Issue #1,124 | Inside the Business of CAD | 28 February 2022
Families taking refuge at a Ukrainian Catholic church in Kyiv (image source Alexander Laschuk)
Someone once said that software eats the world, but now software is being eaten by war.
Europe and North America ought to be at the front lines helping defend the borders of Ukraine against the Russian invasion, but for Western leaders steeped in a “The End of History” mindset, such a move is inconceivable. Better to lead from behind with sanctions.
Sanctions are, nevertheless, useful as an initial counter-attack against the evil that desires to kill fellow humans to satisfy its greed for moar empire. This is not the way of Christ, even when the Russian Orthodox believe Moscow to be the Third Rome, Kyiv to be the spiritual mother of Rus, and the Ukrainian Orthodox church an illegitimate breakaway sect.
When sanctions, like BDS, are small, we barely notice the impact; in this case, however, they are against the world’s second largest energy exporter, and — significantly for our industry — the source for many contract programmers who create, debug, and update the CAD software we use. As is Ukraine.
(China, also a major outsourcing center, may well one day also be cut off, as its leader continues his reckless pursuit of territorial expansion.)
How might war in Ukraine and sanctions with Russia affect software? I asked some CAD-related firms.
A North American developer:
“As of February 25, there are no sanctions in place that would block our ability to work with programmers based in Russia; the current sanctions affect only specific Russian banks.
“The situation with programmers based in Ukraine is unstable right now, as people are rightfully concerned about their own lives and the lives of their families, and work necessarily takes a back seat.”
A Russian developer:
“The war in Ukraine is a big tragedy for both our nations. The only hope is that this will stop as soon as possible.
“We keep operating as a company on a regular level, but some actions are not a top priority now.”
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As for upFront.eZine Publishing, our policy is that we work with individuals, not politicians. We have clients in Russia, with whom we continue to work.
At one time we had clients in China. By 2015, however, we came to realize that the Chinese Communist Party is embedded in all companies, and cancelled our work there.
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Kyochi Myogo reminds us that the war against Ukraine is not an isolated event, sadly. “People who don’t know or care what’s going on in, for example, Yemen, Myanmar, or Sudan, but who are very worked up about Ukraine, should ask themselves why that’s the case.” The horror is everywhere.
Countering the horror takes courage. David Burge notes that “the most courageous leadership seen in this world in the last 40 years has come from a coal miner, a satirist, and a comedian: Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and Volodmyr Zelensky.”
Contact!
upFront.eZine is published most Mondays. This newsletter is read by 4,600+ subscribers in 70 countries. Read our back issues at www.upfrontezine.com.
Editor: Ralph Grabowski Copy editor: Heather MacKenzie
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Issue # 1,123 | Inside the Business of CAD | 21 February 2022
From the Editor
Not much of a newsletter this week, as my dad (98 next month) moved (willingly!) from his condo to a very fine old folks home. This meant that family and friends spent the last week clearing the condo of 30 years of memories. Regular newsletter next week.
There was, however, one bit of new news I want to share with you.
And in Other News
With the sale of Bricsys to Hexagon, and much of the old Bricsys crew leaving Hexagon, we wondered what was up next for Erik de Keyser and his team of serial entrepreneurs.
It turns out to be Qonic, “the next generation building design modeling tools.” The old team has gotten back together, with people like Erik de Keyser, Mark Van Den Bergh, Sander Scheiris, and Dmitry Ushakov.
Reflecting, the new endeavor should comes as no surprise to us. Mr de Keyser’s aim always has been to create easy-to-use architectural design software. This, by my reckoning, is phase V in his journey.
The Web site, for now, is largely a placeholder. qonic.com
Issue #1,122 | Happy Valentine’s Day! | 14 February 2022
Guest editorial by Leo Schlosberg
Glass fiber reinforced concrete (image source Al Blair Construction)
I received a call from a roofer who needed a price on some GFRC [glass fiber reinforced concrete] fascia for an addition to a school. Neither GFRC nor fascia was normally in his scope of roofing work, but he was stuck with it in his bid package. He’s been at this for 40 years and so we chatted.
We went over some of the known industry issues. He said he was glad he did not own the roofing company, because he did not see how he could his price work high enough to cover all the assorted risks. He has been around so long that he could complain about the decline of drawings as the industry moved to CAD.
