Briefings: March 2007

By DE Editors

PTC Announces Mathcad 14.0

Mathcad 14.0 includes solver improvements, a symbolic math update,single-statement definition and evaluation, a visual update that makes it more closely resemble how a mathematician would work on paper, and the addition of Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Korean language versions. Mathcad 14 represents the first global release of the program under the PTC aegis since PTC (Needham, MA) acquired Mathsoft Engineering & Education last May.

Mathcad 14 now includes full UNICODE support, improving usability of the program. With about 2,000 new characters and symbols included in the program, it improves clarity of documentation, allows for better formatting and printing capability, and improves IP capture and reuse. Mathcad 14 allows for more compact notation, which lets users calculate and view math solutions inline, rather than using multiple fields that require continued scrolling up and down a page.

The latest version also takes advantage of improved differential equation solving and algorithms for faster, more reliable solutions.The enhancements improve documentation and enable a broader range of engineering design problems to be solved, and allows less adjusting of tolerances or methods.

Greg O’Neill, a senior RF engineer from SkyCross Inc. (Viera, FL), a maker of antennae for the wireless market, described how his team used a beta version of Mathcad 14 to develop mathematical parameters used to drive Pro/Engineer geometry in the design of a new wireless antenna.

He called the program “invaluable” for its ability to facilitate the easy identification and recording of mistakes and misplaced decimals,etc., leading to “focused optimization” of RF design.

For more information, click here.

Personal Edition of OneSpace Available Free, 2007 Design Contest Announced

CoCreate Software (Fort Collins, CO and Sindelfingen, Germany) has introduced CoCreate OneSpace Modeling Personal Edition, a free version of its dynamic modeling based 3D MCAD software, CoCreate OneSpace. (Seethe review of OneSpace Modeling, click here.) OneSpace Modeling PE,which is available as a free download until the end of March, is offers all the power of CoCreate’s enterprise OneSpace Modeling 3D MCAD system only limited for assemblies of up to 60 parts. This limited-time offer follows the company’s recent announcement of the 2007 release of its full product development platform CoCreate OneSpace Suite, which began shipping on February 12.

At the heart of OneSpace Modeling PE, and indeed its enterprise sibling, is the concept of dynamic modeling. Dynamic modeling is an approach to 3D product development that differs from traditional history-based design methodologies in two key ways. First, although you create your geometry and wield commands as you would in most MCAD applications, your modeling steps are not stored in a history tree. Second, you are not required to apply constraints on profiles or the resulting 3D models. What this all means to you is that your downstream changes are independent of the steps you used to get there.

Consequently, rather than spending time interacting with a history tree, you can change any part of the geometry dynamically without regenerating your design constantly. The net effect of all of this,says CoCreate, is a responsive, flexible, and faster design process.

The 2007 CoCreate OneSpace Suite is a complete PLM (product lifecycle management) comprising modules for 2D drafting, 3D modeling,collaboration, and document management. As a PLM platform, CoCreate does not impose a monolithic system on your organization. Rather, it is designed to leverage your existing IT investments as it creates an interconnected, collaborative enterprise.

All areas of the CoCreate OneSpace Suite 2007 have been enhanced. For example, OneSpace Modeling now offers the ability to modify, stretch,and position parts and assemblies simultaneously as well as the ability to create a cross-section of a design and then create and modify 3Dwithin your sliced views. A new Cabling module for mechatronics design has been added, as well as an integrated rendering environment for real-time texture map rendering and photo realistic imagery. Other enhancements include a part comparison feature; more options to analyze sheet metal and thin-walled, constant thickness components; expanded FE analysis capabilities; as well as clash analysis reports, Adobe PDF publishing, and expanded out-of-the-box integrations with enterprise systems.

In other news, CoCreate has begun a call for entries to its 2007 Design Competition. Organizers say the contest will reward innovation in product design.

Entries should showcase a design project, created in CoCreate’s 3Dproduct development environment, within one of 15 different product categories.

