DEVELOP3D July / August 2020

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NEW How Lelo’s brand of intimate luxury delivers more than just good vibrations

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WELCOME EDITORIAL Editor-in-Chief Al Dean al@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)7525 701 541 Managing Editor Greg Corke greg@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3355 7312 Digital Media Editor Stephen Holmes stephen@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3384 5297 Consulting Editor Jessica Twentyman jtwentyman@gmail.com +44 (0)20 7913 0919 Consulting Editor Martyn Day martyn@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)7525 701 542

DESIGN/PRODUCTION Design/Production Greg Corke greg@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3355 7312

ADVERTISING Group Media Director Tony Baksh tony@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3355 7313 Deputy Advertising Manager Steve King steve@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3355 7314 US Sales Director Denise Greaves denise@x3dmedia.com +1 857 400 7713

SUBSCRIPTIONS Circulation Manager Alan Cleveland alan@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3355 7311

ACCOUNTS Accounts Manager Charlotte Taibi charlotte@x3dmedia.com Financial Controller Samantha Todescato-Rutland sam@chalfen.com

N

ow then. Let’s get the important things out of the way.

How are you? How have you been during all of... this? I’d genuinely like to know how our readers are faring out there. What’s work like? Have you been working from home? What’s that been like? Have you been furloughed at all? What did you get up to during that time? I know I’ve been oscillating between sheer and utter panic at work, periods of intense, focused concentration and time enjoying the back yard (which, frankly, doesn’t have a clue what’s hit it over the last few months.)

There seems to be, at this moment, some light at the end of the tunnel. There’s talk of a vaccine. Things are tentatively opening up. And I bought some beard trimmers. If only there was a vaccine for the Custard Cream addiction I seem to have developed. Even the Wotsit-in-Chief is now advocating wearing a mask. He must have found a particularly resilient tub of fake tan.

DEVELOP3D has always been a remotely managed affair. Our core team is spread between the Midlands, Oxford, London, the South Coast, Portugal and wherever Erin has parked up this month. Working this way will now be familiar to far more of you than it previously was. It’s important to try and keep some semblance of contact, but if I had one piece of advice for those folks new to home working, it would be to make sure you go outside every couple of hours, even if it’s just for 10 minutes. Half an hour is better still. It’ll do you the power of good and, if it’s sunny, you can nab some essential Vitamin D. This month, we’ve got some cracking stories for you. We learn how Lelo is looking to revolutionise our most intimate moments; how skinsuits for cyclists are being developed with the assistance of 3D scanning; and there are two looks at the forthcoming Right to Repair legislation coming out of the EU. We also consider what’s new in Solid Edge, take a peak at what Ansys has been working on (Spoiler: it’s seriously good) and examine the power of new Intel chips.

Right then. Enjoy this issue and, until next month, take care folks. If you spot a pack of Custard Creams, shoot them my way. Or maybe not, eh?

ABOUT DEVELOP3D is published by

465C Hornsey Road, 1st floor, Unit 2, London, N19 4DR, UK T. +44 (0)20 3355 7310 F. +44 (0)20 3355 7319 © 2020 X3DMedia Ltd All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part without prior permission from the publisher is prohibited. All trademarks acknowledged Opinions expressed in articles are those of the author and not of X3DMedia.

X3DMedia cannot accept responsibility for errors in articles or advertisements within the magazine

Al Dean Editor-in-Chief, DEVELOP3D Magazine, @alistardean

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CONTENTS JULY/AUGUST 2020 ISSUE NO. 120

NEWS AMD and Lenovo buddy up for Threadripper Pro launch, Siemens and SAP partner on digital thread and a new desktop CNC milling machine from Bantam Tools

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13 14 15 18 20 28 30 34

FEATURES Comment: Every day’s a school day for Glen Smith Comment: Erin McDermott’s tips on going freelance Comment: Is it AI or AGI? Nikolas Kairinos explains Visual Design Guide: The Cave tent from Heimplanet COVER STORY Lelo’s pleasure principle Right to repair: What does it mean for manufacturers?

Second skin: A new use for 3D scanning at Vorteq How Bel Air gives 3D-printed parts a superior finish

37 42 46 48

REVIEWS Solid Edge 2021 Ansys Discovery 2021 T3DMC/Scantech iReal 2S Scan 3XS GWP-ME Q120C / Intel Core i9-10900K

49 DEVELOP3D SERVICES 50 THE LAST WORD Al Dean considers the ‘right to repair’ movement and wonders how manufacturers will adjust to new rules, providing us all with the interchangeable parts we need to fix our own machines

2020

3 November 2020 The wood used to produce this magazine comes from Forest Stewardship Council certified well-managed forests, controlled sources and/or recycled material

University of Sheffield

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NEWS

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT NEWS

AMD GETS LENOVO THINKSTATION ON BOARD FOR LAUNCH OF THREADRIPPER PRO » AMD finally has a CPU focused exclusively on workstations, and with its launch partner Lenovo, a gateway into the Intel-dominated workstation market

A

MD has launched Threadripper Pro, a CPU designed specifically for enterprise workstations.

More importantly, it has partnered with Lenovo to launch the first Threadripper Pro workstation, the ThinkStation P620.

This is big news for an industry that has been dominated by Intel for years.

It’s the first time since 2006 that a major OEM has released a workstation with an AMD CPU. Now, with Lenovo on board, AMD should get much better access to enterprise customers.

Workstations that feature the consumer Threadripper CPU have been available for over six months, but only from smaller regional manufacturers. On a global stage, firms such as Armari, Scan and Workstation Specialists can’t offer the same levels of support or manageability as Lenovo can, or Independent Software Vendor (ISV) certification, which is important to enterprise customers.

Threadripper Pro, like its consumer counterpart, stands out because it offers up to 64 cores in a single CPU. For highly threaded applications such as ray trace rendering, Intel simply can’t compete. The closest it has to the 64-core

Threadripper Pro 3995WX is the Core i9-10980XE (18-cores), the Xeon W-3175X (28-cores), and the Xeon Platinum 8280 (28-cores), which can be doubled up in a dual-socket workstation to give 56 cores.

Threadripper Pro also comes in 12, 16 and 32-core models. Here, AMD says the high all-core base frequencies of the Threadripper Pro 3945X (4.0GHz) and 3955X (3.9GHz) will give a performance advantage in multithreaded applications over the equivalent 12-core Intel Xeon W-3235 and 16-core Xeon W-3245.

Lenovo believes the 12 and 16-core models should appeal to architects, engineers and designers who primarily use 3D CAD, but also rely on a secondary tool like ray trace rendering, CAM, simulation, or generative design.

Threadripper Pro is based on the same silicon as consumer Threadripper, but several features set the CPUs apart.

These include more memory channels (8 versus 4), higher memory capacity (2TB versus 256GB) and additional PCIe Gen4 lanes (128 versus 64).

Memory is arguably the biggest differentiator, and the larger capacity and higher bandwidth should appeal to firms that use memory-intensive applications like Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)

or Finite Element Analysis (FEA).

For security and manageability, Threadripper Pro comes with several features that will be important to enterprise customers. AMD Memory Guard, for example, allows the contents of system memory to be fully encrypted, while AMD Pro Manageability is designed to speed and simplify deployment imaging and manageability.

The Lenovo ThinkStation P620 is set to ship this Autumn. Lenovo has an exclusive six-month agreement with AMD, which means it will be only Threadripper Pro workstation supplier until at least January 2021, but probably longer.

DEVELOP3D believes 2021 is going to be a very important year for AMD. If Threadripper Pro is received well by enterprise customers and taken on by other OEMs, including HP and Dell, then Intel will surely start to get worried.

Above: Threadripper Pro is available in 12, 16, 32 and 64-core variants Below: The Lenovo ThinkStation P620 will launch this Autumn

Learn more about Threadripper Pro in our extended report tinyurl.com/TR-LEN DEVELOP3D.COM JULY/AUGUST 2020 9

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NEWS

SIEMENS & SAP TO PARTNER ON DIGITAL THREAD OFFERING

ToffeeAM gets investment for DfAM tools

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offeeAM has raised £1 million in seed funding in order to expand its innovative team and advance its intriguing ‘automatic design software’.

The Imperial College London spin-out claims its technology produces more intelligent, complex and efficient designs for additive manufacturing. It’s 40% more efficient than competing solutions, they say, creating products that can be produced 20 times faster, thanks to its ability to optimise not just parts, but also whole systems, by reducing the number of components. toffeeam.co.uk

S

iemens and SAP have announced a new PLM/ERP partnership. The move has been described by Siemens as a means to deliver integrated end-toend software solutions across product lifecycle, supply chain and asset management.

The partnership will leverage the industry expertise of both companies. What’s key here is that software from Siemens and SAP will be sold by sales teams from both. That, in turn, will enable the partners to cover the full lifecycle of products, from requirements capture, through design, engineering production, and ultimately into in-the-field operations with SAP’s asset management products.

As with all things enterprise-focused, there’s much talk from executives at both SAP and Siemens about digital transformation, Industry 4.0 and smart, connected products.

As a first step, it looks like the partnership will see SAP sell Siemens Teamcenter as the core foundation for product lifecycle collaboration and product

data management, while Siemens will offer SAP Intelligent Asset Management and SAP Project and Portfolio Management solutions.

It’s going to be interesting to watch this new partnership play out. Siemens and SAP are, in a sense, competing organisations – but in reality, there’s not a huge amount of functional overlap between their software offerings.

Those customers who already use both Teamcenter and SAP will know that integration between the two can be fraught with problems. While there’s always been connectivity at the hand-off from PLM to ERP, having that link ready to go before the integration consultants show up on site might be a big benefit to customers.

There’s also an indication that the two companies will, in future, look to develop applications from an ‘end-to-end lifecycle perspective’, with a view perhaps to helping customers achieve a seamless digital thread. siemens.com | sap.com

Bantam Tools announces launch of new desktop CNC milling machine

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antam Tools, formerly One Machine Company, has launched its newest machine, the Bantam Tools Desktop CNC Milling Machine, fitted with a spindle capable of 28,000 RPM, automatic material location, Fusion 360 integration and toolpath templates for ease of use.

Designed to close the gap between ‘hobbyist models’ and professional machines, the desktop CNC milling machine has a 16mm solid aluminium frame and 20mm shafts, ensuring it’s a good match for tough jobs and taking its unladen desk weight to a hefty 32kg.

There’s a decent amount of working volume, at 177 x 229 x 89mm, and it is capable of cutting aluminium, brass,

Surface Scan sets up shop during pandemic

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any 3D print and scanning business have struggled during the Covid-19 pandemic to adapt to the new challenges facing UK manufacturing and engineering.