I had forgotten that people could still complain about that. I had commented on this two decades ago in Ralph Grabowski’s newsletter, when he mentioned my words on the occasion of the newsletter’s 20th anniversary. My post was the most controversial editorial he had in those 20 years. (See https://www.upfrontezine.com/2015/05/857.html.)
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I follow constructech news loosely. I mostly get veiled sales pitches. Forty years ago, when I was a minor pioneer in a different industry (IT – focused on what was then called “office automation” or word processing, integrating text and data, and so on) it became clear that sales efforts focused on the benefits of new technology and glossed over, or omitted, the steep implementation costs. This is still true in tech sales.
The big issue in much of constructech, especially in the segment related to design (CAD, BIM, generative design, and so on), remains knowledge, or rather the lack of it, embedded in designs. The complaint that CAD made drawings worse is based on the observation that the knowledge embedded in the drawings has declined. This is undeniably true.
When I used to work on restoration projects, I would be struck by how the original drawings of century-old structures were so much more detailed and in better correspondence with what was actually built, than modern drawings. The challenges created by all the complex knowledge embedded in the built environment are typically underestimated by those who have not spent a lot of time and effort in the muddy swamp water of the physical realities of materials and structures.
I clearly recall, with fondness, an engineer who was a salesman of admixtures (chemicals) for concrete, sitting me down at lunch one day and patiently explaining to me that “sand” is not one thing, not a simple homogeneous material, but a source of lots of relevant complexity. Everywhere we turn in this business, we run into that sort of complexity.
Software people are not used to complexity, because “data” is an abstraction and computing is full of wonderfully controlled interfaces. By contrast, construction is a collection of physical realities that may not be nicely consistent and homogeneous; that change with changes in moisture and temperature; and are subjected to environmental forces (wind, rain, hail, lightning, earthquakes, soil settlements, and so on). In turn, these complex materials have to interface with other materials. Some of the interfaces are well understood and standardized; others are not, and so become a common point of failure. Data does not have to deal with this sort of thing.
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In conjunction with an extremely seasoned and knowledgeable fabricator, I delved into the school renovation project manual and searched for photos of the existing school to better understand the limited information in the contract documents. Turned out the documents made little sense. There was zero correspondence between the detail (called out as one kind of GFRC, but we thought it should be another type, or maybe even cast stone) with no spec for the GFRC.
Before becoming mostly retired, I dealt with this regularly. Now I am astonished and reminded that industry has made so little progress in the problems of design-bid-build as it exists in the real world.
Leo Schlosberg was the founder of Heavyware.com and is now the retired owner at Cary Concrete Products.
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Siemens released an NX With No Name, calling last week’s update to its flagship MCAD program “latest release” sans version number (although captioning during the launch video seems to label it NX 2007). New functions include
NX topology optimization
Design space exploration
NX voice command assistance
Part orientation optimization
The official launch video can be viewed on YouTube.
I’m a little biased, since I sell Solidworks, but everything “new” you described in Solid Edge has been available in Solidworks for several years. I’m not sure I understand why any company would choose Solid Edge over Solidworks. - Sam Scholes, senior account manager Go Engineer
The editor replies: The reluctance could be due to a number of reasons:
Political — they don't want to buy from Dassault
Top-down — they've been told to buy Solid Edge
Compatibility — the customers they deal with also use Solid Edge
Checkboxes — Solid Edge does things competitors do not
UX — they might prefer the way Solid Edge works
For me, UX is the #1 concern in the software I select, followed by checkboxes.
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Thanks for the article on Solid Edge. I already used (giving you credit) the comment [below] to some of my colleagues about our need to learn our interdepartmental processes better so that we can develop better programs that solve the right problems.”
“Solid Edge benefiting from their use of its CAD in its own engineering projects and how that offers insights into development of functions that are otherwise hard to program and that many of their rivals can only dream of offering someday”
Also, Jeremy has a good eye. Thanks for the Dogbert. Scott Adams is another of my favorite authors! -Ron Powell
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I used to work for one of Siemens’ divisions. The engineers weren’t very happy when word came down from the Mother Ship that they had to start using NX, instead of pre-Wildfire Pro/E and ancient seats of AutoCAD. The story everyone heard was that the NX sales force was tired of hearing the question, “So, what CAD software does Siemens use themselves?”
