Last week, Geomagic acquired Sensable’s 3D design and haptics businesses. Sensable is best known for two things: Their force-feedback haptic input devices, and their voxel-based organic shape modeling software.

The combination of Geomagic and Sensable makes a lot of sense, from a business and technical perspective. And, admittedly, the combination has a high cool factor.  Check out this video showing how the Sensable Phantom works:

www.geomagic.com

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Here’s an amateurish video I shot at SolidWorks World with Mark Driscoll, of 3Dconnexion, showing their new SpaceMouse Pro.

3Dconnexion

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During the same period, other companies also sold fast Camaros. Though GM’s official policy in the late 60′s and early 70′s was that they didn’t support drag racing, there was a way to get nearly drag-ready cars, if you knew the trick. A few dealers, notably Yenko Chevrolet, managed to get Chevrolet to install Corvette 427ci L-72 engines in Camaros, through the “central office purchase order” process. These factory hot rod COPO Camaros came with a full factory warranty. Nearly perfect examples have sold for over $2.2 million USD at auction.

Muscle cars have little to do with CAD, but I was reminded of these cars, at least by analogy, when I was at the SolidWorks World 2012 show, in San Diego, last week.

While there, I attended a press conference announcing HP’s new Z1 engineering workstation. This machine is sort of analogous to a factory hot rod. It comes with a stunning 27” built in display, a quad-core Intel Xeon processor, NVIDIA Quadro graphics, and uses ECC (error correction code) memory—which is particularly desirable for critical engineering software applications (See Wikipedia’s entry on ECC memory for background on this.)

There’s no doubt that the Z1 costs more than a typical commodity PC. But, for people doing serious CAD, CAE, or CAM work, the performance and reliability the system offers is worth the premium.

While at SolidWorks World, I also had a chance to chat with Rick Krause, CEO of BOXX Technologies. BOXX makes what could be considered the equivalent of a tuner-built hot rod. Their 3DBOXX 3970 XTREME workstation is designed to provide the best performance possible for serious 3D CAD work. That is, it’s performance isn’t tuned for doing spreadsheets and web browsing (which benefit from multiple core processors), it’s tuned for doing serious CAD work (which requires fewer, but faster cores.)

Let’s go back to the car analogy: Yenko Chevrolet sold stock Camaros, with the biggest and best engines GM offered. Baldwin Chevrolet sold hot-rodded Camaros, also with the biggest and best engines GM offered, but tuned to put out over 500+ horsepower (while still being streetable.)

The HP Z1 engineering workstations use Intel’s biggest and best processors. The BOXX XTREME workstations also use Intel’s biggest and best processors – tuned (overclocked) for the most horsepower.

BOXX doesn’t really like to use the work “overclock,” because it implies that they’re pushing the processor past it’s design spec. BOXX works closely with Intel, to make sure they stay within the processor design specs. Since they use liquid-cooling, they can push the processor faster, without reliability problems. Their workstations are backed-up by a 3 year warranty, and, in their history of selling overclocked systems, they’ve never experienced a processor failure.

If you’re a serious CAD, CAE, or CAM user, and you can out-run your current computer, you need to take a serious look at getting a factory-built or tuner-built hot rod computer.

HP Z1 Workstation

BOXX Technologies 3DBOXX 3970 XTREME Workstation

 Photo courtesy Baldwin-Motion

3D CAD Tips

The term “expensive graphics card” might be troubling to GPU suppliers such as Nvidia and AMD. Yet, it is probably more accurate than, for example, “high-performance graphics card.” For many years, all graphics subsystems used in CAD capable computers (whether built-in, or on an add-in card) have been relatively high-performance. When comparing entry-level with top-of-the-line graphics, the most stark difference is price: free (something that comes with the computer), versus not-free (something you need to pay extra for.)

It’s only after you’ve come to the conclusion that it’s worth paying that extra that you need to start digging into the question: How much extra?

The practical differences between $100 graphics cards and $2000 graphics cards are not all that obvious to the uninitiated. There is no simple number-of-merit on a specification sheet that will tell you how good a graphics card is. To choose well, you need to start by doing a little homework.

A good starting point is AMD’s ebook, Simplifying the World of Professional Graphics. It’s well worth the read, even if you’re already reasonably knowledgeable about graphics hardware.

3D CAD Tips

According to the company, getReal3D brings a greater sense of immersion to Unity applications for training and simulations. By integrating with head and hand tracking devices, the software provides more intuitive interaction with data and models. Combined with large screen displays and viewer-centered perspective, users are able to walk in and around 3D objects, extending the realism of a wide variety of situational simulations that require a perception of presence and life-size scale.

The product allows developers to focus on the content rather than the display platform. Its simple plug-in library manages all of the configuration information of the display system external of the application. A single executable is capable of running on many types of displays without the developer ever needing to know the specific details of the display system.

getReal3D is available worldwide. For more information, go to www.mechdyne.com/getreal3d.aspx.

Mechdyne

www.mechdyne.com

3D CAD Tips

EVAs are extensive printed-circuit board (PCB) networks that contain various TI chips. User guides describe the PCB set-up in relation to the particular board. The user guide describes the characteristics, operation, and EVM-user specifics.

