One of the things that puzzles me in traffic is the large number of people that drive around with one or more broken lights on the car. You will not see any difference if you miss a rear light, but missing one of your head lights surely should be noticed by the reduced visibility of the road ahead. In both cases, a regular check of you lights will make you aware of the problem, IF you do a check. In the “IF” lays the problem, because we do not tend to check regularly.If you do not have a built in warning of malfunctioning electronic parts in you car, you will probably be warned by other participants in traffic if you pay attention to it.

What is the parallel with engineering? Well, it is the awareness that things can be improved, but we don’t know it. We are not going to ask for improvements until we know it can be better and we are not asking for solutions for problems we do not see.

This may sound very straight forward, but it is a challenge in itself. Very frequently I visit companies where I get into talks about efficiency. Of course there are always things that are mentioned as issues where a solution is desired. Problems in systems performance, data management, information flow are known in organisations. The risk is in the priority of the problems and in the savings of the solution. In several cases improvements could be proposed that the organisation is not aware of, but offered more savings against a much lesser effort.

What is required for this this a regular “self check” of your engineering organisation. Ask yourself some fundamental questions. What is the purpose of our activity? What is input and output? (and please verify what is the real required output, in some cases engineering departments create output that nobody is using). How do we measure the effectiveness? etc. Only after that, look at the methods and tasks at hand and dare to question every single one of them.

If you do this right, and if possible with some help from outside, you should be able to come up with a longer list of improvements. Now these improvements can be listed in order of merits, following the Pareto principle. It helps you to spend you time and budget on the improvement plans with the highest output.

In parallel to the car lights: it helps you to follow your path with a clearer view on the future…

Third day of SolidWorks traditionally has a known protocol, starting with a video compilation of many moments of conference experience and ending with the announcement of next conference’s venue. I would like to go over a few items that were covered in between.

Enhancement Request Top 10, this year presented by SolidWorks “family members” from the early hours, is the most visible proof how SolidWorks invites the user comunity to express which enhancement would really make their life easier. This list is built from user input where users can come with ideas and vote for ideas from others.

Very impressive was the interview of Marie Planchard with Tom Atchinson of Rocket Maverics who started to turn students into junior rocket scientists. He lets children work on small space projects in different levels of complexity, but let them really bring technology into space. In the video shown on stage you could see the excitement shining off their faces as they see their rocket launch into space to deliver a payload the worked on as a team. SolidWorks embraces this kind of initiatives and in this case offered to sponsor Tom’s next launch.

NVIDIA took me by surprise. As a platinum sponsor they were allowed to have a few minutes on stage. NVIDIA took the opportunity to show a few valuable innovations. First there was the alpha version of eDrawings for Android live on stage (one of the top 10 requests) shown on a Tesla powerd Nexus 7 tablet. Next was the statement that with NVIDIA’s GRID Enterprise technology it is possible to run SolidWorks with full 3D accelleration via Citrix over the web. With this we have SolidWorks 2013 (yes, the actual current version) available as a cloud based solution. As a punch line a video was shown of SolidWorks running on a MacBook air.

The main dish of day 3 traditionaly is a preview of next major SolidWorks release. This time the number of improvement were aimed at the user community. Instead of spreading time over all kind of different products in the SolidWorks portfolio, the product team focussed on the large number of productivity improvement in the main CAD product. Many seemingly small improvement, but with high impact on productivity, were presented in a very entertaining context. The product team came up with crazy product ideas and explained new functionality as in a typical TellSell TV show. In my opinion the content and amount of improvements proves that SolidWorks is fully committed to its user community and delivers improvement that directly benefit their daily work.

SolidWorks 2014 will bring us again one step closer to the ultimate goal: Design Without Limits!

Looking forward to a great SolidWorks 2014 coming this year and all the other innovations that will accompany it. Let’s see where we are in a year from now as we meet again in San Diego, California.

In today’s general session on SolidWorks World the first speakers elaborated a bit more on the community factor. The role SolidWorks User Group Network was emphasized with 223 usergroups worldwide. The Certification Program also has  its 15th anniversary with 89.000 certifications passed and 3.5 million questions answered during the years and the Beta Contest Awards were where users play an important role to improve our software.