However, this has not stopped recent entrant Surface Scan from attracting new business, claim executives from the company. Launched in early 2020, Surface Scan has hit the ground running, they report, collaborating with a number of design engineers and manufacturers. surfacescan.co.uk

CAD Exchanger updates its 3D CAD viewer

C steel, copper, wood, linoleum, engineering plastics and machining wax. The introductory price is $3,599, with shipping expected to begin in six to eight weeks. bantamtools.com

Bantam's new desktop CNC milling machine is perfect for designled, small-scale workshops

AD Exchanger, a 3D CAD viewer and converter specialist, has announced a new release of its multipurpose viewer.

The key highlights for this 3.8.1 release are support for the X3D format as an import option; direct links to Unity’s VR/ AR engine; and new licensing options for the GUI-based version of the technology.

It also addresses the correct construction of parasolid geometry based on two other entities computed in separate cores to ensure an accurate result. It’s available now, for an annual subscription fee of $225. cadexchanger.com

10 JULY/AUGUST 2020 DEVELOP3D.COM

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MSC APEX GENERATIVE DESIGN GETS FIRST RELEASE

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SC Apex Generative Design 2020 is the first full launch of MSC Software Corporation’s software for optimal product design. Part of Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division, MSC has released a software product it claims will enable engineers to explore new approaches and optimise any part of their designs in a single step, in order to develop innovative products “up to 80% faster than conventional approaches.”

This first major release introduces controls that aim to make it easier for designers to adjust the complexity of generated designs and manage the extent to which fixation points can be reduced.

The MSC Apex Generative Design 2020 release also exploits many productivity benefits of the underlying MSC Apex platform; for example, it offers direct export of engineered models (mesh) to CAD formats, so that generative design optimisation can be used within common CAD/CAM manufacturing workflows.

Thomas Reiher, director of generative design at

MSC Software, said: “Designing an optimal product that fully exploits the available techniques is such a convoluted process today that designers have to compromise.”

He added: “Designers’ eyes light up when they use MSC Apex Generative Design, because it thinks like them, improving parts with intelligent engineering decisions – only much faster.”

Reiher claims that users are achieving those upto-80% reductions in product development times by reducing the number of individual tools and interventions needed, automating the optimisation process and streamlining workflows.

The company also claims that the software can run on a “normal” laptop to generate initial model candidates in under an hour, and produce final designs within hours.

The launch version also comes equipped with a more intuitive user interface, opening its capabilities up to designers and engineers who don’t have specialised knowledge of CAE. mscsoftware.com

Swatchbook partners with Bru Textiles for improved fabrics visualisation

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watchbook has announced a new partnership that will provide digital access through its cloud-based site to Bru Textiles’ massive material catalogue for 3D visualisation.

Bru Textiles is one of the world’s largest distributors of fabrics for home furnishing, architecture and interior design, and for the past three years, it has invested in creating digital twins of all of its fabrics.

Bru.digital, the digital branch of Bru Textiles, has digitised close to 10,000 materials to date and recently introduced twinbru.com, an online platform that offers modelling and rendering services using these digitised materials.

Through this service, Bru is uniquely positioned to offer digital services,

backed by years of experience in the fabric industry. As part of the new partnership with Swatchbook, Bru will use the Swatchbook platform to distribute its collections of materials to customers worldwide. swatchbook.com | twinbru.com

Bru and Swatchbook are planning to roll out their offerings to Bru customers later this summer

ROUND UP The new Dynamic Product Navigation solution from Aras is billed as a shift away from static representations of CAD geometry to an environment where users can tailor their 3D view, creating queries to display graphic representations in the context of their specific business needs aras.com

The new Samsung 870 QVO is the first Solid State Drive (SSD) from the company, available in capacities up to 8TB. The 2.5-inch SATA SSD will be compatible with workstations and older generation pro laptops, but not newer ones that have standardised on the smaller M.2 form factor samsung.com

Velo3D has qualified nickel-based alloy Hastelloy X for use on its Sapphire metal 3D printer system.

A nickel-chromiumiron-molybdenum alloy, Hastelloy X offers an exceptional combination of oxidation resistance, fabricability and hightemperature strength velo3d.com

An updated Faro Gage arm has been launched, boasting a new slimmed-down form, greater accuracy and a simple two-button user interface. It's more streamlined than its chunky predecessor, but offers a 20% longer reach – a 1.5m working sphere compared to 1.2m faro.com

Graphics' VGStudio Max 3.4 release adds to and augments tools to more easily convert CT scans into 3D CAD models by generating surfaces from a CT scan, or any voxel model converted from a closed mesh/point cloud scan, using its auto-surface function volumegraphics.com/

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NEWS

LIVEWORX 2020: TIME TO FOCUS ON BUSINESS ADVANTAGE, SAYS PTC CEO JIM HEPPELMANN

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hat a difference a year makes. When PTC president and CEO Jim Heppelmann delivered last year’s Liveworx keynote, he addressed a packed house at the Boston Convention Center from a striking multi-zone, multi-level stage set that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Broadway show.

By contrast, this year’s keynote was a far more subdued affair, delivered over the Internet from Heppelmann’s Boston home.

As he wryly observed, “It seems crazy I’m talking to you from my home office.

But the past few months have been crazy across so many different dimensions.”

Despite the unusual circumstances, Heppelmann delivered a sensitively judged, well-structured keynote, clearly intended as a message of hope to PTC’s industrial customer base.

In keeping with the technology sector trend of recent years, the presentation put customer success stories front and centre, but Heppelmann didn’t shy away from acknowledging the human and economic cost of Covid-19 and took time to pay tribute to the vital role played by frontline workers in recent months.

Nor did he miss the opportunity to thank his own team. During the pandemic, he said, PTC employees working from home had successfully closed the company’s fiscal second quarter, met software release goals and generally kept its global business running.

Special mention was made of the recent release of Creo 7, “the largest release since we introduced Creo to you a decade ago.”

Here, DEVELOP3D editor in chief Al Dean got a name check from Heppelmann, for his recent assessment of Creo 7 as “one of the most impressive releases of a 3D design and engineering system that I’ve seen in a good few years.”

The core of Heppelmann’s keynote focused on four main lessons learned from the recent crisis, and how these might be used as the basis for developing “thriving skills” over the months and years ahead.

The first of these “thriving skills” is workforce mobility and resiliency; in other words, using cloud technologies to ensure that workers have access to the tools and data they need to get work done, regardless of their location.

According to Heppelmann, PTC’s $470 million acquisition of Onshape last November doesn’t just give PTC a full suite of software-as-a-service CAD and PLM tools, but also the technological foundation to deliver SaaS versions of all of its major products in the future.

This platform has been named Atlas by

the company, “because it will ultimately carry the entire PTC SaaS world on its shoulders,” he said.

It is these kinds of cloud capabilities, he added, that have kept design work moving ahead at Onshape customer Garret Motion, an automotive supplier, and at PTC Windchill customers, robot maker GreyOrange and medical equipment specialist Fresenius Medical Care.

The second skill is flexible and innovative supply chains. In a world where many companies work together on the design and manufacture of a product, said Heppelmann, software incompatibilities continue to be a burden.

Again, a cloud-based product like Onshape enables partners to collaborate more easily on designs, as seen in the ventilators produced by a consortium of local companies in El Salvador led

by Francisco Gandia University, and at electric vehicle specialist e.GO Mobile in Germany. (Although, in this latter case, Heppelmann’s ‘survive and thrive’ message may not be entirely apt, since the company filed for insolvency protection in April and its future hangs somewhat in the balance.)

The third skill, meanwhile, is enabling frontline worker connectivity and collaboration – a clear opportunity for Heppelmann to showcase PTC’s Vuforia augmented reality (AR) applications.

“Like a growing number of you, I’m a big believer that AR is going to bring massive productivity advantages to those enormous ranks of frontline workers,” he told his online audience.

Automotive giant Toyota Motor Company, for example, is already using Vuforia Chalk, so that production engineering staff can remotely oversee subcontractors who

handle installation of new manufacturing lines and maintain existing assets and facilities around the world.

In the UK, PTC worked as part of the VentilatorChallengeUK consortium, providing AR technology so that manufacturing experts could capture the crucial assembly steps and processes involved in building ventilator systems and share them with workers in the factories of consortium partners that have never made ventilators before.

Finally, there’s remote monitoring, using the Internet of Things (IoT) to keep plant floor machinery up and running and smart products serviced once they’re bought and installed by customers.

At medical equipment company Elekta, for example, IoT connectivity has reduced the time it takes to make part changes on radiotherapy machines from 60 hours to 15 hours and around half of equipment problems are now resolved remotely.

At Autoliv, which makes car safety equipment such as airbags and seatbelts, IoT is used for real-time detection of problems in product quality and reliability.

As Heppelmann concluded: “While the Coronavirus crisis is a terrible health and economic problem, it’s definitely accelerating the movement towards digital technology like IoT, AR and SaaS – the types of technology that PTC has been prioritising and that make our company so unique.”

“When uncertainty and disruption become the expectation, then accelerating digital transformation is the ideal response,” he continued.

“It’s time to take stock of what works and what doesn’t – and to think beyond necessity, to business advantage.” ptc.com

Heppelmann's keynote featured a quote from DEVELOP3D's very own Al Dean

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COMMENT

Even the most difficult times can be an opportunity for learning. This pandemic could be a chance for you to develop new skills and hone existing ones, for the betterment of your career and your life, writes DriveWorks’ Glen Smith

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n previous columns, I’ve written about what businesses can do to ensure they survive and thrive during this pandemic. But people are at the heart of this and many are asking what the future holds. Do I still have a job? Has my role changed?

And if so, is it something I can still do?

Students, meanwhile, have completed their studies. What should have been an exciting time for them is now uncertain and confusing.

What you do now will make a real difference in what happens as we transition to the next phase and to a different kind of ‘normal’. How will you answer the question: “What did you do while in lockdown?”

If you’re unemployed or just entering the world of work, it’s time to invest time in yourself. Skill up and make yourself more employable.

FOLLOW CHARLIE’S LEAD My nephew Charlie is an apprentice joiner. Early on, the company he works for furloughed the whole team. Undeterred, Charlie, who needed to complete and submit coursework for his apprenticeship, started looking for home-based projects that would enable him to practice his skills. His mum is delighted to now have unsightly water pipes clad, new laminate flooring laid in the dining room, new skirting with dovetail joints in her living room, and a wobbly pocket door re-hung and realigned.