It’s a good example of how weirdly unscientific the sales world is. That question about the software the parent company uses is exactly the kind of question I like to ask of salesmen, just because it’s fun to back them into a corner and watch them flail. But trust me, what software companies use has absolutely zero impact on my buying decisions.
I’ve been on the receiving end of this stuff, too, and remember having to design an optional set of wide tracks for a piece of machinery, on a salesman’s insistence that the customer said the only reason he was buying Deere, instead of ours. was because their tracks were an inch wider.
The older, wiser salesman tried to explain to me that it was just an offhand comment to get the pesky salesman to go away, and that it didn’t matter what we did, the customer wasn’t buying our machines. (He had a large fleet of exclusively Deere equipment).
We did the wide-track option, tested it, and ordered parts for production. As far as I know, those sets of tracks are still on their pallets, twenty years later, slowly rusting into the ground.
Great write up on Solid Edge. It’s one of those options that doesn’t seem to get much attention. - Jess Davis
The editor replies: I worked at a consulting firm before the transition to CAD. They had a look at Intergraph, but $100,000 per seat was too much. Civil engineering is, after all, not all that complex.
Next, they had AutoCAD demo’ed, but when the salesman suggested that a 10MB hard drive would be needed for AutoCAD to work properly, the added cost was deemed prohibitive, about $2,000 at the time. (Later, I found AutoCAD v1.4 worked just fine with two floppy drives.)
They decided on Anvil CAD as their first CAD system, which, as you might guess, was not the best choice. I have no idea how that came about. Some years later, they bought into AutoCAD, but then found they were now somewhat incompatible with Microstation, which the Ministry of Highways used.
Mr Davis responds: I worked for some years at a trencher manufacturer. When I started, they were using Intergraph on Interact workstations. What a strange world that was! I remember the tech replacing a graphics board that was the size of pizza box. He mentioned it was $12,000 or something like that.
I heard about a gigantic inter-departmental war where the IT priesthood locked horns with engineering, they being natural enemies. When it was finished, engineering triumphed by going with a CAD system that ran on a DEC mainframe instead of the IT department’s beloved IBM mainframe, which is what the rest of the company ran on.
By the time I left five years later, they were on Intergraph Microstation PC [written by Bentley Systems, marketed by Intergraph], and at my next job I instituted CAD with a copy of Microstation on a PC that I got from our in-house buyer, because he didn’t like it, and wanted to go back to his green-screen terminal.
I remember harassing the poor guys demo’ing Pro/E with questions like “So, if we buy your software, can we still run in on hardware from Wal-Mart?”
As an electronics and computer tech for > 40 yrs I’ll explain a few things that people don’t get [about erratic cursor movement caused by poorly-located mouse dongles].
No, it’s not Microsoft’s (or the mouse manufacturers’) fault with driver updates. The problem isn’t software, it’s hardware. These devices are radios. Unfortunately (or not, lol) we can’t “see” radio waves. So we can’t see what’s happening, but there are so many devices transmitting in the frequency range used by mice that there can be countless combinations as every environment varies. This is totally a radio interference problem.
It’s not the receiver’s fault, nor faulty design. The need for such small receivers (nano) came from our need for small portable setups (laptops). People hated the large receivers we used to have, they often hit them and broke them. Since the nano receiver is so small, it has a tiny antenna. Larger antenna are less likely to pick up interference. People wanted small. They gave it to us.
Current Logitech Unifying receiver (top), older one (above)
USB plugs are usually grouped. They’re always placed in clumps. That means the device plugged in next to it can interfere, as it’s right beside the mouse receiver. I’ll give you a real example: my Logitech MX mouse’s nano Unifying receiver is plugged directly in the front USB port of my large tower. Worked great. But when I plugged a USB DVD player into the next port, it went nuts! As it’s not unusual to have four or six ports next to each other, your odds aren’t good.
The standard technician’s response to naughty mice has always been “change the port.” While this works, most techs don’t understand why, as they’re computer people, not electronics people. It’s radio interference.
“But it worked for years like this!!” Your environment changed. You got a new printer that’s plugged in next to it. You got a new cellphone or cordless phone, etc, etc, etc. You can’t see radio waves. Something changed, not the mouse.
The batteries are low. A strong signal can cut through the interference, but as the batteries get weaker (or in the case of built-in rechargeables, they’re aging and aren’t as strong), that lowers the power and raises the interference effect. Your mouse isn’t shouting loud enough to be heard.
