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by Ralph Grabowski with Thomas Yip
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Radica Software has grown since I first interviewed CEO Thomas Yip and his electrical schematic software that runs on top of Visio -- Electra. For this kind of design task, Visio is brilliant. (I still use it for annotating figures for my books, because of its smart connectors.)
The company launched 15 years ago, is growing 25-30% annually, and now has 20 employees. It is headquartered in Malaysia.
Now Radica has ported their schematic designer to the cloud. "Three to five years ago, we saw the industry was moving to the cloud, and so we made the difficult decision to embark on this," Mr Yip told me over Skype. "Engineering CAD software in a browser is extremely challenging."
The base program no longer is Visio. Instead, Radica first wrote an extensible SVG [scaled vector graphics] editor, Vecta at https://vecta.io/ (see figure 1), on which they built Electra Cloud.
Figure 1: Vecta SVG editor running in a Web browser
Electra Cloud launched just a few weeks ago at cloud.radicasoftware.com, with Mr Yip calling it "the world's first fully browser-based electrical CAD software." Being browser-based, it runs on all current operating systems and hardware that handle modern Web browsers. (See figure 2.) Vecta and Electra are hosted on Google Cloud in the USA.
Figure 2: Electra Cloud running in Opera for Android on a Chromebook
Both the desktop Visio-based program and the browser-based SVG app handle 2D diagramming of electrical, pneumatic, and hydraulic systems. Electra Cloud automates tagging, circuit reuse, real-time cross references, NFPA/JIC [National Fluid Power Association and Joint Industry Council] and IEC [International Electrotechnical Commission] symbols, PLC [programmable logic controller] modules, bills of materials, terminals, and panel layout.
Another reason for the cloud version was to make licenses more affordable. When a company has two engineers and a manager, the manager might need only read-only access, so the firm needs only two licenses. The partial license is free, and provides some editing and full viewing functions. The full license adds automation, report generation, and so on.
Revision Control
A third reason for a cloud version was to get around emailing files to people, and being able to collaborate on a design. Electra Cloud uses a dashboard to handle file organization, collaboration, and revision control.
The dashboard shows all drawings produced by the team, including new ones that are shown immediately. (See figure 3.) The dashboard controls the workflow in which users mark up drawings and pass them to others. Notifications are sent to users on both the cloud and the desktop.
Figure 3: Dashboard collating all diagrams being worked on by a team
Revision control is called "Version History" in Electra Cloud. It is automatic, meaning everything is synchronized at the server. Versions are saved with "events" (changes made to the document) and so are not based on timing. Electra Cloud groups the modifications so that you are not flooded with a long list of minor changes.
Programming
Mr Yip believes that having a modern JavaScript based API will let users customize Electra according to their needs. The built-in editor lets you write as little as one line of code to control the look of objects. Intelligence is added to objects through scripts, which can be named, to enable them to be referred to.
Data and programs (written in JavaScript and JSON [JavaScript Object Notation] can be attached to drawing elements, even elementary ones like radius=10. Having an object controlling the position, size, and properties of other objects operates like parametrics and constraints in CAD. Even fills can have formulae that change the color of an object based on what is happening to other objects.
"Our vision is to open up the platform for others to create their own solutions," he said, and the team has since collaborated with a music equipment maker in Germany for their design work. Another collaboration is in the works with a French software firm
Radica also supports plug-ins, such as one that calculates the number of symbols in the drawing. Electra Cloud supports public plug-ins and private ones seen only by the team. "We provide some plug-ins, but prefer that users write their own," said Mr Yip. The API is documented online at https://vecta.io/api/.
The Role of SVG
SVG is a lightweight vector format supported by all Web browsers, even if you never use it. If you have never heard of it, then we probably have PDF to thank for that: think of SVG as the JPEG for vector images.
Embedding SVG files in Web pages can be problematic, as they can be large. And so Mr Yip wrote Nano, what he calls "the world's best SVG compressor," which on average removes 80% of the file size. https://vecta.io/nano is free to use online, and a desktop version is coming soon. (See figure 4.)
Figure 4. SVG compressor showing before and after results
Compressing SVG saves bandwidth by taking out unnecessary information, such as fonts and structural elements required by the editor. The compressor follows the SVG spec closely, so it uses inheritance to remove unnecessary references to properties.
Diagrams are not stored as files with Electra Cloud, because when small changes are recorded, there could be a huge amount of writes on the server side. Instead, diagrams are saved as a database using Google services: only changes are recorded to use as little bandwidth as possible.
Mr Yip and his staff are, however, reinventing the system so that they can provide on-premise saving, which is not possible with public Google Cloud. The ideal he is aiming for is to provide security, privacy, and speed.
"Because we live in a country [Malaysia] that is not well known for high speed Internet, this has benefited us in forcing us to make sure the software is responsive and speedy," explained Mr Yip. For instance, once a symbol is used, it is cached locally.
Electra exports diagrams as vector formats (DWG, DXF, SVG, and PDF), raster formats (JPG and PNG), and in as a TSV (tab-separated values) data file. The company has been making progress improving DWG and DXF, and so the program can now handle DXF files as large as 50MB.
Future Plans
Radica makes public its road map, as illustrated below:
Figure 5: Road map showing development plans for Electra Cloud
In the next month, Electra Cloud will receive an enhanced dashboard for attaching PDF files, DWG drawings, spreadsheets, and so on. The idea is to have all resources in a single place to document the project.
The online demo is available through https://cloud.radicasoftware.com/app/edit/demo
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| ASCON Group releases KOMPAS-3D V18 in English, Turkish, and Korean with a new user interface in ribbon-like sets, and light or dark themes. Other improvements to the MCAD software include faster 3D models and associative views, new functions for sheet metal, new versioning function, better BOM [bills of materials], and the Add-Ons Configurator.
You can download the 30-day free trial from ascon.net/download/kompas/items/?dl_id=532
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Open Design Alliance last week released BimRv SDK 2020 Update 2 for creating Revit families from any application. albeit limited at this time. The goal is support for creating the entire Revit object model. ODA SDKs are available to members only. More information on this release at opendesign.com/blog/2020/february/oda-adds-limited-family-creation-bimrv-2020u2
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Re: Mr. Davis’ experience with cracked vehicle parts
Currently I’m reworking the frame of a 2000 Silverado 4x4 because the 6” lift kit caused the frame brackets to crack where the steering components bolt-on to it. The ‘gingerbread’ market has been sorely negligent in the area of frame reinforcement for their lift kits. Seems like nothing’s changed. Appeal to ego or aesthetics, but FDOT requirements are an afterthought!
- Chris Cadman |
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