Charlie sent me photos of his work, seeking approval. But being an engineer, I wanted to make sure the lad was learning, too. We have had a few video calls and in one of these, I pointed out an issue I had spotted with the way he had clad the outdoor pipes.

He had used cladding panels but had placed them upside down, meaning that rain would be directed behind the pipes, rather than forced to run off. Charlie was pleased to have my input and even included details of his oversight and what he had learnt in the write-up of his project for his tutor.

Charlie could have taken the easy way out and lost motivation during all of this, but I’m proud he’s carried on learning. He will have lots to talk about when employers ask him what he did during lockdown. I’m glad Charlie can come to me for advice.

Learning new skills and keeping your knowledge up to date can only help right now. The more you learn, the more you will be inspired to start your own projects, too.

With a personal project under your belt, you’ll be even more memorable when you talk to employers.

GET INVOLVED If you’re looking for help and inspiration, get involved in events designed to help you learn and network. It’s easier than ever while there are so many free, digital events going on.

You can find them on Eventbrite or in social media groups that focus on the topics that interest you.

No matter what your subject area is, read interesting articles and stories and talk about them during interviews. It will make you stand out. If video is more your learning style, watch some TED Talks. Even if they aren’t directly related to your area of expertise, there’s so much to learn.

If you’re looking for more tangible learning, there are lots of free courses and certifications you can take online. Whether it’s learning a new language on Duolingo, or taking a certification related to your future career, it’s great to have extra things to add to your CV. If you’re interested in digital marketing, have a look at Google’s Digital Garage. If engineering and digital transformation is your thing, become a Solidworks Certified Professional or learn about the 3DExperience Platform. Our DriveWorksXpress and DriveWorks Solo certifications are free and available online.

Whatever you decide to do to add to your skills, break it down to make it manageable and achievable. Set small milestones.

When Charlie started his first lockdown project, he didn’t imagine he’d eventually be tackling a whole room of skirting boards and laminate flooring - but as you build on your achievements, your motivation and confidence grow, too.

My colleague Maria set herself what she thought would be an impossible challenge – to run 5k. By using the Couch To 5k app, Maria (not previously a runner) has been able to achieve her goal. The app breaks the training down, gradually increasing runs to ensure you feel good about your achievements as you hit each milestone.

Maria says she’s going to keep on running to maintain her fitness and has even found she enjoys it.

If you’re like me – one of the lucky ones still working during all of this – make time for yourself. It’s easy to burn out and do too much, especially when you’re working from home and the lines blur between work and home life.

I, for one, have enjoyed getting back to some old hobbies. Thanks to the weather, I’ve spent time in the garden on building projects (not plants, though – I don’t know a fuschia from a Ficus Benjamina). I’ve supersized a bench, turned a bit of waste ground into a hidden beer garden and used a bag of rubble to justify the purchase of a 2-tonne gantry crane.

I also bought a new soldering iron and repaired my bass guitar. Now I’m putting my fingers through a workout to make sure I can still play ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered’ – one of the best bass lines ever!

Glen’s been keeping his walking bass line game strong during lockdown

GET IN TOUCH: Glen Smith is CEO of DriveWorks. He might think that ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered’ is one of the best bass lines ever, but we’re convinced it’s ‘North, East, South, West’ by Kool and the Gang.

Get in touch at driveworks.co.uk or @driveworks DEVELOP3D.COM JULY/AUGUST 2020 13

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Making the transition from employee to freelancer is not as straightforward as most assume. Erin McDermott offers some tips on how engineers can navigate the journey successfully and step into the role of expert leader

I

f you’re transitioning from engineering employee to independent professional, how do expectations of your performance change? Do you know how to fill the role of an expert leader?

This subject isn’t often meditated upon by new business owners working in product development, so I’d like to offer some points to ponder.

I created a type of engineering firm that only has one employee – me. Yet I still wanted to provide a breadth of offerings in a manner that could scale beyond my personal limits, so I built my business in an unconventional way; it includes a network of other, totally independent professionals.

Some of the pros I added to my network only had academic experience or previously worked in roles where their every action was governed. Eventually, I realised this meant that many of them needed coaching.

While their experience and technical ability were top-notch, things like communication and mindset could still create disastrous pitfalls.

The first conversation I have with prospective subcontractors usually includes two topics: money and the expectation of taking up the role of a leader to our clients.

you provide rise to the same level?

Unfortunately, years of being told what to do and how to do it as an employee can hamper a person’s ability to step into the shoes of leadership. So what does providing expert guidance mean to me?

Let’s think about communication first. When my subcontractors communicate data, those deliverables are ultimately meant for engineers and laymen at the client site who are rarely experts in the optical engineering specialties we work in.

Oftentimes, I get reports and data conveyed in a way that even I need help understanding. When that happens, I know that the end audience for sure will not be able to follow along.

Are you using esoteric jargon, without translating into layman-ese? Do your charts and graphs have detailed labels? Are units of measurement made clear? Is all the data included useful for explaining a concept or an important



acting as a benevolent expert guide or do you look for someone to lead you? Do you leave decisions up to the client, who might paint you into a corner and handcuff your ability to design what you promised?

Or, instead, do you provide recommendations and stipulations based on technological foresight?

How often do you say, “That’s not my job”?

Sometimes, it’s necessary to draw the line between your expertise and another discipline, but oftentimes, guidelines can still be provided.

If a prototype arrives from the factory and things aren’t working as expected, how do you react?

Hopefully, you have enough experience dealing with factories, especially foreign ones, to know that most of the time, the design is not the problem.

Investigating to the point where you can defend your design is the best course of action, when possible. Any other action can jeopardise your reputation, especially when your clients don’t understand the details of your work.

Sometimes the idea of leadership gets twisted into the mindset of removing all risk and liability from the freelancer.

If you include a blanket clause in every contract that says, “By the way, I don’t guarantee any of this will work”, is that something a trusted guide would say?

In short, when making a decision, charging a rate, crafting an email, or editing a report, ask yourself, “What would I expect if I were paying a trusted, toprate engineering firm for this?”

If you can follow through with that, then, congratulations! You’ve brought your work to the level of an expert technical leader.

The first conversation I have with prospective subcontractors usually includes two topics: money and the expectation of taking up the role of a leader to our clients

MONEY AND LEADERSHIP Money is the easier conversation. Instead of haggling with my subcontractors in an effort to persuade them to charge less, I often advise them to charge me more – advice they happily take.

When starting off, it’s easy to overlook all the extra expenses for tools, software, advertising, travel and taxes that freelancers cover themselves. I remind them of these costs.

For my company’s sake, I need individuals in my network to be able to survive on their own and not go crawling back to corporate employment.

The tough part of the coaching is always getting across what it means to provide a higher level of service. So you charged me more than you ever received as an employee? Good for you! Now how will your work, your attitude and the deliverables

 point – or is some of it extraneous noise? Is it clear what points you are making?

Are there any CYA (‘cover your ass’) disclaimers you should include? (The answer is always ‘yes’.) Are you pointing to something with a big, exclamatory, inflamed red arrow, making clients erroneously think there is a horrific problem when none exists?

Besides clear communication, another thing I get routinely from larger engineering firms – but need to ask for from independent subcontractors – is comprehensive communication.

If you ran an experiment or a simulation, do you remember what you learned in science class?

Are you reporting in a way complete enough that someone else could reproduce your experiment and verify your results?

MINDSET IS EVERYTHING The remaining points, and really everything mentioned already, come down to mindset. Are you

GET IN TOUCH: Erin M. McDermott is Director of Optical Engineering at Spire Starter and a digital nomad (read: vagrant). She travels the world meeting hardware engineers who don’t know that things using light (cameras, LED illumination, LiDAR, laser processes etc) need competent design, optimisation, and tolerancing like the rest of their widget. Reach her at spirestarter.com or @erinmmcdermott

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COMMENT

Recent advances in the world of AI may be impressive, but just wait until you see what artificial general intelligence (or AGI) can do, writes Nikolas Kairinos, CEO and founder of AI think tank Fountech.ai

T

he proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) has prompted as much excitement as it has concern over the past few years. On the one hand, many suggest the technology could solve society’s most pressing problems, reduce the amount of labour-intensive work that humans do, and generally make our lives a whole lot simpler.

Others suggest the contrary: that it could lead to the demise of humanity.

As we make advancements in the field of AI, the subcategories of the technology will also grow, in the same way that the creation of moving images led to film, television and digital video. One variety that is of burgeoning interest to researchers and observers is known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

AGI AND ITS IMPACT AGI differs from AI in that it refers to a machine or computer that has the capability of understanding the world as a human would. It doesn’t yet exist, of course, but the idea of it has seeped into our cultural consciousness via popular media.

Films like The Terminator and The Matrix showcase man-made robots with human-level understanding – but the real-world version of AGI will probably be much more quotidian. However, making any kind of solid predictions is a fool’s errand; although the field is evolving quickly, we are still far away from achieving something close to AGI. For now, the real-world applications of regular AI are already being seen. Social media provides an excellent example; here, deep learning algorithms expose users to content that prompts the optimal emotive response, helping to create dependency and increasing ‘stickiness’.

While the impact that AGI will have is less clear, there is certainly huge potential in this field.

Indeed, the possibility of a programme being able to process information as quickly as a human, all the while possessing the ingenuity of a person, would undoubtedly improve our decision-making abilities on both an individual and societal level.

In turn, this would free up time for people to divert to other activities. While some may associate ‘free time’ with unemployment, I consider it to mean greater time for an individual to pursue more value-adding and fulfilling activities.

In saying that, such a scenario would mean that AI would need to merge with human intelligence.



The development of AGI will require greater creative thinking. We will need to see experts looking beyond reprogramming AI and instead considering new and novel ways in which AI technology can be applied

 This would be functionally difficult, as it would require a programme to be augmented by millions of AI experts, to ensure human qualities are ‘coded’ into the AI. In order to achieve the best outcomes, machines will need to have the ability to present different options for humans to choose from.

With time, the AI will learn how to make similar decisions in a way that mimics human emotion and critical thinking.

The development of AGI presents risks, too.

It would increase the ability of governments to conduct surveillance on their populations, as machines would be able to process a far larger amount of information — in the same way that Tesla cars are able to digest, in (almost) real time, masses of data about their surroundings and make movement decisions based on them.

On the flipside of the argument, Chris Bishop, laboratory director at Microsoft Research Cambridge, claims that these kinds of predictions are “utter nonsense”. At best, he argues, “such discussions are decades away.”

