Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Creo 2.0 Launched


Adroitec Engineering Solutions team launched the latest version of Creo 2.0 in INDIA. All started with PTC Creo 2.0 Launch Series from Delhi on 17th May 2012. This was the first among the series of seminars that are being organized across the country by Adroitec. Followed by  Chennai , Coimbatore & Bangalore. 

The event was well attended by an extremely knowledgeable & interactive audience. The audience appreciated  the Paradigm shift in design that PTC has introduced with Creo. The unanimous opinion was that the extremely user friendly and technology robustness that Creo provides will shorten the product development time and increase productivity.




Glimpses of the event as follows:

Delhi 
Chennai
Coimbatore

Bangalore
we continue to update...
Hyderabad, Pune....

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Building Design that Pushes Engineering Limits

Architects designed a huge cantilevered canopy for the new Francis A Gregory library in Washington DC. Problem was, hanging a canopy 40 feet from its support isn’t an easy engineering challenge, as the engineers from CST Covers pointed out. Vince and Allison walk us through the solution.



Product Used: Creo Parametric & Creo Advanced Framework Extension

Creo Parametric

Creo Parametric is the standard in 3D CAD, featuring state-of-the-art productivity tools that promote best practices in design while ensuring compliance with your industry and company standards.  Creo Parametric provides the broadest range of powerful yet flexible 3D CAD capabilities to help you address your most pressing design challenges including accommodating late stage changes, working with multi-CAD data and electromechanical design.
A scalable offering of integrated, parametric, 3D CAD, CAID, CAM, and CAE solutions allows you to design faster than ever, while maximizing innovation and quality to ultimately create exceptional products.
As part of the Creo product family, Creo Parametric can share data seamlessly with other Creo apps. This means that no time is wasted on data translation and resulting errors are eliminated. Users can seamlessly move between different modes of modeling and 2D and 3D design data can easily move between apps while retaining design intent. This results in an unprecedented level of interoperability and delivers break-through productivity gains throughout many product development processes.

Creo Advanced Framework Extension

Expert structure design

As essential foundations for a wide range of equipment, steel and aluminum frames are prevalent in virtually all industries. Creo Advanced Framework Extension is tailored for machine designers and equipment manufactures to simplify and speed structure design. The intelligent component library and automatic deliverable creation of this structural design software make frame design up to 10 times faster than standard design techniques.

Features & Benefits

  • Simple concept-to-production process for designing any product containing constant section profiles
  • Enjoy an efficient transition to 3D CAD from 2D systems
  • Explore alternative designs via fast modifications using intuitive functions such as mouse drag, move, and rotate
  • Create comprehensive documentation automatically, including bills of materials and beam/assembly drawings
  • Realize up to a 10:1 productivity gain over standard CAD techniques for frame design.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Demos & Tech Tips: Live Webcast Schedule-June 2012


Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
1
10:30 PM - 12:00 AM
4
Description: http://www.ptc.com/images/common/dot_clear.gif
5
8:30 PM - 9:30 PM
10:30 PM - 11:30 PM
11:30 PM - 12:30 AM
6
Description: http://www.ptc.com/images/common/dot_clear.gif
7
9:30 PM - 10:30 PM
8
8:30 PM - 9:30 PM
9:00 PM - 10:00 PM
11
Description: http://www.ptc.com/images/common/dot_clear.gif
12
9:00 PM - 10:00 PM
13
12:00 AM - 1:00 AM
9:30 PM - 10:30 PM
14
12:00 AM - 1:00 AM
9:30 PM - 10:30 PM
11:30 PM - 12:30 AM
15
12:00 AM - 1:00 AM
8:30 PM - 9:30 PM
18
Description: http://www.ptc.com/images/common/dot_clear.gif
19
8:30 PM - 9:30 PM
10:30 PM - 11:30 PM
20
12:00 AM - 1:00 AM
9:30 PM - 10:30 PM
21
12:00 AM - 12:30 AM
11:30 PM - 12:30 AM
11:30 PM - 12:30 AM
22
Description: http://www.ptc.com/images/common/dot_clear.gif
25
Description: http://www.ptc.com/images/common/dot_clear.gif
26
9:00 PM - 10:00 PM
27
Description: http://www.ptc.com/images/common/dot_clear.gif
28
12:00 AM - 2:00 AM
9:30 PM - 10:30 PM
11:30 PM - 12:30 AM
29
12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Creo Customer: Box Making Design Magic