After that, two more, very interesting speakers made clear that the community of who we can learn stretches beyond our human society. Professor Vijay Kumar from the University of Pennsylvania showed some amazing video’s of autonomous flying mini-robots that can perform colaborative tasks in groups. To be able to do this, the researchers looked at the way ants move paricles in a group and how a swarm of birds changes direction in flight. To see the robots, called quadrotors, in action you can watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sUeGC-8dyk&feature=youtube_gdata_player

The smallest type of these crafts weighs only 72 grams and they are extremely agile in flight. During development SolidWorks was heavily used to optimize the characteristics.

Also on stage Festo showed some innovative designs derived from mechanics present in animals. The Robotino includes two of these biomimicry applications. They used flexible pneumatic actuators in the robot arm to allow it to move like a trunk of an elephant. For the grabber fingers a principle was used that can be observed in tail finns of some fishes. The principle was demonstrated with a 3D “printed” part live on stage, causing an exited buzz in the audience of mechanics who were already thinking of many other applications of this.

The idea of biomimicry probably is as old as human kind itself. A well known example is Otto Liliental who started experiments in 1867 studying bird’s flight in order to build wings for humans to fly. I’m sure he would be amazed about what we can do today, as shown on SolidWorks World. I guess he would have liked the remote controlled, wing flapping bird of Festo best as it was flying over the 4500 heads present in the audience…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnR8fDW3Ilo&feature=youtube_gdata_player

SolidWorks World 2013 has finally started on Monday with the general session. The underlying message was all about the power of community as was to be expected from the early signals. SolidWorks’ CEO Bertrand Sicot pointed out some numbers for the 4500 attendees that made the trip to Orlando: Solidworks passed the 2 million users barrier…..

Evidence of this tight bond SolidWorks has with its community is shown by the fact that still 90% of the product enhancements are based on user input, including the newly added backward compatibility that was very highly appreciated by the croud. Ather proof can be found in the presence in education. More than 25000 schools use SolidWorks to teach their students ranging from 9 year old to adult age.

SolidWorks will continue to invest in this community by offering possibilities for people to connect and collaborate more tightly than ever before. First a new platform is announced called My.SolidWorks.com. It is based on Dassault Systemes ExaLead and NetVibes and aims to allow users to find engineering knowledge in all kind of internetsources like blogs and social networks filtered from the irrelevant “noise”.

A real breaktrough I see in the completely new technology that was presented: SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual. It will allow a level of real time collaboration that has not been seen before. What I like most, besides the absence from files, versions, etc., is the concept of parts that learn from usage in other situation. If a component is mated (if this still will be calledthat way?) in one occasion it wil look for a possibility to “behave” similar in a next occasion. Be this way reuse of best practice is opened to a much more social way.

The general session closed with a presentation about the record, and sound breaking jump of Felix Baumgartner. A group varying from 12 to 50 people worked together for 5 years to make this happen. I saw a lot of similarities to what we learned at NASA the other day. A true example of this year’s SWW slogan: Design Without Limits

If something that may seem complicated, but it really isn’t, we tend to say “it isn’t rocket science”. Well, today we are going to look for some real rocket science. Since there is some free time only on Sunday, we wanted to use it well and look for some inspiration in the neigbourhood of the convention centre: Kennedy Space Centre.

Proud as they are entitled to be, NASA display their paramount of achievements in the KSC Visitor Complex at The Cape. Of course the astronauts take a lot of credits for it, but I would like to speak for all the engineers making it all possible. Just try to imagine the physics related to the following numbers:

The Saturn V rocket used to launch the Apollo missions to the moon is around 100m high, weighs approx. 3 milion kilograms, of which 91% is fuel. The power its first stage unleashes is equal to 160.000.000 Horse Power. Is something goes wrong and the rockets would explode, the force would be comparable with a nuclear explosion. The rocket was assembled in a 150m high, single story factory that was purpose built, large enough to contain two times the volume of the Empire State building. The list goes on…

What is impressive about this is what people can achieve if you set a goal – “… We will go to the mean in this decade…” and, admitted, with a nice sum of US tax money. Nevertheless those engineers and scientists had to solve many problems that never had to be solved before. Complete new areas had to be explored on terrain like metalurgy, structural strength, chemics, computer science, physics and human science. These heros in the background had to walk the thin line between bravery and unaccceptable risk, unfortunately not everytime on th right side. I vividly remember the testimonies of Gene Krantz and Jim Lovell on SolidWorks World 2011 where they we explaining how they got Apollo 13 back home alive, aided by their engineers improvising to the maximum.