Dystopian concerns aside, then, AGI could help humanity combat hugely complex problems such as climate change. With a cohort of reasoning and high-functioning machines, our ability to analyse and deduce solutions will be massively increased.

HOW CLOSE IS AGI TODAY? There is a growing body of evidence that we are already getting closer to achieving something akin to AGI. Google Deepmind’s AlphaGo, for example, successfully beat champion Lee Sedol at board game Go. To put this in perspective, Sedol was once described as the “Roger Federer of Go”.

What was so interesting about this victory was that a computer is unable to calculate all permeations of Go – there are simply too many.

So AlphaGo had to use reason and something bordering on intuition in order to win. This signified a major advancement on the road to genuine general AI.

However, whilst Google Deepmind serves as an excellent example of just how far we have come in the development of AI, the technology remains just that: AI. In other words, it still works by performing a limited series of functions, and lacks the key human qualities that would be required for it to be awarded the title of AGI. Indeed, I fear that we are approaching an AI ‘winter’. While we cannot deny impressive breakthroughs like the development of deep learning – the science that underpins many advanced applications of AI toolsets today – the amount of research being dedicated to novel applications of AI has plateaued.

Programmes like AlphaGo might lead people to believe that AI can be ‘creative’, as might the ability of AI to create ‘deepfakes’, but these accomplishments do not yet meet human levels of creativity. True creativity cannot come from a system that solely takes input, performs analytical functions and presents the output.

The development of AGI will require greater creative thinking. We will need to see experts looking beyond reprogramming AI and considering new and novel ways it might be applied.

That said, this does not mean we have nothing to be excited about in the field of AI. There is little doubt that, as we progress toward achieving AGI, there will be major changes to how human society will be constructed. I, for one, look forward to seeing what the next big development will be.

GET IN TOUCH: Nikolas Kairinos is the chief executive officer and founder of Fountech.ai, an umbrella company to three specialist firms: Fountech.Solutions, Fountech.Ventures and Fountech.Science. Fountech.ai is driving innovation in the AI sector, helping consumers, businesses and governments understand how this technology is making the world a better place. Reach him here: @NickKairinos or @fountechAI DEVELOP3D.COM JULY/AUGUST 2020 15

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Š 2020 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, Radeon, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. EDEM is a registered trademark of Altair Engineering, Inc. PCIe and PCI Express are registered trademarks of PCI-SIG Corporation. Other product names used in this publication are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective companies.

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ROOF DESIGN The tent’s centre becomes an additional supporting point and its star-shaped roof offers five run-offs for rain

GEODESIC FRAME FOR STRENGTH Besides great stability, geodesic domes also boast a very efficient structure, due to their excellent materialto-volume ratio. Heimplanet translated this principle into its Inflatable Diamond Grid (IDG) and its inflatable tents. The inflatable geodesic structure is built out of modular double-layer airbeams

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Lelo is one of the world’s leading intimate lifestyle companies

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PROFILE

E H T E L P I C N I R P rge u e , y th mers b n o rive r cust ns. d s wa ion fo bratio that y o x t ensat ple vi lated t e s s s c a m Son ind of an si m tran produ s ’ elo ew k her th sh fir ning L f n n i t gn o tirely es ra Swed rd-wi i s e v a n e he d e an e nic wa ow th an aw T » t o rea d on s ts on h g into c o r t in e bas n repo think ea ative D l A ov inn DEVELOP3D JULY/AUGUST 2020 21

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W

1

hat do you buy the sophisticated woman who seems to have everything but still wants more, as a gift to mark her 50th birthday? That was the challenge facing three Swedish designers/engineers, which led to the development of luxury sex toy brand Lelo back in 2003. Contemporary designs lacked innovation and luxury, the trio observed. The adult stores in which they were sold lacked comfort and intimacy.

With their background in the development of early smartphones and their expertise in navigating how the technological and the personal can come together in a compelling product experience, their work began in the front room of a Stockholm townhouse with one simple question: “What if our most intimate items were made as beautiful as the ones we displayed with the most pride?”

Their first design – the Lelo Lily – far exceeded expectations in terms of its considered design, its simplicity and its technology, says Stu Nugent, the company’s brand expert: “It went against everything else on the shelves at the time, resembling something more like a smooth pebble from a Nordic fjord than a phallic sex toy of convention.”

The gift’s recipient, meanwhile, was thrilled. At her insistence, the engineers put together a handful of further

prototypes and began touring trade shows with their designs. Word spread, and as interest in the Lelo Lily grew, it quickly became unviable to make each product to order.

Demand grew for follow-up products. An increasingly large and sophisticated distribution network was needed to get those products to eager customers. Fortunately, the team’s earlier experiences in the technology industry provided solid foundations for growth.

Today, almost two decades on, Lelo’s heart may still be very much in Stockholm, but it now has a presence in locations around the world, from San Jose to Shanghai.

A multicultural brand from the start, it operates as a highly internationalised, decentralised business. Digital operations, for example, are run out of its offices in Zagreb; manufacturing happens in China; and business-tobusiness sales are largely an American affair.

1 Lelo’s Sona ●

Cruise 2 is a mix of engineering smarts and high-quality materials choices 2 Taking inspiration ●

from subwoofer technology, the Sona’s internals aim to provide an entirely new sensation 3 Juanita Salcedo, ●

senior product development specialist at Lelo

SENSATIONAL DETAIL Despite an established reputation and popular products, Lelo still works hard to find room for innovation. And what that comes down to is close attention to sensory and anatomical detail, explains senior product development specialist Juanita Salcedo.

“We’re interested in sensations. That might sound obvious given the nature of what we do, but just as you need engineers of sound and light to produce a beautiful movie,

CONNECTED PLEASURE: WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD? Intimate devices are becoming much more intelligent than a switch, a battery, a motor and an eccentric cam.

We wanted to know how the Internet of Things (IoT) and the widespread ambition to connect everything is changing Lelo’s design process, if at all? Does the team consider

connectivity and intelligent operations as an equal part of the design process or are they considered separately?

“Our processes have a certain amount of flexibility built into them, constrained only by anatomy, so it’s hard to even define our process with any certainty,” says Lelo’s Juanita Salcedo.

“It’s that way necessarily.

As taboos are shattered and the sexual landscape changes, we need to have that flexibility in order to maintain our relevance, in all sectors of the business.

It’s rare that a technology or material emerges that forces a change in whatever process we already have,” she explains.

That said, characteristics such as intelligence and connectivity are certainly considerations to bear in mind.

“Indeed, many of our products integrate some kind of wireless functionality by design. But we tend not to rely on it too heavily. What customers desire most is simplicity.”

In fact, it could be a long time before you encounter anything resembling an operating system built into a Lelo product, she adds, “because in a product as personal as a Lelo, a clever interface is actually an obstacle for a user, not a benefit.”

It’s not unimaginable that Lelo will do it in the future,

and it’s exploring those avenues, she says, “but we focus more on streamlining the user experience as much as possible, not complicating it.”

“Despite the relative complexity of some of our technology, the trick is, as many of your readers can probably testify, to make it look simple.”

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PROFILE We ‘‘ wanted to

find out if there was an entirely different way to approach those sensations, and to do that, we had to understand how sensations are created and interpreted

’’

so you need an engineering approach to sensation to make something sensational.”

The vast majority of pleasure products available, including those built by Lelo, involve the creation of pleasurable sensation through the stimulation of nerve endings by vibration. “Vibrations are great. We love them. But that doesn’t stop us wanting to explore entirely new, untapped territory,” she explains.

“We wanted to find out if there was an entirely different way to approach those sensations, and to do that, we had to understand how sensations are created and interpreted.”

So for a new product, Sona, the starting point was something entirely intangible. “Not a new design, not a new shape, not a new audience, but a new feeling. From there, we quickly made the leap from vibrations to sonic waves, based on the physical impulsion one feels in the presence of a powerful kind of energy. In this case, sound, in a sense.”

Naturally, some designs are led by anatomy and there’s no escaping this simple fact. “A penis ring, for example, is always going to be the shape of a penis ring,” states Salcedo. But the team’s experimentation and increasing understanding of anatomy has led to some interesting product developments.

“The clitoris, for example, was long held to be a bundle of nerve endings atop the entrance to the vagina,” she explains. “But now, as poorly publicised as it is, we know that the clitoris is a far more substantial structure,

2

extending its ‘legs’ around and into the vagina, and perhaps buttressing the G-spot. In fact, research suggests they might be one and the same thing.”

She adds: “Isn’t it crazy that there’s still speculation about such a thing? It’s a testament to the unforgivably poor state of research into female pleasure processes.”

This is where Sona differs from most competing products. Instead of vibrations that simply stimulate the nerve endings closest to the skin’s surface, it’s based on sonic waves, so that sensations are transmitted along the entire structure of the clitoris.

FROM SENSATION TO HARDWARE According to Salcedo, Sona’s ideation and development may have been the firm’s most conceptual to date, but they have also proved the most seamless. “The idea of sound, sensation, and pleasure all came together at exactly the same time, leaving us with that ‘Why didn’t we think of this before?’ feeling that we all enjoy as designers, because when you feel that, you know the idea is strong.”

Lelo’s development process follows a pretty typical route.

Ideas are workshopped in a product development meeting, with sketches flying around, amendments being added and modelling clay manipulated into suggested shapes, until the assembled team have settled on a rough design that suits the original idea.

With a previous product, Soraya, design impetus came directly from customer comments on social media and feedback from shop assistants on market trends. Demand was identified for ‘rabbit-style’ vibrators, the technology required was developed, the silhouette designed to encompass mechanics, and the design tested and refined.

With Sona, however, the design impetus was the search for entirely new sensations. That triggered a particular mechanical engineering challenge: while the team was familiar with using unbalanced rotary motors to create vibrations, now they would be dealing with miniaturised sonic motors.

Eventually, the archetype they settled on was the cone of a subwoofer: they took that oscillating principle and applied it through a silicone surface on a much smaller scale, to create a sense of ‘bass’ that could then be applied directly to the body.

Developing Sona’s Cruise Control function - from which the upgraded Sona Cruise takes its name - was even more complex. As Salcedo explains, “That functionality allows the oscillating motor to retain a set amount of power over and above normal operation. When the motor senses that it’s begun to experience high resistive load, [it] adds the power it was keeping in reserve, to maintain a consistent sensation no matter how vigorously the product is being applied. We wanted to eliminate the kind of power drop that characterises many lower-end pleasure products, and we achieved it.”

3

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PROFILE Of course, internal mechanisms are just one aspect of the challenge when dealing with devices that come into intimate contact with the body. External form plays a vital part, too, in terms of both aesthetic qualities and function.