It’s money! Yep, the good ole $$$. Not the receiver’s fault. The USB plugs next to or near it are not shielded. Virtually all wires nowadays are fully shielded or our electronic world would grind to a halt with interference problems between devices. Unshielded wires act as long antennas and everything would be interfering with every other thing that had a cord. However, it’s expensive and difficult to shield the plug, and the bean counters object to a pair of $0.50 plugs on a $1 wire, so the engineers are overruled and they ahve to use a $0.10 plug that’s not shielded. Guess what’s right next to your nano receiver? Yep, that unshielded plug.
So there you go. It’s spelled “i n t e r f e r e n c e!” This is the solution: moving the receiver away from the interference allows it to be heard. Awesome fix, Ralph! - RM (on WorldCAD Access)
Notable Quotable
“Let’s face it, Facebook and Twitter are charities that allow you to donate free data to needy billionaires. Say what you want about Bezos and Musk, they actually produce something other than mental illness.” - Iowa Hawk
Thank You, Readers
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Issue # 1,121 | Inside the Business of CAD | 7 February 2022
CAD Direct integrating parts and assemblies from NX and Solidworks
The Siemens CAD universe centers around NX, with Solid Edge the oft-overlooked stepchild. It’s just as powerful as any mid-level MCAD rival, such as Solidworks or Inventor from Dassault Systemes and Autodesk, yet lacks the mindshare of these rivals.
Part of the problem stems from a history of bouncing between homes. Born at Intergraph, it was adopted by Unigraphics, passed along to EDS, sent back to UGS, and now calls Siemens its home.
Another issue affecting Solid Edge, as I see it, is that its powerful hybrid Synchronous Technology (ST) is saddled by a perplexing (and initially over-hyped) combination of smart direct and parametric modeling. The typical machine shop designer hasn’t shown much in the way of enthusiasm for ST, its biggest differentiator from competitors.
Yet, if it’s stability you want, then Solid Edge is the one for you. Autodesk and Dassault are bedazzled and distracted (and so far failing) in moving their mid-range MCAD offerings fully to the cloud.
By contrast, Siemens repeatedly makes clear that MCAD belongs on the desktop, full stop. Sure, ancillary functions, like co-designing and PLM, are suitable for running on the cloud. So, Siemens offers Solid Edge users cloud-based products like Xcelerator Share for collaboration and Teamcenter X for product lifecycle management.
What’s New in Solid Edge 2022
When I saw what is new in Solid Edge 2022, I felt like I was back in the glory days of CAD. Here was a release claiming over 500 enhancements, a far cry from other CAD systems that these days might be satisfied by offering customers a third way to view symbols and such.
Let me walk you through some of the new and improved functions that I found most interesting.
CAD Direct places parts and assemblies from NX, JT, and Solidworks files into Solid Edge models. Copies of the foreign b-reps are stored in an intermediary format, called “internal components,” in Solid Edge’s assembly file. There are no external files, solving that particular data management problem.
To the user, the imported part/assembly looks and acts like a Solid Edge one. In the figure at the top of the article, an imported part is highlighted in green. Mates, constraints, and so on work with it.
You are, for instance, designing a locomotive but are sourcing the electrical generator from another supplier. You don’t need to edit the generator; it’s done. You just need to place it so that you can connect bolts and electrical connections to the locomotive. Should the supplier update the generator, the copy in your locomotive design changes, should you wish it to.
In Pathfinder’s model tree, foreign models are tagged as “external.” Nevertheless, a link is maintained if possible, so that when changes are made to the model in the originating CAD system, they are reflected in Solid Edge.
Dan Staples, Siemens vp of mainstream engineering, told me that in the future additional MCAD systems will be supported by CAD Direct, but that it works most reliably with Parasolid-based CAD programs, as they use the same geometric kernel as Solid Edge.
Point clouds are new to Solid Edge 2022, catching up with competitors. In the past, points were displayed as triangles or b-reps; now they remain points.
Each point of the millions or billions point generated by laser scanners carries color and x-y-z data. An assembly in Solid Edge can have multiple point clouds, components can be placed among them, and measurements take between solids and point clouds. “Rendering them, as they are being rotated at high speed, is secret sauce stuff,” explained Mr Staples to me, with a straight face.