It is funny that with today’s technology where we probably have more computing power in a dish washer than in the entire Apollo program we still did not bring people further than the Apollo missions did. I guess the changing political climate has some influence on it noe we don’t see the same amount of mutual threat between great powers. Today most of the work in space is done remotely, with aid of robots. Next steps for manned space exploration will most likely have to come from private initiatives is the common belief.

We, with our feet both on the ground, are mostly concerned with solving earthly problems. We do our best to do it betterevery day and… with SolidWorks. I do take the inspiration from NASA that we don’t have to stop if when most people say it can’t be done.

“Space, the final frontier… “, written by captain James T. Kirk in his captain’s log, will probably remain true words for a while…

Do you know the story about the sales manager,  CEO and the technical manager who were sitting in a three seat row aboard a 767-300 for 8 hours? Sound like an imaginatory tale or the start of a bad joke, but I am in it today, crossing the Atlantic at 10.000km altitude. To be honest it isn’t quite unproductive after all. There are more expensive venues where management teams retreat to get out of the daily flow and contemplate about ideas.

For us it is a nice opportunity to discuss some ideas we neglected in the rush of the Q4 and the new year’s start up. The nice thing is that we are never short of ideas at Cadmes, but the challenge is to prioritize and execute. We are also talking about what to expect from SolidWorks World 2013. The days of the conference are just as tightly packed with planned events as the economy class compartment of our airliner, so we should not fear to get bored.

The question will be what the “big picture” will that SolidWorks is going to convey to the user community. I am guessing that a key role will be reserved for the users as a driving community and that SolidWorks will do ever more to give this community more means to open up communication with other users and SolidWorks itself. It would’t be surprising if you consider that designing and engineering is mainly a communication process in itself designers must put ideas and concept in a language to convey it to others. (in that context we might even consider the acronym C.A.D., computer aided design, as a “catch all” for every software function used to “aid” design)

What I’m looking for at SWW2013 is how SolidWorks is going to put it all together in its offering. On one side there is the growing arsenal of disciplines in the SolidWorks product suite, including the recently added SolidWorks electrical that was warmly welcomed by a lot of Cadmes customers in 2012. On the other side there several options to collaborate and communicate within and between design teams like the latest “social network” function in SolidWorks Enterprise PDM.

We will keep you informed about what we learn during SWW2013 during the coming days. Please stay tuned to this blog. Lunch is served now by a flight attendant asking the traditional question.. “chicken or beef?”…

Off we go!

During Christmas holiday, my youngest son (8 years old) wanted to try SolidWorks. I suggested him to work through the Dutch educational tutorial. At some point I wanted to advise him to save his work and asked him to click on the “floppy” icon, whereafter he replied to me “what is a floppy?”…

It made me aware again how quickly we have adapted to the concept of no longer storing data on magnetic devices (tapes or disks) that dominated computer technology for over 30 years. Of course for today’s data, diskettes are no longer sufficient in capacity; a single 8 megapixel photo taken with my smart phone would require 2 HD 3,5” discs or 8 (!) DD 5,25” discs. Why should we bother since nowadays we can buy a 16GB sd card (about 11377 times the capacity of one HD diskette) for around €10,-…

Why do we still use the floppy icon (where floppy is actually even a wrong word for it because this refers to the old, black, soft 5,25″ disk type) for the save function. Some exceptions left aside, most commercial software applications use the diskette as a symbol for “save”. It has become a metaphor for the ability to store something.

In the world of engineering we sometimes come across habits that also have an origin in principles that are history for some time. A nice example is the use of item numbers or drawing numbers in PDM. Back in the days where we had to store paper drawings in large cabinets it made sense to name the drawings after the drawing size. An A1 size drawing would be named starting with the “1″ for size. It is also likely that other logic is included in the number to help engineers find the drawing quicker.

Now we have PDM, all information required to find a drawing or other files is included in the  files metadata. To be able to find the file quickly, we just have to enter the properties we are looking for and the system will get all matching files for us. The role of the number is therewith reduced to nothing more than a unique identifier and should idealistically have no other purpose.