But according to Salcedo, the Sona’s form development proved less challenging than for many other products.

“It all happened together, really. Each element of the development necessitated an adaptation to the design, and the design adaptations necessitated certain functionality,” she says. “I hate to say it, because it’s a very unsatisfying answer from a designer’s perspective, but Sona kind of designed itself. We trialled a number of different design applications, but in the end, we sort of trusted it to dictate its own direction, and the end product was very close to the way we thought it might end up anyway.”

She continues: “Sona’s shape happened fast and naturally: we had the engineering principles of a subwoofer in mind during development, so it’s no coincidence that the clitoral aperture is cone-shaped. Similarly, we knew we were targeting the clitoris specifically, so we had to work within the framework set by anatomy. And third, we had to apply our knowledge of how the product would be used – onehanded, not to put too fine a point on it. Sona’s ergonomics were dictated by that.”

3D design tools usually come into play around this point.

Lelo uses a mix of McNeel Rhino and PTC Creo, with disparate teams focusing on their given area of expertise.

A number of 3D renders will be produced and 3D printed in time for the next development meeting. There, various designs will be considered, in line with the advancements the engineering teams have made in their own research.

It’s all very symbiotic, and it’s all done in-house, from start to finish. The engineering team has access to full-size,

4

industrial 3D printers for high-quality prototyping, but there are also a couple of Raise3D FDM machines in the offices too, for quick and dirty ideation.

INTEGRATED PRODUCTION Manufacturing happens in China, but not just for economic reasons. The team at Lelo claims the company is unique in its industry in keeping most of its processes inhouse and derives major benefits from that decision.

As Nugent explains, “We wanted to be able to produce extremely luxurious pleasure products, but make them in a way that they could be accessible to most budgets. We also wanted to reach beyond a western audience, and bring what Lelo offered to everyone, not just the US and Europe. So, we moved the entire design and production operation to Shanghai, while maintaining operational headquarters in the US and Europe too, expanding from there.”

Much of the company’s research and development now happens in Shanghai, which hosts a large multinational team of designers and engineering, steered from the top by one of the original founders, Filip Sedic. It’s in this office that the real graft of the design work happens, fed by data and input from the global team.

Taking in the various engineers and designers involved specifically and only in product development, the team extends to around forty people, half of them western and half of them Asian, with a more or less 50/50 gender split, too. Says Nugent: “A lot of senior responsibility holders are women, and the majority of marketers and PR specialists are women too. The company has a good representative mix, reflecting its incredibly diverse customer base.”

The skills at work are diverse, too. In-house teams design the manufacturing equipment itself, often from scratch, such as the molds and manufacturing processes used to make the company’s Hex condoms.

In fact, these production teams are involved from the start of a project, advising on which elements might add significant cost to the design, and what amendments might be made to reduce cost without affecting performance.

“We have the ability to do all this very fast, since our manufacturing facilities are only an hour away from our design studio and head office,” says Salcedo. “The transition from design to production is the responsibility of a director who has been consulted and involved since conception – and, in the case of Sona, is largely responsible for the original idea. So for Lelo, the transition is a smooth and natural one.”

Being able to rely on its own in-house capabilities, she says, saves huge amounts of time and cost, not to mention the frustration of agreeing and monitoring service-level agreements with an outsourced manufacturer, as many competitors must do. “It’s no trouble at all to have the person who 3D-rendered the design in the office visit the factory, consulting with the people who will make it.”

Sona’s ‘‘ shape

happened fast and naturally.

We had the engineering principles of a subwoofer in mind during development, so it’s no coincidence that the clitoral aperture is cone-shaped

’’

5

4 Lelo pays as much attention ●

to smart packaging and premium materials as it does to design 5 Stu Nugent, brand expert ●

at Lelo

6 Hygeine and safety are key ●

on Lelo’s design criteria list, where it takes its cues from the medical field

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PROFILE

6 INTRODUCING SONA 2 The Sona was released to great public acclaim and five-star reviews. Lelo has since followed up with an updated version.

The Sona 2 features different pressure settings, as well as a redesigned exterior.

Considering the industry Lelo operates in, you might be forgiven for thinking that customer feedback might not be immediately actionable as design changes or new engineering challenges. But that’s not the case at all.

Salcedo explains that Sona 2’s updates were largely based on reviewer feedback, collected over the original version’s first two years: “This might come as a surprise, but there is a huge, vibrant and highly vocal community of committed sex toy testers, who have no hesitation in providing detailed and experienced feedback on their experiences.”

She adds: “Many of them now do it as a profession, or at least as a healthy second income. Very often, this feedback is given to us openly, particularly by Twitter. By aggregating all of their responses and analysing them, we’re easily able to spot patterns and places for improvement.”

Take, for example, the clitoral ‘cone’; thanks to feedback from reviewers, the Lelo team realised that making small changes to its design could significantly enhance the range of sensations – so it did so.

INTO THE FUTURE As with all industries, the production of sex toys is intrinsically linked with other, seemingly unrelated areas of technology and the Lelo team is very open to new thinking from such sources.

As Nugent explains: “The digital revolution and advancements in connectivity will undoubtedly drive innovation in the sexual wellness and intimacy industries, as they do elsewhere. In fact, one particularly fast-growing section of the market, into which Lelo falls, is now referred to as ‘sextech’, even by mainstream outlets, and so the pace of progress accelerates as old taboos are washed away and new developments embraced.”

He fully expects sex toy apps to grow in sophistication and increasingly integrate with the Internet of Things (see boxout, page 22), “to such a point where a pleasure product will be able to deduce, through a series of algorithms based on your use of it, exactly what sensation you want, before you know it yourself.”

These kind of learning programmes already exist in the industry, to an extent, he says; take, for example, the proliferation of intelligent sex dolls in the Far East. “With virtual reality now coming to maturity, it’s easy to see applications for that technology in the very near future, creating and exploring fantasy in real time.”

New production methods and materials are on the horizon, too. For now, Lelo relies on a handful of tried-andtested materials that it knows unequivocally are body-safe and feel great, in line with regulations for the medical industry: cured silicone, ABS plastic, stainless steel.

But it is also interested in the ‘supermaterial’ graphene, while conceding that, for now, it’s not commercially viable.

“We costed it: it would cost $15,000 dollars per condom,” says Salcedo.

“But we always have our ear to the ground: with graphene just around the corner, and the fantastically organic nature of carbon nanotubes, the next generation and the one after that will be the most exciting in history. In the meantime, we’ll concentrate on engineering entirely new sensations using the materials we know work best.”

With over 17 million products shipped and numerous design awards under its belt, the main focus begins and ends with the customer. As Salcedo puts it: “I think what’s driving most advances in the manufacture of consumer goods is the consumer: more than ever, and across every industry, consumers have become much savvier about quality, much better equipped to make educated buying decisions, and much more vocal with the brands they’re buying from. If anything, it’s the quality of the consumer that’s changed most – and for the better.” lelo.com

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OPINION

RIGHT TO

REPAIR A » How should growing demand from consumers to fix products themselves influence manufacturers’ decisions around product design and materials choices, asks Craig Hillman, director of software development at Ansys? dvocates of the ‘right to repair’ movement look back favourably on a time when consumers were able to take a do-it-yourself approach to fixing everyday machinery, such as automobiles, washing machines or refrigerators – or could at least call in a qualified thirdparty repair company, instead of relying on the original equipment manufacturer (OEM).

Farmers who have been used to repairing their own tractors, for example, resent the fact they are voiding their warranty if they don’t load the tractor onto a flatbed truck and pay to haul it hundreds of miles to the manufacturer’s facilities, for repairs that will likely cost more than if they had performed them themselves.

Mobile phone owners might prefer to have instructions on how to replace a battery, rather than paying the inflated prices of a manufacturer’s repair service.

And environmentalists lament overflowing landfills, containing products that are trashed rather than repaired, as well as the excess energy consumed and greenhouse gases emitted in manufacturing their replacements.

For their part, OEMs cite intellectual property rights that could be at risk if they are made to publish schematics of the inner workings of their proprietary designs. They say that do-it-yourselfers could injure themselves or further damage products if they do not have the necessary skills to make repairs. They also warn that third-party replacement components might not meet their own quality standards.

And obviously, the loss of revenue that might result from making their products easy to repair is another concern.

LEGISLATION UNDERWAY

This ‘right to repair’ movement is particularly noticeable in the US. Starting with the first Motor Vehicle Owners’ Right to Repair Act, passed in Massachusetts in 2012, the movement has spread, with 20 US states considering similar legislation in 2019. As expected, some OEMs are defending their rights and lobbying legislators to prevent passage of these laws.

Recently, the European Union (EU) passed its own right to repair legislation for major appliances, including washing machines, refrigerators, lighting and dishwashers.

This means that starting in 2021, EU businesses that sell these products must make them easily repairable with common tools and provide spare parts for up to 10 years after the last unit is sold. The EU is also contemplating including consumer electronics like TVs, computers and mobile phones in future laws.

So what might be the impact of this kind of legislation on product design? In fact, some corporations are already changing the way they design mechanical and electronic products and how they choose materials for each component. Their experiences can provide key insights into how other manufacturers will eventually need to change their overall design strategies.

Design decisions on mechanical parts such as connectors, seals and enclosures are among the first to be revised. Permanent attachments, such as welds or glued joints, are being replaced with separable connections, such

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as latches or gaskets. Even separable connectors are being redesigned to be more accessible.

For instance, some corporations are starting to ensure that the force required to insert and remove connectors follows best-in-class human ergonomics. Modelling and simulation software will play an increasing role in understanding the repairability of these products.

ROLE OF SIMULATION At Ansys, we’ve seen how our product Ansys Mechanical can perform mechanical simulations of connectors to gain insights into the effects of extended repairability, as well as knowledge of the forces required to disengage connectors. Design teams can use Mechanical to ensure that the force required to disengage connectors is practical, given the location of the connector within the system.

For example, the average key pinch (easy-to-access) and tip pinch (hard-to-access) connectors can differ in strength by up to 45N (or 10 pounds of force).

Mechanical can also predict the number of insertions before a connector fails. Each insertion and removal introduces stresses that can induce low-cycle fatigue in the part’s polymer constituents. Design teams have typically assumed that the part will need to survive one to five insertions.

However, with the right to repair, these connectors could see 10 times the number of insertions and removals.

For gaskets and other polymer-based components that will become brittle with age, simulations in Mechanical can answer the question, “How brittle is too brittle?”

