Eunice Kokor is a high school junior who leads the Bird Brains’ eight-person CAD Design team. She became interested in robotics as a freshman.

“[I saw how] high school students just like me were collaborating together and using their minds to create something bigger than themselves. It still continues to inspire me. Each day at robotics I have to think in ways that I’ve never had to think before. It’s challenging. It’s tough. It’s intense. It’s stimulating. But it’s fun, too.”

The Bird Brains operate less like a high school team and more like a high-powered successful business. Their 17-year-old CEO, Evan Giarta manages 50 students in subteams that include marketing, communications, CAD design, and electronics design. With mentors from companies in their community, the Bird Brains learn how to accomplish every task from CAD design to fabrication to robot programming and animation.

PTC provided special licenses of Creo Parametric and Windchill to Kokor and her team to design The Fish.

For Kokor, the best part was “tackling problems as real engineers in our world do with the same software they use… When you finally get the gist of 3D and 2D modeling, it’s a blast. Our team often finds time to make silly models of things we see in our daily lives. I’ve seen Game Boys, crazy wheel patterns, pink robots, and Wall-E.”

They may be students, but even professional design teams can learn a few things from these FIRST Robotics competition teams. In this episode, Vince & Allison report on The Bird Brains’ robot and how they overcame a lot of the same challenges as commercial design teams.

Now that I’m an accredited teacher-trainer in the use of Creo, I thought that I’d write something about it! Creo is the latest version of the 3D CAD software which is developed by PTC. Many years ago, my school used ProDesktop before moving to AutoDESK Inventor back in 2008. Whilst Inventor does ‘the job’ well, I must say that I am really impressed with Creo. I find the whole design experience more rewarding (have a look at CreoFreeform on You Tube) and the photo-realisitc rendering is amazing – produced by a MentalRay add-in (for those of you who have ever heard of it – this is the same rendering technology which saw Yoda and Spiderman come to life – and was also used in movies like The Matrix). As I now develop courses in Advanced Higher Grade Graphic Communication, I thought that I’d post up a couple of models which I have produced this week.  Hopefully, this nifty software will also be used in Product Design, Engineering Science and in Practical Craft Skills.

The scooter was surfaced modelled and the caster is solid - both to unit standard as outlined in Outcome 1 and 2 in the AHGC course. The Dalek was a muck-about, though it turned out to be a pretty good impression of the classic Dr Who baddie! The Dalek can be downloaded as a part from Grab Cad. Enjoy!

Continue to the post to see images

Designing electromechanical products is challenging, as it requires the carefully coordinated efforts of electrical and mechanical design teams. Facilitating this collaboration between mechanical and electrical designers throughout the design process, as incremental changes occur in either discipline, is a key business driver for the design of successful electromechanical products.

Problems in electromechanical design often result from poor or lack of communication of required design changes between disparate electrical and mechanical design systems. Effective communication is often tricky since the design systems themselves often do not speak the same language. What makes it more problematic is the reality that the two design teams—the electrical and mechanical—are often geographically dispersed.

To overcome these obstacles, both design teams need a mechanism by which they can identify and manage the effects of design changes across disciplines earlier in the design cycle to prevent costly late-stage design changes. Continuous and consistent collaboration between the two design teams keeps design teams synchronized and can help prevent the need for rework later in the design cycle.

Before the mechanical designers request changes be made, the impact of those changes on the electrical designs should be considered and evaluated, and vice versa. This requires that digital data from both systems be shared, providing opportunity for incremental review and counter-proposal, if necessary. Once the changes are approved, a mechanism must be in place to automatically update the respective databases.

The problem traditionally has been that when design data is transferred back and forth between ECAD and MCAD systems, it is akin to trying to communicate in two completely different languages. In order to collaborate effectively, the data needs to be communicated in a form familiar to users of both systems.

In 2008, the ProSTEP iVIP Association released a data schema and communication protocol to facilitate this collaboration, the ProSTEP iVIP Recommendation, which is available to users of various ECAD and MCAD software. This collaboration capability is offered in the Creo ECAD-MCAD Collaboration Extension.

Here’s how it works. The new standard addresses several pain points of ECAD-MCAD collaboration, one of which is the reality that design teams are often globally dispersed, making real-time collaboration impossible. As a result, these tools support both synchronous (both designers are online and can immediately respond to change proposals) and asynchronous collaboration. In the latter case, changes are stored and presented to the collaboration module at the appropriate times.

These collaboration tools also support the ongoing negotiation that often occurs between the ECAD and MCAD design teams on proposed changes by offering the capability to “sandbox” proposals and implement only the result of a completed negotiation in the permanent design database. This functionality enables both teams to iterate on proposed changes, test the effects of proposed changes, and offer alternatives, or counter proposals.

These collaboration tools also each maintain interface characteristics that are similar to those in the common software used by each discipline, shortening the learning group for both groups. Graphics, options and menus use terms familiar from other tools so users don’t have to learn an entire new language or interface to be proficient.

All these new capabilities provide a way for both design disciplines to speak the same “language” and collaborate effectively on incremental proposed changes to either the mechanical or electrical design followed by real-time negotiation through a new industry standard data format and communication protocol.