A more challenging concept is the 2D drawing in itself. The common belief is that we still need them and everybody uses the drawing as the “legal document” to represent the design. But why is this. 3D CAD is widely spread for over 20 years already. We engineer in 3D in most cases, so why bother to create a limited translation of the design in a form that only experts can read effortlessly? (most “normal” people have difficulty in reading technical drawings but have difficulty in admitting it). Some customers are seriously looking into possibilities to eliminate or reduce the need of 2D annotated drawings, but the number is surprisingly low if we put this in perspective of the number of possibilities the software technology is offering already. Dimensions and tolerances can be be applied in 3D in SolidWorks and it can be reviewed in eDrawings and some other viewers.  I guess it still needs some extra years before this paradigm is shifting towards “real 3D engineering”.

Please don’t get me wrong, there is nothing against the use of the diskette icon for save if everybody understands its meaning. I guess the whole concept of “save” might be obsolete in itself in the near future anyway and we will only see a cloud instead. The only thing I would like to encourage is to think about what we do and why we do it. Just doing things because we do it already for years is not a good motivation in my point of view. If there is a good reason to keep “intelligent” item numbers, just do it, but at least give it a good thought if it is worth all the trouble of maintaining it.

For our FLL team the season has ended on December 15th last year. Looking back we can say it was a success. For me as a coach, my goal was to learn from this season and build on a more mature team for 2013. I did not expect to qualify for the Benelux finals and prepared the kids in their expectation accordingly. In that perspective the surprise could not be bigger when we heard our team name called in the award ceremony for the Robot Strategy and Innovation Award (one of the three titles in the category for design).
In the first place this was a huge triumph for the children in the team, but it also confirms to me that, with a methodical approach, we were able to let these 9-year-old children achieve an outstanding design in the strongest regional finals of the Benelux.

The end of the season is also a good time to think about the steps for next season still with the experiences of this year fresh in memory. From all the improvement points I can think of I would like to take two that also apply to many companies I see in my work for Cadmes:

A. Make “lessons learned” available for others

For most engineers and designers it is obvious to document the designs for production purposes and other needs related to the use of the product. So we did for our FLL robot, we took many photos of our design (and of course I could not resist to remodel it in SolidWorks) and we saved the control programs we used for the competition. What is often forgotten is to document all abandoned design ideas that were tried and investigated. Since a substantial part of design effort is used on ruling out options, documentation of these considerations is of high value. It is a shame to see how much valuable knowledge gained in a design process is not recorded in many design departments. (A well implemented PDM system can help with that with little effort.)

What we tried to do with FLL at the end of the season, short before the regional finals, is to write down the things we compared and tried and the related conclusions for the final design. To do better this year,  we just need to revisit this workbook and extend it with new ideas and results. Secondly, we can make this knowledge available for the rest of the world. Sharing the experience with others is one of the core values of FLL.

B. FMEA
Surely we all have heard about Murphy’s Law once or twice in our life. In the finals we observed that one of the missions the robot had to complete failed in all three matches and thereby missing 60 points. The same mission practically never failed in our preparations, how can this be? I’m sure many engineers have run into a similar situation in real products once in their career. There is a technique to help to reduce the risk of such surprise in design methodology that is often underrated by designers and engineers. An appropriate way to spend time on the right “save guards for failure” is FMEA: Failure Mode and Effect Analysis. The approach is very simple: imagine all possible ways how a design can fail and describe what the effect will be. An extended variety,  FMECrA,  also includes the weight by criticality into the equation. The result of this exercise is that we will think before we do and avoid spending all the time to avoid failures with irrelevant effects and overlook the failures that render the entire design useless, or even dangerous.
With the FLL team,  I will try to perform such FMEA in a “light”  way to make them think of ways to improve the success rate in this year’s competition.

Last but not least I enjoyed working with enthusiastic children who are making their feet wet in the field of design and engineering. I’m looking forward to this year to try to top last year’s performance. Thanks to the team and to Cadmes who supported us.

I wish you all the best for 2013,

Bas Koomen
FLL team coach

An important part of FLL is the “project”. The team has to do research on a specific theme, discover a problem and come up with an innovative solution. This year, the theme is “senior solutions(tm)”, about the position of elderly people in our society and how they can keep participating in it.