By modelling stresses on the gasket seal mechanism, engineers can determine whether it will still be viable in 10 years, or if a change in materials will be required. Having to consider materials that will be able to retain their form and function after 10 years of use and storage presents OEMs with two key challenges.

First, the necessary lifetime of certain parts may now double (assuming 10 years in storage awaiting need for repair and 10 years in the field). Typically, this is not a risk for metal structures, because warehouse environments are more benign than field applications. However, extended storage can be an issue for connections, plastic parts and electronic hardware due to oxidation, plasticiser evaporation and other processes.

The second challenge is that the legislation may entice the consumer to expect the field lifetime to also be longer. Take Max Mustermann, a German homeowner who buys a brand-new washing machine: before the legislation, Max would likely expect the machine to last as long as the warranty. If the warranty is 10 years, then Max will plan on buying a new machine the first time it breaks down outside of the warranty period.

Now, with the right to repair, Max will hold on to the machine far past the warranty period and will still expect the machine to operate reliably. That is to say, he may be okay with a repair every few years, but it should not fail more often than that.

To meet this new expectation of lifetime, OEMs will need to improve the robustness of all aspects of the machine (latches, seals, paint,

motors, electronics, displays and so on). The combined effects of these two challenges could potentially double or triple current product lifetimes.

RISK MITIGATION The effect of legislation on electronics will depend on whether OEMs view the minimum field-repairable unit as an electronic part (CPU, electrolytic capacitor, relay, and so on); a printed circuit board assembly (PCBA); or the entire box or enclosure.

Repair at the part level will require printed circuit boards (PCBs) to withstand multiple heat exposures during repair processes. Most companies qualify PCBs to withstand four exposures to assembly temperatures (around 245°C or 473°F) during primary reflow, secondary reflow, wave and one rework.

Each repair attempt will require two additional exposures to these temperatures to remove and attach parts. This means that if design teams need products to withstand at least two repairs, the number of heat exposures will double from four to eight. This is a difficult requirement for PCBs and the introduction of unseen physical damage is a real risk.

OEMs will either need to eliminate part-level repair or reevaluate design robustness. Costly physical tests have been the typical evaluation approach; however, Ansys Sherlock or Ansys Mechanical can affordably simulate the reflow process to determine if, for example, internal vias will delaminate or crack due to additional stresses.

OEMs will also be challenged to extend the storage and lifetimes of electronic hardware, because several components – including relays, connectors, electrolytic capacitors and solder joints – can have limited lifetimes. Relays and connectors can oxidise, leading to greater electrical resistance. The fluid in electrolytic capacitors attacks the oxide that provides the capacitance, dissolving into the liquid electrolyte over time; the electrolyte can also evaporate while the capacitor sits on the shelf.

Regarding solder joints, the physics behind solder fatigue has been well-studied and the most validated failure models have been incorporated into Ansys Sherlock. A wide range of complex storage and use environments can be input into the models to produce reliability predictions.

If manufacturers are going to succeed, while also cooperating with the right to repair movement building in multiple countries, they will need to implement solutions now. While the timeline for implementation will vary, multinational corporations will need to update design and validation processes to follow existing EU legislation. They also need to prepare for possible passage of similar legislation with different details in the US and other countries.

Multiple technical challenges around compliance – such as traditional development approaches and physical prototyping and testing – could cause design and validation costs to balloon.

Simulation can perform these tasks quickly and virtually, enabling manufacturers to stay ahead of the right to repair curve in a costeffective manner. ansys.com

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An Artec 3D scan captures data from a rider in Vorteq’s wind tunnel

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DRAG RACE Âť Vorteq has set its sights on creating the fastest custom cycling skinsuits to help riders compete at their absolute best. Stephen Holmes reports on how a handheld 3D scanner is helping to shave vital seconds off medal-winning performances DEVELOP3D.COM JULY/AUGUST 2020 31

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W

ith up to 90% of a cyclist’s energy output spent on overcoming air resistance, reducing the rider’s drag is paramount in a sport where every second counts. Vorteq has already created some of the fastest cycling skinsuits for professional track and road riders. It’s now building on its reputation with the launch of a custom skinsuit service for serious riders of all levels of experience.

Whether they’re professional riders or serious hobbyists, the reality is that money spent lightweighting a bike and its components might be better invested in more efficient apparel. After all, the most aerodynamic clothing can actually reduce their level of drag to below what they might experience riding naked.

In its bid to take skinsuits to a whole new level, the British company has invested in excess of $500,000 in R&D facilities at its headquarters at the Silverstone Sports Engineering Hub (SSEH) in Northamptonshire. This location enables it to test more than 45,000 different material, tension, and speed combinations in specialised onsite wind tunnels.

Created in custom patterns and fabrics, each custom skinsuit is designed to reduce the drag of the individual rider, helping them to achieve their own personal bests.

A 3D scanner is a crucial element in capturing the rider’s exact anatomy. In the hours that follow just a few minutes of scanning, data relating to size, patterns and fabric types are meticulously processed by a computational draping system and then assembled by Vorteq’s skinsuit team.

In the past, Vorteq used an arm-based scanner for 3D scanning race cars, bicycles and other machines. But when it came to using the scanner for capturing humans, the team ran into significant difficulties. In short, older 3D scanning technology wasn’t up to the job.

FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT Following a consultation with Central Scanning, a 3D scanning specialist, the team at Vorteq was recommended the Artec Leo, a cable-free, handheld 3D scanner with a built-in touchscreen and an up to 80fps capture rate.

“The rider comes into the wind tunnel with their bike, mounts it in place on the platform, hops on, and in just five to six minutes with the Leo, I capture the rider in two positions in precise, high-resolution colour 3D,” says Vorteq metrology engineer Sam Quilter. “Then I need just

another minute to capture their shoe, on all sides.”

This means he can be totally done with that rider in just 10 minutes, he continues. “I’ve got everything I need to design an anatomically accurate, fast-as-a-bullet Vorteq cycling skinsuit. No chance of a rescan needed – not once.”

Cyclists are typically scanned in their underwear to capture as much detail of their anatomy as possible, meaning that the end product lays perfectly over the cyclist’s body – just like a second skin, in fact.

“When we’re making our skinsuits, we’re working directly from the Leo scans, so it’s not measurements we’re taking, it’s the exact physical data that’s being used, and the difference is crucial,” explains Quilter.

“If you’re taking physical measurements and then entering them into a CAD system, or a computational draping system like ours, something is going to be lost in the transition. And that something can easily result in imprecise dimensions being used to create a skinsuit, which is entirely unacceptable to us.”

Even one tiny mismeasurement could result in a wrinkle here or there, he says, or fabric being overstretched in areas.

Quilter then uses Artec Studio to post-process the 3D scans. Any 3D modelling work needed is carried out in Geomagic Wrap. Finally, the garment is exported as a 3D model that can be used to make the skinsuit.

“Not many steps are needed in Artec Studio at all. I basically read the Leo data in, double-check everything visually, then use the Eraser tool for a few clicks to remove any occasional, unwanted bits,” says Quilter.

“I normally keep the bike in the scan, since it’s a great reference point to get XYZ positioning as well as the angle, and then I go into Global Registration, where I just use the default settings, because they work brilliantly as is.

Outlier Removal isn’t usually necessary, he adds, because the data is already clean enough. “Then I do a Smooth Fusion and, after a few other minor changes, I export it as an STL file for use in Geomagic Wrap.”

Geomagic Wrap’s Decimate tool is used to reduce the triangle count further. “If I’m getting rid of any wrinkles, which shouldn’t be in the scan, but on a very rare occasion might be, I use the Relax command, and then I move on to the Smooth commands, which let me cut out any imperfections, because sometimes athletes twitch their fingers during the scanning, and we need to fix that.”

This is exported as an OBJ file for use in Vorteq’s computational draping software. This final part of the process takes around two hours, and a ready-to-race skinsuit is typically produced in just under two days – but Quilter is looking to narrow that down to just 24 hours in the future.

1

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PROFILE

‘‘ get tired, and Mannequins don’t they’re always perfectly still, which allows us to know exactly what kinds of changes our fabrics and designs are causing in terms of drag and performance ’’

2 DUMMY RUN For regular customers, typically professional athletes, there’s now a way for them to order new skinsuits without having to visit the Vorteq offices.

Based on the 3D scan data, Vorteq produces a 3D-printed, anatomically precise mannequin of them. This means that if a cyclist is training on the other side of the world, but urgently needs a cycling skinsuit for an upcoming long-distance time trial, it can be produced in hours and express-delivered to them. What’s more, it will be entirely customised to the specific terrain they will be covering, whether that’s flat roads or long downhills.

“That’s where the marginal gains really add up,” says Quilter. “With a live rider in the wind tunnel, there’s going to be the wiggle factor to deal with, where the rider is moving around, even ever so slightly, and that’s going to affect results.”

With a mannequin, those problems disappear. The only factor that changes is the fabric, and this can be tested on the mannequin in the wind tunnel.

Says Quilter: “Mannequins don’t get tired, and they’re always perfectly still, which allows us to know exactly what kinds of changes our fabrics and designs are causing in terms of drag and performance.”

At present, the Vorteq custom mannequin process takes just under two days, but that time is steadily decreasing with each passing week, he says.

And, thanks to the portability of the new Leo 3D scanner, Vorteq can really go where the action is, meeting athletes face-to-face at training camps and even during a Tour, something which potentially makes for a far more streamlined approach all round. vorteqsports.co.uk | artec.com

3

4

1 The set-up at the Silverstone Sports Engineering ●

Hub wind tunnel, where Vorteq has its HQ

2 Clients range from professional track and ●

road cyclists to weekend warriors

3 3D scanning taking place inside the wind ●

tunnel using the Artec Leo, with no need for wires or extra hardware 4 Geomagic Wrap exports an OBJ file for use in ●

Vorteq’s computational draping software

5 A 3D-printed mannequin is built from scan ●

data, allowing the team to run further tests in the wind tunnel, regardless of where the ‘real’ customer is located

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A FINE FINISH » As designers and engineers continue to explore additive manufacturing, achieving the perfect finish is becoming a big focus and requires attention, as Steve Alviti of Bel Air Finishing explains

A

dditive manufacturing, or 3D printing, is becoming a widely popular form of production, but it comes with its own set of challenges.

One of these is the finishing process, otherwise known as post-processing.

In the medical, automotive, aerospace and firearms industries, many companies struggle to develop and improve finishing processes for their parts. At Bel Air Finishing, we’ve created a set of steps to help them.

We believe that, in order to get the most out of finishing, it’s important to understand both how the process should work and how best to measure results.