The SwitcherPro evaluation tool helps you design power supplies specific to TI’s controllers, low-power DC/DC converters, and SWIFT point-of-load (POL) step-down DC/DC products. This software creates and manages your design with various internal tools and results. Design data such as efficiency curves and stability loop curves are available with this product.

The SwitcherPro has EVM designs embedded within the software offering circuit diagram suggestions for all power supply designs. The circuit diagrams show you the resistive, inductive, and capacitive elements surrounding the converter along with suggested values.

TINA-TI is a circuit simulation tool based on a SPICE engine. This circuit simulation engine provides DC, transient, and frequency domain analysis of SPICE circuits. TINA also has a post-processing capability that allows you to customize the format of the results.

To complete the design cycle, go back to the evaluation module, change the values as suggested by SwitcherPro, verify by using TINA-TI simulations, and test the new circuit on the EVM.

This post was written by Bonnie C. Baker, Signal Integrity Engineer at Texas Instrument

Texas Instruments

www.ti.com

3D CAD Tips

Product users will experience a simplified, intuitive set of viewing, editing, and markup tools to work on designs while on the go. You can open drawings from email attachments, sync files from the web, or upload drawings directly from AutoCAD software through the integrated online tab. Drawings can also be saved locally for use in the field when an Internet connection is unavailable.

One feature is the text annotation tool that supports integrated voice commands available on devices running Android 2.2 (Froyo) or above. Now Android users can insert comments and notations on a drawing simply by speaking rather than typing them into the text edit box.

Additional feature enhancements that are available with this release include: 

• Plot to PDF (web app only): Users can publish their DWG drawing to PDF using the free AutoCAD WS web application just as they would with AutoCAD software.
• Anywhere Storage (web and mobile apps): In addition to the AutoCAD WS cloud, customers can now connect directly to alternate storage folders from their Android, iPad and iPhone devices, as well as through the AutoCAD WS web application. This currently includes: the Autodesk Buzzsaw service, Dropbox (through DropDAV), Microsoft SharePoint, Windows Server 2008, Box.net, MobileMe, and Egnyte, and other cloud storage providers who support the WebDAV protocol.

Autodesk

www.autodesk.com

3D CAD Tips

DraftSight for Linux allows users to create, edit and view DWG files.  DraftSight generally takes a few minutes to download and runs on multiple operating systems, including Linux and Mac OS in beta, and Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 in general release. 

DraftSight beta users have access to no-cost Community Support available within the DraftSight open, online SwYm community where they can access support and training resources, along with an environment to interact, ask questions and share their opinions.  The DraftSight community is one of the first social networks designed by engineers for engineers, designers, and architects. 

Dassault Systemes

www.3ds.com

3D CAD Tips

In early 2011, Simon added Formula One (F1) racecar designer to his resume, with the world debut of Hispania Racing’s (HRT) F111 car. As HRT enters its second season in the most competitive motorsport on Earth, they reached out to Simon to create strong and iconic livery for their 2011 car.

The first thing Simon tackled was to divide the car graphically into attractive red sponsors areas, and zones of freedom — the latter being distorted shapes where no sponsor sticker works. For the sponsor areas, there are many rules – F1 is one of the most expansive marketing fields in sports. Then, Simon filled the free zone with checkered flags and large racing numbers – “a playful, almost retro-romantic racing approach that I missed in this very serious sport,” claims Simon. The last touch was adding little humorous warning messages to resemble the look of modern aircraft. The reaction from the team and fans, when the F111 car was unveiled was overwhelming.

To turn the massive production CAD data of the F1 car into photo real images overnight for the season premiere, Simon relied on Bunkspeed SHOT Pro 3D rendering software running on NVIDIA Quadro 6000 professional graphics solutions.

“I had less than a day to render the complete press package for the global launch of the HRT F111 – which included 16 images at 5K resolution – there was no room for failure,” continues Simon. “With Bunkspeed SHOT Pro running on NVIDIA Quadro 6000 GPUs I was able to make the impossible happen, and complete the project in roughly 6.5 hours. It would have taken me twice as long if I used a traditional rendering solution running on CPUs.”

Bunkspeed

www.bunkspeed.com

NVIDIA

www. nvidia.com

3D CAD Tips

A test machine featured two Intel Xeon X5680 processors, but instead of the 3.33GHz clock speed they usually run at, both chips have been overclocked to an 4.2GHz. Naturally, this creates a lot of heat and a sophisticated liquid cooled sub-system is used to keep them running within their thermal limits.

The result of having two Xeon chips run at such speeds is an exceptionally fast workstation. It recorded the fastest ever time our 3ds Max benchmark, using its 12 physical and 12 virtual HyperThreading cores to full effect, rendering the test scene in 96 seconds.

It also made light work of our PowerMill CAM test, setting new records when running two and three tests concurrently.

The BOXX 8550 Xtreme is also well equipped in the graphics department. The 2GB Quadro 4000, one of Nvidia’s high-end Fermi graphics cards, recorded impressive results in our SolidWorks graphics test.

Storage is a little underwhelming for a machine of this caliber, comprising one 160GB 2.5” 7,200RPM SATA hard drive for operating system and applications and a 500GB drive for storage.

However, optional Solid State Drives (SSDs) are also available in sizes of 60GB – 256GB. All drives are tucked behind the motherboard.

BOXX Technologies

www.boxxtech.com

3D CAD Tips