CAD Atomic Blog

Well, the Christmas/Holiday season has passed us by and now we are in the year 2010. I am curious to see what 2010 will bring us, especially in the PLM market. Solid Edge should have it's 3rd release of Synchronous Technology out if they continue to follow their traditional release cycle. This is one area that I'm watching with much anticipation. With ST2 we saw the birth of a new type of Synchronous feature which resembles a "history based" feature in that it is associative to it's defining sketch, but in this new type of feature, the sketch is not a separate feature, but rather becomes part of the Synchronous feature. This is not exactly new to Solid Edge, as it has always allowed sketches to be created as part of a feature in the older versions which is now the "Traditional" modeling environment, but this is new to Synchronous Technology and works a little differently. It was applied to the Synchronous Helix feature first and was delivered in ST2. Wha...

Trying to figure out how the title ties into CAD :) Well, it doesn't unless you know my background. Today, I was treated to lunch by my boss. Quite a nice gesture, and we had a good lunch at a chinese buffet (rough afternoon now!). One of the required items at any chinese buffet is the fortune cookie. Mine read "Your curiousity will lead you to great achievements.". Got to thinking about it and it is so right! My curiousity about everything has given me a broad knowledge about a large variety of topics, including CAD. In fact, my success in the CAD world is in large part due to my curiousity. I like to know how things work. I used to tear apart mechanical items just to see what made them tick (my father was really upset about the rototiller and dirt bike). I treated CAD much the same. I had to know what was there and how it worked and I had to quiz the developers how things interacted under the hood. To me, it was fun. I craved it. I still do. Here's to ho...

Solid Edge ST2 is now shipping to customers and is available for download. A couple notable new features are Solid Edge Simulation and Synchronous Sheet Metal. Solid Edge Simulation is a an embedded implementation of Siemens PLM's standalone FEA product FEMAP. Prior to ST2, Solid Edge shipped with a feature called FEMAP Express (now called "Simulation Express" in ST2) which was limited in load/constraint options and to single parts. In ST2, Simulation Express is still what's included with the product but Solid Edge Simulation can optionally be purchased as an add-on license through your normal sales channel. The good news is that Solid Edge ST2 does come with a temporary license for Solid Edge Simulation good through December, so install early so that you can try it out. Now as I mentioned earlier, Solid Edge Simulation is an integrated implementation of FEMAP. What this means is that it has a lot of FEMAP's capabilities, but the UI is Solid Edge's which mea...

I thought I would throw out some thoughts out on a term that some individuals are throwing around like they just pioneered it. The term is "Digital Prototyping". Lets start of first by defining what it means. Essentially it means that whatever design checks you might have gone through with a physical model, you are now doing with a virtual model at least up front to reduce the number of physical models needed to prove a design. So for instance, if you were designing a new car door handle: The old school method would be to get a physical prototype made of the actual material using temporary aluminum mold tooling costing 10's of thousands of dollars and waiting weeks to get it and then mount it into a special fixture with data aq and servos/pneumatics to simulate Bruno opening his car door. If it failed, start over, spend 10's of thousands of dollars again and wait weeks. The Virtual Prototyping method would be to load your 3D CAD model into one of the many FEA packages...

It has been a really long time since I have posted (8 months!). What can I say, I've been busy! I'm sure you can relate. What have I been doing? Work of course. Getting ready for my oldest's graduation from High School (I'm feeling really old). BETA Testing :) Accepting a position on the PLM World Board of Directors. Wait a second, what was that last one? Yes, I've taken on the role of representing You, the Solid Edge user, at PLM World. Now before you go off thinking "Wow! Grundey got himself a nice cushy board position making fat wads of cash.", let me burst your bubble and tell you; there is no compensation! So why am I doing it? Well, there was a variety of reasons: Somebody needs to represent Solid Edge at PLM World Somebody thought I would be a good Solid Edge representative I was silly enought to say "Yes" Now, here's the hard part. I need your help. That's right, I can't do it all my self. So what can you do? Well, le...