1

OPTIMISING FORM FOR FINISH First, a 3D model of the part should be made available, in order to provide valuable information on how the part’s structure and size will affect post-processing. This will help narrow down the machines, compounds and media that should be used.

Consider, for example, a large part with a complex geometry sent to Bel Air; since there are many aspects associated with this geometry, it’s best for us to hold a conference call with the customer to acquire background information about the part and its function. This helps decide which specific technologies to consider and provides vital information for creating a feedback loop that can improve post-processing.

The part may not be fully optimised for post-processing.

By suggesting alternative print layouts, we can make postprocessing faster and more effective. This step also aims to preserve and/or improve the cosmetic and functional aspects of the part.

Once suggestions have been taken and the design of the part agreed, it’s then time to consider its finishing needs.

The purpose of your parts is an important thing to consider, since it directly affects the details of the finishing process. Deciding whether or not a part’s finish should fulfill cosmetic and/or functional purposes is important.

Parts can be made to be shiny, matte or coarse, among other surface qualities. The part can be processed to a certain Ra value – a measure of the surface’s roughness.

1 Bel Air’s water jet ●

removes build powder from 3D-printed parts

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PROCESS GUIDE

2D 2C 2B 2A

MEASURABLE GOALS

decide what technologies to incorporate into the sample Manufacturers also need to know how many parts they process. A sample process is determined based on the want to process a day and how consistent they want that manufacturer’s needs; these might include finish quality, process to be. In the mass finishing world, no two parts price and/or pure throughput. share the same exact finish. There are always slight Machines, media and compounds are recommended variations. There are also likely to be small defects in the and then selected for the sample processes. Then, processing of parts, the processes are whether they come performed and from printing or metrology is taken to accidental wear-anddetermine the exact The part may not be fully optimised tear during posteffects and results of processing. Therefore, each one. for post-processing. By suggesting you need to consider the Once that’s complete, alternative print layouts, we can make margin for error: What it’s time to discuss post-processing faster and more is acceptable here? those results and effective. This step also aims to preserve Furthermore, determine how best additional processes to move forward. and/or improve the cosmetic and might be considered.

Additional equipment functional aspects of the part Dyeing, coating and might be considered, electroplating can all in order to preserve improve the look and the life of machinery feel of finished parts. and media and to l Once the criteria have been set, the parts are ready to be ower maintenance costs. More sample processes can processed. be created and manufacturer specifications changed, Sending a sample of acceptably finished parts is an in order to further improve a finish or create a more important step in creating a more effective post-process. At realistic one.

Bel Air, we are able to take sample parts and analyse them We have developed these steps in order to provide to determine the exact cosmetic and metric details of the manufacturers with everything that they need to create part using Zygot metrology data. a finishing post-process, while also providing them with This means that surface data is recorded using a solutions for their coating, electroplating, dyeing and contactless method and a 3D image of the surface is surface analysis needs. created. These provide an in-depth look into how surfaces might be improved.

Steve Alviti is president of Bel Air Finishing. The company’s website is Once a part has been analysed thoroughly, it is time to 3dpostprocessing.com and Steve’s email is info@belairfinishing.com

2 Post-processing ●

options for a 3D-printed part: (a) Raw part (b) Water-blasted (c) Low-energy finished and dyed (d) High-energy finished and dyed





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REVIEWS

SOFTWARE REVIEW

1

Solid Edge 2021 The latest release of Solid Edge neatly combines improvements to existing tools with the introduction of new technologies from elsewhere in Siemens’ growing software portfolio, as Al Dean reports

F

or most DEVELOP3D readers, Solid Edge requires little introduction. After all, it’s a design tool targeted at the mainstream, developed by a giant in this market (Siemens Digital Industries Software), and has around for the last two and a half decades. As you’d expect, it runs the full gamut, from standard parts, assemblies and drawing creation to simulation, machining, rendering and data management.

Over the course of the last quartercentury, Solid Edge has acquired some interesting technologies. These have included tools for surfacing, referred to as BlueSurf and dating back to the early 2000s; its synchronous technology, which mixes direct modelling with intelligent feature and relationship management; and the more recent introduction of convergent modelling, which sees a more cohesive set of tools for working with solids, surfaces and polygons, all mixed together.

Alongside these geometry-focused updates, Solid Edge has also benefited from an expansion in add-ons, based on technologies acquired by Siemens. These

» Product: Solid Edge 2021 » Supplier: Siemens Digital Industries Software Price: on application siemens.com

1 Solid Edge 2021 ●

brings a set of subdivision surface modelling tools to the system for the first time

include the introduction of FloEFD for fluid flow and thermal simulation; better PCB import; and electrical design capabilities using technologies from Mentor. So shall we explore what the 2021 release has to offer?

CORE MODELLING & UX UPDATES Let’s kick things off with a look at enhancements and updates made to the core tools within Solid Edge. As ever, a good place to start is the user interface. While the Solid Edge interface hasn’t changed to any huge extent for the 2021 release, one new tool in particular will make using it a little more efficient – namely, the adaptive Command Prediction tool.

This tool analyses the commands you use most frequently and then automatically presents them to you – in the first instance, in a ribbon bar found at the top of the modelling window. In other words, the system uses machine learning to ‘understand’ how you tend to work, depending on the task and based on your previous operations.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same technology that Siemens introduced to its NX system last year.

As with the NX implementation, there are some interesting capabilities running alongside this. It’s possible to take the data gleaned from the actions of an experienced user and reuse it to get new users on your team up to speed with the way things are done, pointing them to the most commonly used commands within your organisation.

It’s worth noting here, however, that there are no aggregation tools, so you need to pick one specific user whose data you want to reuse. This approach, of course, runs the risk of reinforcing bad practices, too, so my advice would be to pick well and use this capability cautiously.

Alongside this, there have also been a number of updates to how Solid Edge’s core modelling tools work. Since these will be applicable to most users, irrespective of industry, let’s walk through them.

One of the big changes is how the system handles large assembly data during import.

With systems like Solid Edge, the typical data import process has been to take a STEP or IGES file, parse it and create separate part and assembly files on disk that reconstruct that geometry. By contrast, the system now keeps part and sub-assembly DEVELOP3D.COM JULY/AUGUST 2020 37

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SOFTWARE REVIEW

2 data as part of the original assembly file, without creating any additional data files on disk. This means they should load more quickly, since the system isn’t spending time pulling together all of the external references and displaying them on screen.

Elsewhere in the core updates, there have been a few tweaks to how the system handles operations on ‘inactive’ parts and sub-assemblies. Like many systems, Solid Edge allows you to display just the graphic representation of parts and assemblies, mostly to make working with complex and large-scale assemblies more efficient.

For Solid Edge 2021, it’s now possible to carry out more operations on those graphics only, such as creating assembly relationships (mates, aligns and so on), taking measurements, and making synchronous edits at the assembly level.

Also on the assembly front, it’s now possible to copy and paste multiple parts and sub-assemblies from one assembly to another.

Here, all internal relationships to the copied parts come along for the ride. Solid Edge also walks the user through creating the relationships needed to position all the new parts.

The last generally applicable update I’m going to cover before getting into other areas of Solid Edge is a small one, but important for those who use their product models to replicate how a physical product will appear.

In short, it’s now possible to add decals to your models. This works exactly as you might expect, allowing the user to add product information, proof labels and warnings and such, before they get anywhere near a vinyl cutter.

FABRICATION, FRAMES & SHEET METAL Sheet metal functions have been a strong selling point for Solid Edge for many years now. The system has attracted a healthy share of its users who, if not solely focused on sheet metal fabrication, are certainly engaged heavily in design and fab as part of their wider manufacturing processes.

The existing tools in Solid Edge are already mature, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no room for innovation or, indeed, catching up with what other vendors are doing.

One such enhancement for this release focuses on multi-edge flanges, making it possible to create multiple flanges from an edge selection in one step. At first glance, this looks like a common feature in most 3D design systems these days, but what’s really interesting here is that these flanges are intelligent. Trimming is performed automatically where they meet and you can also include an offset gap between forms, for both fabrication/assembly and welding.

While Solid Edge has had the tools to design and engineer sheet metal forms for decades now, a more recent addition is the ability to carry out nesting of sheet metal forms. While this isn’t the fully fledged specialist application set needed by those deeply embedded in fabrication, it does provide a set of tools to carry out quick nesting operations, identify the optimum use of sheets and gain a better understanding of both material and cost – whether that’s for production or just estimation/quotation.

On that point, an update to this toolset for this release that will help with estimation/ quotation is the ability to open an assembly file and have the nesting tools find all

applicable forms. By allowing you to add in your material requirements, the system performs the layout across multiple sheets for you, taking into account multiples, where these are found.

On the frame design side of things, the current tools are well-developed and mature, but as ever, a few tweaks here and there can make life easier for those who use them regularly. For the 2021 release, the ability to automatically add weld gaps between frame members can be turned on – something that’s increasingly important if you’re using laser or plasma cut tubing.

You can also add in end caps to your frame members quickly, either using a standard size or basing them off the frame section with a number of controls.

2 Solid Edge’s reverse ●

engineering tools have now gained a deviation analysis tool to show how far your reconstruction workflow has strayed from the original scan data

SUBDIVISION SURFACE MODELLING Now let’s move on to some new technology for Solid Edge: subdivision surface modelling. If you’ve been watching the wider 3D design technology industry, you’ll be aware that almost every vendor has integrated some form of sub-d modelling into its toolset. The Solid Edge team is probably one of the last to make the move.

If you’re not familiar with this technology, it provides a set of tools for defining complex organic shapes that previously would have required some pretty heavy solid and surface modelling to achieve.

Where needed, sub-d bodies can maintain curvature continuity to get the shape you want quickly. (They’re also useful for creating sharp blends between complex junctions and surface transitions.)

As you might also expect, the sub-d tools in Solid Edge feature the usual array of form

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pushing and pulling, symmetry control, bridging, blending controls and so on. In terms of how these modelling tools work with both ordered (history-based) and synchronous model-led parts, they follow a familiar pattern, with the sub-d form stored as a separate ‘feature’ on the feature/ history tree.

REVERSE ENGINEERING Next up, let’s look at reverse engineering tools. This has been a focus for Solid Edge for a few releases now.

Two years ago, Siemens introduced the concept of convergent modelling to Solid Edge. This allows you to work with meshbased data alongside more traditional forms of solid and surface geometry. At the same time, the development team also started introducing tools that allow you to bring in mesh-based data from reality capture workflows (such as laser scans) and do some of the post-processing work you’d typically perform on the scanner side.