Entries must be received by March 16, 2007. A few days later, CoCreate website visitors will begin to vote for the winners. CoCreate will announce the overall competition winner and 15 category winners during the first week of April.

All winners can select one gift from a range of products designed with CoCreate software. Gifts include products from BenQ, Deuce Snowboards, Festool, Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, and Liebherr.

Siemens to Acquire UGS Corporation

Siemens AG (Munich, Germany) will purchase UGS Corp. (Plano, TX) for an estimated $3.5 billion. No timeline has been set for the closing of the acquisition as the two companies are currently working with the relevant regulatory authorities. The announcement says Siemens will expand its industrial software portfolio by integrating the more than3,000 software engineers who work for UGS.

According to UGS spokesperson John Clendening, no other product lifecycle management (PLM) company will compete with the end-to-end software and hardware portfolio to be offered by the combined companies. The Siemens Automation and Drives Group (A&D) is being assigned the UGS activities. It will employ around 7,000 software experts in total. Clendening said UGS did not expect layoffs to be a significant issue because “there is very little duplication between the two companies.”

UGS employs 7,300 people worldwide and has customers in 62 countries. Siemens A&D employs 70,528 people worldwide.

UGS, which supplies the entire array of collaborative product data management (cPDM), CAD/CAM/CAE, and digital manufacturing simulation solutions to the automotive, aerospace, consumer goods, electronics,and machinery industries, started a business relationship with Siemens A&D in 2003 with joint projects addressing digital manufacturing technology. In fiscal 2005, UGS reported revenue of just under $1.2billion, in the third quarter of 2006, it reported its 13th consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth.

“The combination of Siemens and UGS is a clear game-changer in the global PLM industry,” said Tony Affuso, chairman, CEO, and president of UGS in a statement. “Our customers win through the backing of the long-term security of their system investments. ... In addition, we are able to provide added value to Siemens’ customers by virtue of being the most practiced PLM provider in open systems, which eases integration with the Siemens technology already in place in all of our key markets.”

Tilos Brandis, Siemens senior executive and integration officer,described the Siemens/UGS combination as uniting “the virtual and physical world.”

In a prepared statement about the acquisition, Siemens AG President and CEO Klaus Kleinfeld said, “This combination makes our customers’ processes faster, better, and more cost efficient. With the unique combination, we underscore our position as a trendsetter in automation systems and bring this business into a new dimension.”

That new dimension is seen by Siemens and UGS to at least partially translate into new scales of efficiency for customers whether in manufacturing or engineering services. Integrated solutions created by the combined companies are expected to lead to reduced costs, higher product quality, shorter times to market, and increased flexibility toward market trends.

For more information, click here.

Ovis Open-Source Cluster Monitor

The initial version of OVIS, a software tool developed by Sandia National Labs (Livermore, CA) that provides real-time monitoring of computational computer clusters, is now available for free download at ovis.ca.sandia.gov.

Sandia researchers say OVIS offers a statistical approach to the problem of computational platform monitoring and analysis. OVIS observes the overall statistical properties and environmental effects of a cluster, characterizing individual device behaviors and comparing them to a large number of statistically similar devices.

The baseline capabilities currently available for download are visualization and correlation tools that display information about state variables and their aggregate statistics, statistical tools that present the cluster as a comparative ensemble (rather than as individual nodes),and an XML-based cluster configuration information template.

AutoCAD Support in RxAutoimage R8.1

The new release of the raster editing and raster-to-vector conversion from Rasterex Software (Oslo, Norway) has been updated to add support for AutoCAD 2007 and AutoCAD LT 2007. This release covers all versions of AutoCAD from 2000 to 2007 and AutoCAD LT from 2002 to 2007. It can also be used with other Autodesk products.

RxAutoImage R8.1 offers new technology for processing color, grayscale,and monochrome raster images. The customizable interface, a trueObjectARX technology, and the possibility to use AutoCAD’s own dialogs and settings, turns the software into a hybrid CAD and GIS environment.