Our team saw that older people need help in their daily tasks. This can be practical help, offering means of communication or help remembering things. The solution they came up with is a cross-over between a tablet-device (ipad) and a humanoid robot. They named of their invention: “iBot”. (They did not know that iBot already exists as a solution for disabled people. It is a two wheel wheel chair that is able to climb stairs, developed by Dean Kamen. Dean Kamen is the founder of FIRST foundation who drive the FLL. What a coincidence….)

The "ibot", a service aid robot invented by FLL team "FxS"

How visionary they were i could not have known back in the first week of September. In the last two month a cascade of events fell like jigsaw puzzle pieces in place.

In forming new Dutch government, political parties had to tackle issues on national spendings. Cost of healthcare (in the Netherlands already 12% of our GNP) will rise with 250~400% in the next 30 years if we extrapolate trends. There are many operational and ethical dilemmas around methods how to fund this and which difficult choices should be made.

During a symposium about healthcare and technology by NEVAT and Delft University I learned that a large part of the technological possibilities is not yet used or being explored in healthcare. A particular underused area that was mentioned more than once is domotics or home automation. This technology can be applied in moving care from specialized care centers (hospitals, elderly homes, etc.) to the comfort of peoples home situation. Especially when we consider the trend that the professional population (age 18-64) is shrinking in relation to the older population (65+) and the population of Alzheimer patients will increase significantly. In the near future there will be a shortage of labor power to fulfill the need in care for this people.

Demographic development in age cohorts in the Netherlands from 2004 to 2050

A care robot or “social aid robot” could be an answer to this need and many research projects all over the world have been initiated to explore this field. Cadmes has partnered with Aldebaran Robotics to support this initiative. We can supply and implement the NAO robot “platform” as a basis for education and research on humanoid robotic applications.

Last Thursday a Dutch documentary had an item about robots in care. They covered some examples of robot prototypes that will act as intermediary between healthcare, technology and patient, but also use of robotic pets to comfort Alzheimer patients (PARO robot baby seal). Goal is to extend care in human form with aid of robots. It is understandable that not everyone welcomes this concept immediately and has to overcome some stereotype fears learnt from SF movies.

Children of our FLL have found the solution, now it is up to us to make the Robots work or us. For the scepticists I would like to share a reassuring experience I made with our NAO Robot: A robot might just have a programmed behavior with the suggestion of social feelings, the returned feelings of humans can be very real! (see picture).

It was a victorious moment last week when the children succeeded their first mission, but now we had to extend to other missions. With the next mission it is required to retrieve a “broken chair” and bring it to base. To do this in the most efficient way, the robot needs a grabbing device, powered by the third servo. (the first two servos are used for moving around). In practice, this means that the teams has to make a modification to the robot, a design change.

Because children of 9 years old design primarily with their hands we supplied them with a second robot set. The first, working version of the robot that is built for the first mission is kept (checked in) and with the second set a design variation is built. Besides adding a mechanism, the next version is also optimized for agility and control characteristics.

Another area where the team members have to pay attention to changes is in the robot programs. The NXT programming software is file based, so all dangers we know about file management apply. This was also experienced by the programmers of the team: with the blink of an eye a working program is overwritten by an experiment for something completely different. Fortunately the input for the the program were written down and it could be rebuilt very quickly, but it was a good learning moment to speak about version control.

Again this has a lot of parallels with the world of design for grown-ups. If we design in CAD and make modifications, the changes not always improve the models. Then it is of high importance that we can revert back to the previous situation and take another approach.

PDM is a great tool to facilitate this, instead of building up a sequence by hand in file names (device.SLDPRT, device1.SLDPRT, device2.SLDPRT, device_final.SLDPRT, device_change.SLDPRT… Can you put them in an unambiguous order???) PDM will save working versions for us in a secure vault. The design does not have to be renamed at all (no referencing issues) and it requires less effort (just apply the check-in function)

PDM would also help the FLL team in keeping their documents organized. To work out plans, they write mission plans and keep notes of measurements they do during tests. These measurements are related to a specific program and model in a specific version. In PDM we can have the means to save these documents and relate them to the relevant model data…