As such, we’d like to offer some guidance and resources for those thinking about upgrading from Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire to Creo Parametric. Ensure you get the most out of the transition to PTC’s latest generation of design software with these five steps:

1. Determine what Creo brings your team specifically. Creo is a whole suite of design applications spanning concept design, 2D, 3D, direct and more. Which apps and features do you expect to bring the most value to your team?

Resources:

• Compare Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0, Creo Parametric 1.0, and Creo Parametric 2.0 with this version comparison chart.
• Meet the product managers and view short product demos in these video introductions showing what’s new in Creo Parametric 2.0.
• Explore detailed product information on Creo Parametric 2.0.

2. Evaluate the impact on your processes. Creo Parametric 2.0 doesn’t have to change the way your team works, but with faster performance and easier to use tools, you may want to streamline.

Resources:

• Attend a live Creo 2.0 event near you for a hands on experience with the latest software.

3. Prepare the team to get up to speed quickly.  PTC offers many training options, some at no cost. You can sign up for traditional classroom training, self-paced online training, and online access to libraries of learning material and tutorials. A well-trained team ensures you get the most value from your Creo investment.

 Resources:

• LearningConnector is a free learning application that comes with Creo. It includes tutorials, online help, and more.
• Instructor-led training is available through PTC and its global network of value-added resellers or through your VAR. More than 75,000 students learn in 100+ training centers in 8 languages around the world.

4. Migrate data. Or don’t. If you’re already using Pro/ENGINEER, you don’t need to do anything to use your data in Creo Parametric. That’s because Pro/ENGINEER design data loads directly into Creo Parametric:

• No loss of data, models, parts, assemblies, drawings, etc.
• No loss of design intent, features, parameters, annotations, etc.
• Data fully upward compatible, irrespective of Pro/ENGINEER release.
• Creo Parametric’s user interface can be tailored.
• Customizations can be loaded into Creo Parametric.

5. Swap out your hardware.  Creo Parametric 2.0 supports new technologies enabled by AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards that deliver blistering performance. A major software upgrade can provide an excellent opportunity to upgrade the hardware as well.

Resources

Here’s the NVIDOA QUADRO® 4000 speeding performance 30x in realistic mode:

Here’s Creo on AMD FirePro Graphics. I don’t read Slovak, but I think that says 800% faster.

Bonus resource: If you’re thinking about upgrading from Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire to Creo Parametric, here’s one final resource: Your value-added reseller and PTC. No one understands your CAD system like the people who developed it. Make use of training and support. PTC and our VARs can often speed implementation of software upgrades and help resolve any problems or questions quickly.

This eliminates print production costs, and allows technicians to call up information on the exact product variant they’re working on, with all of the latest engineering changes included.

Without having to read a lot of text and try to figure out limited 2D drawings, technicians using 3D manuals made with Creo Illustrate can dramatically improve their performance in the field and increase customer satisfaction around your products.

Easily created 3D animations can show technicians how products are disassembled and put back together—without the need for additional authoring and translation expenses. In any language, service technicians typically have a much easier time understanding visual animations than textual descriptions.

Creo Illustrate manuals also make part ordering more accurate and convenient. Technicians can order parts with a simple click, and manual authors can easily provide a service bill of materials (BOM). For example, the alternator in a design BOM may contain hundreds of components. But a Creo Illustrate manual author can reduce it to a single component for the technician. The author can also add items such as tools, glues and lubricants that technicians need but aren’t part of the design documents.

Continue to CAD/CAM Performance.com to read the full article

It’s also boring. For fans, watching drivers jockey for first position is more fun than watching one car push another car around the track all day.

So this year, NASCAR changed the rules on drafting – by design. NASCAR made the cooling systems less efficient, forcing the cars to run in open air to keep water temperatures down.

To do this, NASCAR reduced the huge five-gallon radiator down to two gallons. The accumulator can was reduced from a one-gallon max volume to a half gallon. A larger change was moving the grill opening up to the bumper fascia area, which, when tucked up behind another car, kills the air intake.

A final change was softer springs, a smaller rear spoiler and a baseline restrictor-plate size of 19/32^nd of an inch, or 1/64^th of an inch larger than the plate for the 2011 Daytona 500.

So on January 10, 2012, NASCAR issued these rules for the upcoming Dayton 500 race. That was good news for fans, but bad news if you are a design engineer for a NASCAR team. The Daytona was just a few weeks away.

A potentially formidable set of design changes took only days using Creo Parametric.

The Product Design Show spoke with Drew Kessler, Designer on the PENSKE racing team, to find out how they used Creo Parametric to get ready for race day.

Tartan Marine of Painesville Ohio hired Tipton Design and Engineering, a Creo customer, to design and fabricate a cockpit arch for their 4300 Yacht. A yacht arch handles large loads transferred from the boat rigging. That means several little parts have to go on this arch to make the yacht sail.

Tipton knew that while looking aesthetically tantalizing, the arch had to be structurally resilient.