Other new benefits include a redesigned scanning module with direct support for Contex, Graphtec, and Colotrac SmartLF scanners; and more.

Collaborate on Projects Through On-Demand PLM

On-demand product lifecycle management (PLM) solution provider ArenaSolutions (Foster City, CA) deployed its new Winter ‘07 release of Arena PLM last month Key to this release is a new Project Collaboration module that, says Arena, leverages its application’s product definition and product management functionality to create a new layer of product analytics. These analytics are said to “provide the visibility that manufacturers need to better launch new products on time and on budget.”

Citing a recent study of more than 150 mid-market manufacturers, Arena says that it found that most manufacturers manage product-related projects with such tools as Excel and Microsoft Project (70% and 68%,respectively), often in combination with homegrown solutions or off-the-shelf tools designed for other purposes. However, just 4% of these manufacturers considered their existing tools and processes effective for planning product-related projects, while just 7% felt they were effective for project execution and analysis.

Project Collaboration in Arena PLM gives manufacturers a full view of the projects that comprise their projects from the top-level portfolio view down to the individual item level. This enables manufacturers to tie together project plans with the product record by linking tasks,milestones, and deadline data to each individual item in a project. These links automatically update as product data updates, and, by means of the on-demand Arena PLM platform, are readily available to internal and extended product teams. Because everyone has access to all interrelated data, all participants can readily identify project risks, pinpoint issues, and react in real-time to avoid schedule-busting problems.

Project Collaboration is included in the Enterprise Edition of Arena PLM and will be automatically available, at no additional cost, tousers.

For full details, visit Arena Solutions.

GKS Expands Onsite Measurement Capability

Third Faro arm improves ability to scan large, hard-to-ship parts.

GKS Inspection Services, Inc. (Plymouth, MI) has expanded its Detroit-area dimensional inspection services with the addition of a third Faro portable-CMM articulated arm. The new 12-foot Platinum Faroarm is equipped with both a touch probe and a 3D laser scanner.

GKS’s system configuration includes Faro’s CAM2 measurement software and contact probes along with a Laser Design SLP-330 laser scanner and a laptop PC, loaded with Geomagic Studio and Qualify software.

Steve DeRemer, GM of GKS Michigan, explains, “Many of our customers prefer onsite inspection of their parts. This makes a lot of sense for larger parts that are expensive to ship as well as for proprietary or delicate parts.”

GKS Inspection Services has been a provider of dimensional measurement and 3D laser scanning services for 25 years. Jim Andrews, supervisor of engineering services at GKS Michigan, added, “While we have offered onsite inspection services for many years, we are now seeing growing demand for onsite reverse engineering services as well. In some cases,it is possible to travel to the customer site, laser scan a part, and create a surface model without the part or the data ever leaving the customer site.”

For further information, click here.

NextEngine Teams with Rapidform

NextEngine (Santa Monica, CA) has introduced RapidWorks, a suite of tools that lets you take raw points from your NextEngine Desktop 3DScanner and turn them into idealized SolidWorks SLDPRT part files. At the same time, the company also introduced ScanStudio ART and ScanStudio PRO for designers and engineers. (For a review of the NextEngine Desktop 3D Scanner, click here.)

RapidWorks leverages Rapidform XOR 3D scanning software technology from Rapidform (Sunnyvale, CA). After you turn your raw points into idealized SLDPRT part files, the resultant output is a fully parametric solid model with a true Feature Tree, according to NextEngine.

Although the high-end version of Rapidform XOR normally costs about$20,000, the RapidWorks product costs $2,495. The key difference is that the premium Rapidform XOR offers a massive point capacity and works with departmental 3D scanners, while the dedicated RapidWorks product will provide millions of input points.

NextEngine says that ScanStudio ART is for designers who want to create fully healed watertight models for 3D printing and complex design or CGI tasks. It is a $495 upgrade of the ScanStudio Core, which is supplied with each NextEngine Scanner.

