRoc Racing.

If you fancy an F1 spec helmet for your own purposal use, they’re 400 quid a pop and available over the web - you can even get your company logo laquered into the back of them.Or you can buy Brawn F1, McLaren or Force India (shown above) replica helmets if that’s your bag.

At DEVELOP3D we love the increasing use of Labs websites to let users try out new tech in development - and this latest development from Geomagic is sure to interest users of NX. Geomagic has launched Parametric Exchange for NX which provides an intelligent connection between Geomagic Studio and NX. The tool is designed to take point cloud data and reconstruct it in NX as a parametric CAD model, complete with model tree. We’d love to hear from any NX users out there that try it out.

While I’m sworn to secrecy regarding the next release of Geomagic’s line of reverse engineering or, as they would have it, Digital Shape Sampling and Processing (DSSP), applications, there’s something that’s been talked about a little bit online and recently posted to the company’s labs web-site (labs.geomagic.com), that’s too good to resist a little yap about.

When you look at the use of reverse engineering within the context of 3D design, there are several workflows and processes that it supports. Whatever your end goal, the process of capturing a physical form digitally is used across a wide spectrum of the design and manufacturing world. There’s those looking to capture concept models/clays/styrofoam concepts and turn them into something more workable. there are those looking to capture organically generated shapes because that’s the only way they can be produced. Then looking into more production related applications, the use of revser engineering technologies is huge in many areas. Whether that’s the digitalisation of physical legacy parts for remanufacturing where either digital data doesn’t exist, or the ‘in-use’ part doesn’t match the source 3D data (something that’s huge in aerospace and turbomachinery). There’s also inspection and metrology applications that are gaining massive traction.

Whatever your use and purpose, it’s common that the scanned form is used as the basis for the construction of more accurate, cleaner surfaces. This is true of the automotive styling world as it is of the product design or medical market. you’ll start with a physical form, but your end requirement is a clean, smooth and fully featured surface or solid model. Now, the problem is that while you’ve traditionally been able to create surfaces and solids which can be passed to your workhorse design system, there’s very little in the way of intelligence. you can derive forms based on scan data, but editing that geometry, to effect design changes, takes complex edits and in many cases, complete rework.

#1: Using Geomagic Studio to indentify ‘features’ and surface entities within your scanned data.

What Geomagic has done is to develop a series of connections that establish a link between its host application (Geomagic Studio) and either SolidWorks, Inventor or Pro/Engineer. You perform the standard scanning, registration and clean up processes (look out for a full review in DEVELOP3D in April for more information).

#2: Surface entities created using automatic and manual tools

But once done, you then use the built in tools (from the Geomagic Fashion module) to start to break down the model into precisely defined surfaces and solids. The system has, for some time, included a range of tools that allow you to create very clean surface/solid data using that underlying point cloud. This extends that by passing that same data to your workhorse CAD system. This is then used as the basis of reconstruction your models in your CAD system, using standard operations and features.

#3: Surfaces transferred to SolidWorks, with generating sketches in place and feature history constructed – ready for boolean and trimming operations.

The benefit this gives you is that you’ll end up with a quasi-parametric model which contains a great deal more intelligence (in terms of enabling design modification) than you’d traditionally get.

#4: Final SolidWorks model, clean, trimmed and intelligent.

Looks cool eh? it is. While Geomagic’s arch-nemesis, RapidForm has a similar tool in the form of RapidFormXOR/Redesign, Geomagic’s Parametric Exchange looks like a very elegant solution that lets Geomagic do what it does best (working with point cloud and polygon data) and leaves you to do the bulk of the surface and solid editing in systems best suited to the job. The images above show the system working with SolidWorks – now here’s a nice little video to show how it inter-operates with Pro/Engineer.

Geomagic Parametric Exchange + Pro/E Wildfire from DEVELOP3D on Vimeo.