Starting with a basic 2D drawing from Tartan, Tipton engineers used Creo Parametric to straighten out the details required to manufacture the individual parts and then work up the assembly. They worked in three dimensions with tolerances less than .025 on a structure over five feet tall and 11 feet wide.

Courtesy of www.tiptonde.com

The project was one of Tipton’s most challenging and gratifying design and manufacturing projects. From concept to design, the entire project took a single week.

Wait a second – just a week?

Roger Tipton, CEO and Founder and yachting expert, recounts the simplified production process:

“It is pretty amazing that we could do something so complicated in just a week. Creo is like that. The time is saved in production due to all the complex cuts at all kinds of different angles where different tubes come together. Without Creo there would be a lot of fitting the parts together and trial and error with the cuts. That entire headache is totally eliminated using Creo.”

The final product was a simple stunner: a mirror finish stainless steel arch, bent in three dimensions with 45 individual parts. It takes a lot of design engineering expertise to make something look so seamless.

Let’s take a look at some of these steps that can better prepare engineering departments for their next CAD software upgrade.

Assess your needs. Before implementing a software upgrade, CAD users and their managers need to huddle and determine what their current pain points are and how they adversely affect productivity. Are design schedules not being met because of system inefficiencies? Is software freezing up or crashing frequently? Chances are that management will understand the importance of upgrading software when they can clearly see how it’s affecting the bottom line.

Weigh your options. Once you’ve determined what the current problems are, start researching how software upgrades can help alleviate them. Read web sites, blogs, and articles to find out what are the new features and how each new feature will improve current processes. Contact vendors and ask what functions have been improved upon or streamlined? What are the systems requirements of the new upgrade? Armed with this information, CAD managers will have a better chance of getting the necessary buy-in from management and elicit support among the troops.

Give it a trial run. Work with your CAD vendor and put the new upgrade through some basic testing with a few of your most trusted CAD users. Most vendors now offer free trial versions. Another great way to get your hands on new releases is to become a beta tester. Be sure to use your own data when putting new software through its paces so you can fairly assess how the new software works with data you would normally use.

Consider hardware upgrades. Major CAD software upgrades sometimes require the hardware it runs on to be upgraded as well, not just a bump in memory. There is no point upgrading the CAD system if the hardware won’t keep pace with the new software, leading to frequent system crashes and accompanying downtime in productivity. Many workstations are certified for specific CAD systems, which can improve productivity and decrease downtime enough to justify the cost of the hardware within months.

Plan for training. Some upgrades are significant enough that new features—ribbons, toolbars, browsing interfaces, or content libraries—can confuse your existing users and might require additional training. If so, what will the additional cost of training be? What will the cost of the downtime in productivity be as well?

Calculate ROI. Now it’s time to sit down and calculate your return on investment. Will this new upgrade significantly save sufficient time, clicks, and picks to justify the cost of its installation and training in the next year? Include cost of software, estimated installation cost, training cost, and the estimated savings in efficiency. Calculate the ROI by dividing the estimated annual savings by the total of the costs (software, installation, and training) and multiply that by 100%. Most software upgrades are in use for one to two years, so look for a ROI of at least 50%.

Formulate a plan. Once you’ve crunched the numbers necessary to justify the expense of the upgrade, it’s time to start a detailed analysis and plan that will be required to implement the new software. Involving some high-level CAD users in your testing could really go a long way in generating some groundswell for the upgrade among your other users.

Why now? Creo Parametric 2.0’s improvements make owning the right graphics card more essential than ever. You’ll appreciate the dynamic viewing and fast real-time rendering for the new generation of sketching, part modeling, large assemblies, freestyle, sheet metal, 3D Annotation, measuring, and cross-sectioning capabilities.

Here’s what you should know about each of these graphics card providers:

AMD. When AMD tested Creo Parametric 2.0 in system configurations that included AMD FirePro graphics cards and compared performance to Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 in shaded mode, AMD engineers found a 5x performance boost with Creo Parametric 2.0. Also with Creo Parametric 2.0’s new transparency mode (Order Independent Transparency), you’ll see up to 10x the performance and a more accurate representation of components in context with its surrounding geometry (when compared with the blended transparency mode in Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0).

In these two examples, the first model is in standard blended mode while the second model has OIT enabled. Notice the model’s clarity and pixel-accurate rendering with no visual artifacts. The AMD video shows 10x performance improvement and significant quality difference. The quality comparison is also shown in the following images.

NVIDIA. In testing relative performance of Creo Parametric 2.0 and Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 on test configurations in shaded mode with NVIDIA Quadro cards, the PTC crowd here couldn’t believe how crazy fast and clear the final models became.

With Creo 2.0’s native anti-aliasing, you’ll see increased clarity because anti-aliasing reduces the artifacts that are present especially during visible motion. In the graphic below, the left half of this model shows aliasing turned off, while the right half shows anti-aliasing enabled. In NVIDIA’s tests, the performance was 8x faster, delivering more clarity and precision.

So now, it’s time to take a deep breath and let it go – all that frustration you’ve experienced with graphics performance in interacting with your assembly. Take advantage of Creo 2.0 and either AMD FirePro or NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards. Either card will spin your 3D models with fine-tuned precision and lightning fast speed.

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