Convergent modeling is the technology through which Solid Edge lets you work with b-reps (solids) and meshes (facets) at the same time. Meshes are typically imported from scans and non-CAD sources like 3D gaming development software. In Solid Edge 2022, you can, say, scan a handle in 3D, bring it into Solid Edge, and then cut a hole into it using Boolean subtraction of solids, as shown in below.
Performing solid modeling operations on a mesh part
“The big nut to crack was Boolean operations between b-reps and facet meshes, but the result [in the past] was facets; now, everything stays in their form,” Mr Staples said. Meshes stay meshes, solids stay solids. (Dassault Systemes has something similar that it calls Polyhedra.)
Some mesh elements can be converted outright to equivalent solids. When it comes to exporting hybrid models, however, solids still are converted to meshes. “You’re never complete, but I’d say we’re very close to completion,” said Mr Staples.
Related to this, Solid Edge Simulation gains hydrostatic pressure simulation. It now performs analyses on mesh models, and is better at remeshing frames prior to stress analysis.
Dynamic visualization creates visual reports by colorizing models according to rules. For example, you can color all components that are from a specific supplier in blue, designed by a specific employee in green, or made from a specific material, such as copper, as shown below.
Dynamically visualizing parts in an assembly
Parts are filtered, colored, and hidden according to rules that you write; rules can be shared with others. This lets you see if the assembly is made from the correct materials, or search more easily for suppliers already being tapped for components in the model.
Free computer-aided manufacturing is now available to all Solid Edge 2022 users on subscription. The CAM Pro 2.5-axis milling software runs as an external program, but is associative with Solid Edge models. It automates tool path creation and generates machining visualizations. New in 2022 is adaptive tool paths, as shown below.
Running CAM Pro on a part designed in Solid Edge
Not free, but also new to Solid Edge 2022, is Simcenter Flomaster from Siemens. It extracts geometry from your model, and then simulates 1D fluid flows through full and partial networks of pipes. In the demo that I saw, it handled pressure pulses from compressors.
Other improvements include Solid Edge opening very large assemblies ten times faster than before. It does this by first showing just a 3D image of the assembly, which you can rotate and turn the visibility of parts off and on. To edit parts, you select just the ones you want loaded.
Synchronous Technology gains the radiate function. With it, you make changes to diameters of shafts, with holes and slots changing automatically to accommodate the new size.
Rules-based configurators are used to design variations of products, based on a single model. Solid Edge 2022 embeds a new Design Configurator (not based on RuleStream or Driveworks) that stores configuration rules with the CAD model.
Xcelerator Share is much like using a CAD-oriented Dropbox for sharing files and commenting on them. It is similar to collaboration offerings from other CAD vendors, and it runs on any computer or tablet, including Chromebooks. Like PTC’s Vuforia, it includes augmented reality for placing Solid Edge models visually in the real world.
What Ralph Grabowski Thinks
Never mind the cloud.
Solid Edge benefits from a company with deep pockets making advances in NX, and then spinning them off to Solid Edge. On top of that, Siemens uses its CAD in its own engineering projects. No other CAD vendor can make the claim.
So, Solid Edge offers functions that are otherwise tough to program and that many of its direct rivals dream of offering some day.
Project Newplex 2.0 is the advanced SHX font designed for technical documents; compatible with every DWG-based CAD program that supports Unicode SHX files.
Features!
Advanced character forms for readability & clarity
Tech Soft 3D updated its HOOPS 2022 SDK [software development kit] for 2022 with support for Apple’s M1 CPUs, an updated animation manager, new physics-based rendering, and IFC spatial relationships. Register for a 60-day evaluation from techsoft3d.com/products/hoops/native-platform.
In related news, multiple reports suggest Microsoft is dropping its Hololens XR hardware. As well, Mozilla is shutting down its VR Web browser, and Meta during the last fiscal year lost $10 billion on its meta operations.
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Here are some of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
Regarding the slanted toaster in your January 10th newsletter. Perhaps a designer at T-Fal had seen this strip from Dilbert: dilbert.com/strip/1989-04-19. - Jeremy TePaske, mechanical designer Smithco
Notable Quotable
“If expert advice does not align with the government/corporate desires, then experts are changed until the advice meets the government/corporate goal.” - Elsergio Volador
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine. To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:
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