Drive SpaceClaim (or anything else) with just your voice
For me, one of the coolest things about SpaceClaim is the refocus on innovation and freedom that it inspires in users. People often use SpaceClaim when they want to break free from rigid constraints and just think through some new ideas on the back of a digital napkin.
James Irvine (Pulseair Defense Solutions), an Australian super-SpaceClaimer, just sent me this wild video of his voice control hack. He used a free tool called PiLfIuS to teach SpaceClaim to respond to his voice commands. Using just a mouse and his voice, he is able to conceptualize new ideas while holding a giant mug of jet fuel coffee.
The question in my mind:
Does SpaceClaim inspire fun & creativity in people?
… or do fun & creative people just gravitate to SpaceClaim?
Note: James has much better taste in music than featured in this video… but Youtube rejected his original (copyrighted) Guns ‘n Roses track!
Change the inertia of your corporate engineering culture
I’m a big fan of this guy, Jeff Monday. He specializes in using “dots” in presentations to simply explain complex concepts. If you read the transcript of any of his presentations, you will fall asleep. But following along to his dots really makes the stories come alive.
Here’s a challenge: Close your eyes, think deeply about what really goes on in your engineering process. Visualize the data hand-offs, over-the-wall-tosses, politics, and rigid PDM/PLM constraints.
Then watch the following video and ask yourself if it still makes sense to keep all access to digital 3D concept creation restricted to the design department and its complex, hardcore CAD tools.
Are you open to considering the new genre of everyman Direct Modeling 3D tools to inspire new levels of innovation earlier in the R&D process?
Or will you accept the old-school inertia of designers accessing traditional CAD while everyone else is forced to scribble on a whiteboard?
Podcast: Dezineforce CEO, Dr. Peter Collins
Kenneth Wong recently posted a short article about an interesting new company, Dezineforce. This UK startup promises to dramatically speedup the workflow and effectiveness of engineers engaged in FEA & CFD.
To dig a little deeper, I contacted Dezineforce’s CEO, Dr. Peter Collins. Our resulting interview uncovers Dezineforce’s unique approach to optimizing DOEs and batch solving on remote compute clusters.
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Click the Play button above (~35 min) or…
Download the podcast (10 mb) for offline listening.
Links from the podcast:
Kenneth Wong on SpaceClaim 2009
Kenneth Wong is a CAD industry expert and maintains one of my favorite new blogs:
Kenneth Wong’s Virtual Desktop
over at Desktop Engineering.
I particularly enjoy his balanced reporting on all brands and products. He also tends to go deeper than just CAD- and promises to talk about cutting edge SaaS (Software as a Service), ERP, PLM, and more.
A few days ago, Kenneth did a fine write-up on SpaceClaim 2009 as an article for Desktop Engineering (not for his blog).
Reading time is about 6 minutes. Check it out here:
SpaceClaim Engineer 2009: Hybrid Modeling
My 30 day caffeine experiment: a quest for better sleep
I’m an early bird. Annoyingly so. Ask any of my old college room-mates! I wake up whistling and ready for action at the crack of dawn. While this has always helped me get more worms than most people, it’s not intentional. I simply can’t sleep once daylight hits the window. Matter of fact, my natural body clock wakes me between 5-6am even on weekends and vacations!
In my college years, I averaged about 4 hours of sleep per night. Bumped that up to about 6 hours once I got out into the work world. That schedule seemed to work fine for many years. Now that I’m getting older (and chasing 3 kids under 7), I’m back to about 5 hours of sleep per night.
I’ve noticed my quality of sleep dramatically decreasing over the last year. I often feel like a zombie. So, I recently decided to run some experiments on myself! Up first? Caffeine.
I started drinking coffee around the age of 10. It started with a few cups each Sunday at the after-church social hour. In my teen years, I graduated to about a half pot per day. In college, I drank disgusting quantities… usually 2-3 pots per day. After school, my normal consumption leveled out to 1-2 pots per day. Not sure I could have managed engineering school or a career in engineering software sales without my little black friend.