ScanStudio PRO offers NURBS surfacing and automatic spline output from points. It features a comparison tool to analyze differences between as-built and CAD models. It costs $995.

All three products should ship this month. For more information, click here.

e-Book Covers AutoCAD Programming

UpFront.eZine Publishing (Abbotsford, BC), a publisher of e-newsletters, e-books, and white papers on CAD and CAD programming, is offering a new e-book, entitled Tailoring Auto LISP-DCL — Diesel.

The 166-page e-book describes how to program any release of AutoCAD from Release 13 and through 2007 with Auto LISP. In addition, it provides tutorials on creating dialog boxes with DCL (dialog control language) and employing the Diesel (Dumb Interpretively Evaluated String Expression Language) macro language.

This release is available for $24.90 as a PDF for delivery via e-mail,ftp, or web browser, or as a CD. Read the full table of contents and view select pages by clicking here.

Vigor Releases Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad System

New Force Recon QXN has four processors for high-end engineering.

Vigor Gaming Computer (City of Industry, CA), a developer of custom computer systems and high-end peripherals, has released Force Recon QXN, an Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad QX6700 system geared toward engineering and multimedia design. The system includes four separate processing cores with 8MB of L2 cache, greatly increasing its multitasking potential.

The Vigor Force Recon QXN base model comes standard with Intel Core 2Extreme Quad QX6700 at 2.66GHz, 1066MHz FSB, and 2 X 4MB Cache. The CPU is mounted to an As us P5N32-E-SLI motherboard with NVIDIA nForce 680iSLI Quad Core ready chipset. Vigor also utilizes the NVIDIA GeForce8800 GTX video card with 768MB DDR3, 575MHz, and DVI and TV input.

Standard memory and storage includes 1GB of Corsair DDR2 800 MHz memory(2 X 512MB); a pair of WD Raptor 150GB SATA hard drives at 10,000 RPM;an internal 16X DVD+CD Rewritable Combo Drive with bundled DVD/CDRW software; and 1.44MB 3.5 in. floppy drive or optional floppy with8-in-1 Card Reader.

The Vigor Force Recon QXN includes onboard Gigabit (10/100/1000Mbps)PCI Network Card. I/O PORTS for adding peripherals include one Parallel, one Game/Midi, one IEEE 1394 Firewire and ten USB ports. The system includes a 7.1 8-channel Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS card for HD audio and a digital thermal sensor spins the system fans only as fast as needed, reducing noise.

The components are encased in a Vigor FORCE tool-less chassis with aluminum trim. The black enclosure can be painted. Inside, the Vigor Monsoon II TEC (thermo electric chip) active CPU cooling and air conditioner system ventilates the computer. The system is powered by aTagan TG900-U96 TurboJet NVIDIA-SLI Certified 900-watt power supply.

All units are loaded with Microsoft Windows XP Professional Edition SP2with $49 Vista Business upgrade. The Vigor Force Recon QXN is backed by a three-year limited parts and labor warranty.

Price: $2,649 (base).Numerous self-build options are available direct from Vigor Gaming.

To vote for your favorite from this issue, go to the last page of the Products section by clicking here.

Two Brief Corrections

An editing error in “Can PLM Make You Lean? Part 2” (DE January 2007)could leave readers with the wrong impression that Agile Software Corp.(San Jose, CA) is merging two of its product lines, Agile 9 and e6.

Although Agile 9 and e6 are separate products at this time, Agile is investing in a service-oriented architecture approach to provide common cross-industry features together across product lines.

We miscalculated the price of the EOSINT P Series of laser-sintering rapid prototyping machines from Electro-Optical Systems (EOS, Munich,Germany and Novi, MI) in “Parts from Powder” (DE February 2007). The prices for the systems in the US are as follows $295,500 for the EOSINTP390 and $731,500 for the EOSINT P730. Pricing for the Process Chain equipment is $88,900 for the P 730 and $69,00 for the P 390.