Creo Customer: Box Making Design Magic

Designers at System Group took on an interesting task: design a machine that will “know” how to create the perfect-sized box for a product. It’s an ideal invention for companies like Amazon that package and ship a lot of different-sized stuff.
Founded in 1970 and located in Italy, System Group first specialized in creating machinery that decorated ceramic tiles and automated end-of-line storage systems. They quickly became known for streamlining packaging processes in the logistics, electronics, photovoltaic technology and packaging sectors.
And that’s how we get to 2012 and a machine that “thinks” about how to package products efficiently – before the product even arrives at the warehouse. The Freebox™ solves the packaging hiccup and mess involved in making boxes to fit different-sized items.
Willy Wonka would definitely be jealous of the Freebox which can operate independently for hours on end without oompah-loompahs to make the magic happen. Essentially, a person inputs the size information for any product ahead of time – from tiny flower pots to large computers, and then this machine the size of a living room spits out a box perfectly sized for it.
Since there is no residual cardboard left to throw away, System Group boasts raw material savings of 40% from the Freebox.
Creating a machine with zero cardboard waste was just one of System Group’s design challenges.
They wanted to avoid exorbitant R&D costs too. In this episode of the Product Design Show, Allison and Vince show more about how System Group hurdled these and other design challenges using Creo Parametric.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Aesthetics and Concept Design

Aesthetics and Concept Design


smartphones_2011
Last week, I was chatting with Develop3D’s Al Deanabout the Freestyle tool in Creo Parametric, when he asked me whether I’d rather drive a Tesla or a Ferrari… Wait, maybe I missed a few steps there. Actually, we were talking about the importance of aesthetics in product design, and the relationship between form and function.
I proposed that there’s a lot of hype around “revolutionary” product design – the first smartphone, the first hands-free gaming device, the first consumer applicable hybrid car… And let’s be honest, that hype is, for the most part, well warranted. Revolutionary design changes industries – it changes lives. But that level of innovation is also statistically very rare, and often means a substantial investment of time and resources in ideas that may never make it to the shelves. In my view, where the real battles for consumer mind share are being fought is in “evolutionary” design – incremental improvements, big or small, to existing products.
How does this tie in to what our products look like? Let’s get back to the smartphone example. The first smartphones were revolutionary – and functionality was front and center. Consumers tend to be a bit more forgiving about aesthetics when it comes to revolutionary design (want a starker example? Think back to early “mobile” phones…and their bags). But what was revolutionary quickly becomes evolutionary – manufacturers capitalize on their initial development effort through new versions and iterations of an existing product type. Think about how many smartphone options we have today – the average consumer would be hard pressed to explain the functionality differences between the multitude of options in any given cellular provider’s store. And sure, while you can argue the point that there ARE differences in functionality, I would counter that they are not significant enough to drive the majority of consumer choices. Admit it, you bought that phone because it looks cool.
I will admit that “looking cool” isn’t only about aesthetics – there’s also brand association and what it means to use a certain product. At this stage of the conversation, Al started ranting about “corporate types who drive massive trucks but hire someone else to change their light bulbs” (I may be paraphrasing)…and I realized we were way off topic. But the point remains that looks are a big part of brand association, even when there are other factors at play. How something looks has a big part in how something makes you feel – which this Product Design Show does a nice job of highlighting. And when you reach competitive parity in functionality, looks become pretty important.
So if you’ve accepted the premise that looks are a key part of design, especially evolutionary design, in the consumer market – how different is the non-consumer market? Al sent me this picture of a stylized forklift. Does how your warehouse looks affect how your customers perceive you? How they perceive the products you produce? There’s a reason that when I walk the floor of the Digital Factory at Hannover Messe, I’m surrounded by smooth-surfaced orange factory robots swaying to German techno. There’s a reason that when choosing between comparable options, that you might buy a better looking forklift, especially if it does everything a forklift should do. There’s a reason that the Maserati repair shop has floors that are cleaner than my kitchen table (this is just about where we got to discussing fantasy sports car preferences).
The moral of the story is that aesthetics, whether you’re making smartphones or forklifts, are more important to design than ever before. How a product looks isn’t something that can be left to an afterthought. If you’re an engineer, thinking about concepts, you need to give a higher priority to aesthetics then you would in the past – even if you don’t have an industrial designer on staff. And why fast, agile tools for freeform surfacing, like the Freestyle capability in Creo Parametric, are so important to concept design.
If you want to explore more topics related to concept design, check out the new Concept Design Resource Center at http://www.ptc.com/solutions/concept-design/