![]() ![]() I do not know if it is useful for CAD in general. This software seems to be offered primarily as a front end to ordering custom designed parts. To install on a 64 bit Ubuntu system, the best advice I have found so far is here (google translation of Spanish page). Additional tutorials are available on YouTube.Ĭan be downloaded from the vendor. Most likely situation is the one that's played out a few times before: acquire your vendor.Support for other formats: "An assortment of geometric converters to convert to and/or from other geometry formats, including Euclid, ACAD, AutoCAD DXF, TANKILL, Wavefront OBJ, Pro/ENGINEER, JACK (the human factors model for doing workload/usability studies), Viewpoint Data Lab, NASTRAN, Digital Equipment's Object File Format (OFF), Virtual Reality Mark-up Language (VRML), Stereo Lithography (STL), Cyberware Digitizer data, and FASTGEN4."ĭraftSight has a Resource Center with manuals and tutorials. So if you push them away, that revenue will be hard to replace. But on the other hand, there are only so many Boeings out there. On one hand, yeah, the CAD vendor could play hardball and hold a client hostage. Part of the contracted agreement is to have a software team on the vendor side work with the engineering team on the design side to produce essentially a custom fork of the software. I'm not sure about Boeing specifically, but I do know that their competitors work very closely with their CAD vendors. The vendor/client relationship is a lot more collaborative and symbiotic than most people would think. > I wonder if big aerospace and defense companies like Boeing, and automakers, and heavy industry, and so on, might decide it's in their interests to collectively buy and open-source an existing commercial CAD package rather than risk being held hostage to the vendors that gatekeep their engineering. Most of the free CAD programs bail before they deal with problems that hard. You might have a design constraint that the chamfered thread can never be thinner than some specified width, to avoid bits of metal flaking off as the bolt is tightened. You can zoom way in and take a close look. The CAD program must correctly and precisely describe what happens to the thread as it is cut by the chamfer. Then, at the end of the bolt, you cut a chamfer by extruding a triangle around a circle and subtracting that from the bolt. Then you extrude the thread cross section along a spiral, subtracting that from the cylinder, to cut the threads. Then you draw and dimension a thread cross section. Constructive solid geometry is hard, because you can use complex forms to cut into complex forms, and have to represent the result.Ī typical exercise in a good CSG program is to model a bolt. Autodesk used to have a staff geometer, and probably still does. ![]() This means Boeing can have some fancy nTopology-created parts in their planes without having to blow up their CAD/PLM systems.ĬAD math is hard and severely limits contributors. Folks like nTopology have done a good job side stepping these concerns as they built a CAD tool that does a specific function (generative design) that can't be done in traditional CAD kernels and can be sold for very high value-add situations - ie designs that need very high performance from the uniquely optimized geometries that they're able to generate, and export files that play nice with regular CAD. There are kernels like ParaSolid with import/export/conversion systems, but they're not trustworthy enough to really put the 787 into new CAD without so many bugs that you'd lose a year fixing them and likely be paranoid forever wondering if you got them all. InterOp is also hard, file formats are complex/proprietary/inconsistently implemented. I believe CAD tools have 50x less $ investment (including big companies) than software dev tools. This has essentially led to an oligopoly in mechanical CAD, and slow pace of innovation in the space. There also aren't that many new huge hardware companies, meaning that folks like OnShape get SMEs, but virtually all enterprise is taken. Ex: Boeing isn't putting the CAD for the 787 in OnShape - ever. High switching costs: there are four big CAD companies: Dassault, Autodesk, Siemens, PTC, and once a company commits to one ecosystem, it's very hard to change. Another core problem is that MechE's can't easily edit the tool they're using when they run into a bug/feature they want to work on, unlike open source software where the users can more easily be contributors. have remained hobbyist CAD, where we've seen the success of open source in software. Unlike many open source projects, you need a pretty big core team to make something worth using. CAD math is hard and severely limits contributors. There are a few problems with making new CAD, especially open source: ![]()
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