About 30 days ago, I stopped all caffeine… cold turkey! The first few days were horrific. Massive headaches, itchy eyes, and extreme lethargy. The only saving grace was a nasty cold I caught at the same time. Better to live through two evils at once and get ‘em out of the way.
My wife monitored my sleep patterns. She’s used to me flailing, yelling, talking, and snoring very loudly throughout the night. I’m often fighting all manner of evil midgets, nasty CEOs, terrorists, and little-girl-ninjas. She’s learned to protect her head during the worst of my punching fits.
CAD for FEA today
Also read:
CAD for FEA in the BAD old days
CAD for FEA in the GOOD old days
In the first half decade of the new century, I saw enthusiasm over FEA and CFD leveling out a bit. It wasn’t so much that companies didn’t see the value in CAE… it was simply that the “new car smell” had worn off. Every fresh-faced engineering graduate was fully aware of the term Finite Element Analysis. Most could even spell CFD. The same was mostly true for the grizzled gray-hairs in engineering management.
Most companies engaging in CAE had at least 5 years of experience with the technology. They might have dropped one brand for another in that time, but they had experienced good time savings over the old build-break-test-repeat process in the prototyping lab. CAE became a validated activity. Expectations surrounding the effort and time required to complete this kind of work started to bake in to the collective consciousness:
“Yes, I’d say it takes about 3 weeks to get all the parts for a physical prototype and complete a test in the lab.”
“Yes, I’d say it takes about 1 week to simplify a CAD assembly (or maybe redraw it from scratch), get it meshed, and run the FEA simulation.”
For the most part, people engaged in CAE were happy with the status quo. They had experimented with different methods for handling geometry and had settled on the best strategies given the toolsets at hand. However, a new technology was about to change the game in the late 2000s.
A solution for engineering layoffs
Many companies out there have responded to the current economy with layoffs. Often, this has resulted in deep cuts and tremendous loss of expertise. Bright engineers who couldn’t have conceived of an unemployment check just 18 months ago are cleaning out their desks today. And, what happens to the engineers that stay? When half the team disappears, those still standing must attempt to take on double the work and responsibility.
It’s a raw deal on either side of the RIF.
I had a great conversation with a longtime friend and former colleague, John Randazzo, that may provide some relief for those hit with that pink slip, and those left behind. John is a top gun Engineer and recently hung out his shingle as an independent contractor/consultant. In these tough economic times, John is finding plenty of meaningful work to support his own bottom line… and, his manpower-starved clients are finding an excellent, cost-effective way to keep projects moving forward.
JW: John, what factors are driving the increase in contract work?
JR: Well, try as we might to get past it, there is still a great bit of uncertainty about the economy and its recovery. However, there is still meaningful work to be done. Companies find themselves faced with the dilemma of having a need for resources, but not wanting to take on additional head count with such uncertainty. That creates a better than average environment for the independent contractor. Read more…
CAD for FEA in the GOOD old days
(see Part I: CAD for FEA in the BAD old days)
I spent my first year in the CAE industry as an Application Engineer. An AE in most CAE software companies does a lot of pre-sales work. Prospects often want to “see your stuff work on our stuff” before making an investment. This was an exciting time for me. I was definitely drinking from the fire hose. My experience in a ton of industries and products exploded.
Change was in the air, however. FEA companies were successfully targeting multi-tasking, upfront Engineers with easier-to-use and less capable simulation tools like COSMOS and Mechanica. At the same time, the CAD companies were trying to move their products beyond the Design department and hoping to have a license on every Engineer’s desk.
It seemed natural to think that an easier to use FEA toolset for generalist engineers featuring a direct linkage to their CAD tool would take over the world. The PhD specialists could use their complex pre-processors, but the regular Joe-Sixpack engineers would prefer to work with geometry in CAD.
For a half dozen years or so, that theory worked out. Read more…
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About this blog
Jeff Waters CAE industry vet writes mostly about engineering tech & personal interests. Let’s connect