These tools range from mesh fixing and repair tools to mesh decimation, making what might otherwise be very heavy data work far more efficient. They also include surface-fitting tools to build up analytical geometry from the basis of scanned data.

For the 2021 release, new performance enhancements make the system work more quickly – up to 50 times quicker, according to Siemens executives. Deviation analysis, meanwhile, shows you any deviations between your scan and the model you’ve worked up.

to components/subsystems and quickly pick points and geometric features/surfaces to snap them to along the way. It’ll save you all of the effort of positioning clips and other mounting components you’d typically have to organise and give you solid, sufficiently accurate data on wire lengths, which subsequently get passed back to the BOM. On the PCB front, there hasn’t been too much action other than an update to the import options, with the addition of IDX 2.7 support, and support for swapping detailed models within Solid Edge when working with the iPad Pro and Xpedition, compared to the usual abstracted outline view.

ELECTRICAL DESIGN & PCB

FLOW SIMULATION

Recent releases have seen Siemens place a great deal of focus on the integration of electrical design with Solid Edge. In 2019, for example, we saw the introduction of an add-on for wire, harness and routing, as well as PCB import and interoperability. For the 2021 release, there’s a new addition to this stable of tools, specifically focused on the layout of control panels. Considering the prevalence of machine design in the Solid Edge community, this is going to be seriously interesting.

The workflow looks like this. You begin by preparing the wiring of the panel at a schematic level, as you would with most electrical design projects. Once that’s done, you start a new panel layout, adding in your shape, a border, a back plate and bringing in a terminal strip. You then start snapping devices to that rail and positioning your components.

What’s interesting is that Solid Edge uses your schematic representation to help you in this process, so you lay it out more intelligently. Of course, you’ll also need to route from your control panels to the components and subsystems that they control – and there’s been work done on this front too.

Solid Edge has had formal routing options for wiring for a while, but this new approach is a little less formal, allowing you to quickly route a cable or harness from your panels

Alongside the core 3D design and manufacturing tools, the last few releases of Solid Edge have seen greater inclusion in the mainstream offering of technology from the wider Siemens product portfolio.

One of the highlights for those with an interest in fluid flow simulation has to be the introduction of Simcenter FloEFD (the new name for FloEFD for Solid Edge). This brings both fluid flow and thermal simulation to Solid Edge in an integrated manner for the first time. (It’s the result of Siemens acquiring CD Adapco and its Flomerics products some time ago.)

For the 2021 release, there have been a few important updates that are worth discussing. One of these is the new Package Creator, which allows you to create components as a complete package, along with all manufacturing and performancespecification information, which can then be integrated into a flow simulation.

There has also been work done to improve the connection between thermal results from Flo-EFD and the structural simulation tools in Solid Edge. It’s now possible to export results and bring them into a structural study as a thermal load. This, of course, requires that you maintain the same set of geometry between the two simulation types (so that the system can map thermal loads to faces), so care needs to be taken with any abstraction or defeaturing.

3 DATA MANAGEMENT To round things out, let’s look at data management. It may not be the most exciting of topics, but it’s crucial for many organisations. The Covid-related shift away from central design and engineering offices towards more remote working practices, in particular, makes this a big focus for customers right now.

While Solid Edge’s data management offerings have shifted over the years, they have always done so with the idea of offering two levels of support and capability.

At a basic level, the core data management tools in Solid Edge work alongside your file structure and basic networked drives/ shared folders, to support rudimentary operations like searches (whilst remaining aware of the complex interactions and links between parts, assemblies and drawings) and data protection (check-in/check-out), as well as enabling OS-level previews and such.

For the 2021 release, there are two updates. The first is that it’s now possible to use the right-click menu in the file browser to open assemblies in a number of ways – either as standard, as a reduced size assembly, or as a specific configuration.

There’s also a new add-on for this release that enables search by shape. What’s that, you might ask? The answer is pretty simple.

Instead of using only textural, metadatabased strings or classifications to search for parts, you can use geometry to search for similarly shaped parts. This new Shape Search Server add-on for Solid Edge Data Management allows you to use the sketch of a part in Solid Edge to search against all of the data within your file system that it has already indexed.

If you’re looking to get more serious about data management, Siemens also introduced a Solid Edge-focused implementation of its Teamcenter PLM system some time ago. This is intended to be useful on an out-of-the-box basis, but as always with PLM systems, the more you do with them, the more you need to configure them to suit your requirements. Teamcenter is a complex beast, but the Solid Edge team has built a

3 Solid Edge’s control ●

panel tools help with tasks ranging from schematic layout to routing of wiring

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SOFTWARE REVIEW

set of presets and templates designed to get smaller organisations up and running more quickly.

For the 2021 release, Teamcenter for Solid Edge brings a bunch of updates and enhancements, so we’ll just outline the most useful ones. The Teamcenter Concept Workspace tools, for example, are interesting.

We’re all accustomed to the idea that data management systems allow you to manage design, engineering and production data in a controlled and centralised manner. But it’s often the case that it would be useful to carry out the earliest stages of a project outside of a managed environment, because it’s here that thinking, experimentation and iteration are quickest and most fundamental to ultimate success.

This is the purpose of the Teamcenter Concept Workspace, which allows you to take data from Teamcenter (for example, data relating to a product that you’re looking to refresh) and place it in a sandbox. In that way, you can work on it without messing up your carefully managed revisions and intelligence. This also provides you with tools to compare your experiments with data held inside

Teamcenter, then transition them into a managed environment when appropriate.

IN CONCLUSION Solid Edge has certainly grown in the last few releases. In particular, it now benefits to a far greater extent from technologies derived from elsewhere in Siemens’s expanding product portfolio.

While other vendors have expanded their toolsets through partnerships with third-party vendors, Siemens has the benefit of already owning those tools in-house.

The tools added to Solid Edge typically focus on expanding its reach within a customer organisation (to include your electrical design specialists, for example, rather than just your mechanical engineers), but at the same time, it’s good to see that there’s been a lot of work done to expand the tools for core users, too.

Subdivision surface modelling is something that a lot of users are interested in. But while it’s often pitched as a way to quickly create complex models, the reality is a little less ‘magic bullet’. You still

need to have a good idea of what you’re doing and plan your workflow carefully, otherwise you’ll end up in a horrendous mess. That said, those with a need for complex forms will find it an awesome tool to have in their armoury.

The expansion of the reverse engineering toolset, along with a performance boost for polygon mesh data, means that this type of work can now be conducted in your workhorse design system, rather than you having to rely on third-party applications – something that’s always a big benefit in efficiency terms, over and above the associated cost reductions.

All in all, this is a pretty solid release for Solid Edge, which neatly combines the expansion of existing tools to do more and to work more efficiently with bringing new technology to the product range.

After all, when you’re looking at a system like Solid Edge, a mature toolset is an incredible benefit. But finding new, more efficient ways to work is just as important – and arguably, more so. Solid Edge 2021 offers a good mix of both. siemens.com

TEAMCENTER SHARE: BRINGING DATA COLLABORATION & AR TO ALL

O

ne of the most interesting additions to the Solid Edge 2021 release is the Teamcenter Share service. This is not a Solid Edge-specific enhancement per se, since it’s just as applicable to NX users or indeed, users of any other CAD system.

But it’s certainly worth taking a look at in the context of this review, as it’s strikingly similar to the Solid Edge Portal service that Siemens launched a few years ago.

Essentially, it’s a cloud-based view, mark-up and collaboration service that centres on 3D CAD data.

You sign up for it, get a certain quantity of storage space, and you’re able to upload your CAD geometry. For this, you either use the browser

or the new desktop synchronisation tool, which monitors a specified folder on your desktop for file types to send to the cloud.

There’s the usual mix of viewing tools: simple view, rotate and zoom; assembly structure exploration; and part visibility, sectioning and measurement capabilities.

The redline and mark-up capabilities allow you to mark up your model and add comments. These are tagged to your model and available to view by anyone else who has access to the project files.

What’s interesting is that because this is browserbased, you can perform these tasks on pretty much any device that gives you access to the system – whether that’s a lower-end laptop, a smartphone

or a tablet. For non-technical staff, this is a neat way to get access to 3D data visualisation tools without a heavy overhead.

If the device you use is AR-capable, meanwhile, you can use it to position the model in the real world. The system uses a detected surface to place the part (on the desk or on the floor, for example), and you can then walk around the object, using your device as your viewing tool. By default, your object is imported at 1:1 scale, but this can be adapted with a quick two-finger ninja move, in order to scale up or down as needed.

The service is currently in beta testing. As yet, there are no confirmed details with regards to price and availability.

1 Once you've been through the sign-up process, you're ●

2 Your next step might be to set up the desktop ●

3 There’s a good selection of view, redline/markup ●

able to log into the system and start uploading data to experiment with. The system accepts a wide range of CAD data formats, both native and standards-based.

synchronisation service. This means you can keep a folder on your machine synced to the cloud, with filters for file types that are handled as they’re added.

4 The benefit of this type of service is that you can access 5 We tried out the 3D viewing tools using an iPad Pro and ● ●

the data from anywhere and send it to those who need it.

It also means that your viewing tools are available on more portable devices, such as tablets and smartphones.

this worked nicely for us. Using the Apple Pencil to redline and mark up a document makes huge sense and might prove very useful to non-technical folks.

and collaboration tools available in the browser from a standard workstation. The viewing tools are pretty selfexplanatory and include measurement and sectioning, too.

6 There’s also the benefit that with the integrated ●

camera, you can take advantage of augmented reality capabilities. For smaller parts, it’s nice to see them at 1:1 scale. For larger parts, walk-throughs are possible.

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SOFTWARE REVIEW

1

Ansys Discovery 2021 With Ansys Discovery, the simulation specialist combines rapid experimentation with deeper insight into product behaviour in a way that is remarkable to behold, as Al Dean reports

W

ith the launch of Ansys Discovery, Ansys has kicked off a significant expansion of its nextgeneration simulation products. But first, a bit of history, in case you’ve not been keeping a close eye on the company recently.

A couple of years ago, it launched Ansys Discovery Live (ADL), which focuses on making simulation much faster to use.

Rather than following the traditional, stepby-step ‘build-mesh-load-solve’ approach, Discovery Live uses new technologies that take advantage of GPU compute power in order to obscure a good deal of the complexity of this multi-step process.

The result is a near-real-time simulation system for both fluid flow and static structural problems. Discovery Live has since grown in capabilities and has also become a core part of PTC’s simulation offering, with its integration into Creo 7.

But the issue here – as always with simulation – is that when you boost speed dramatically, you typically experience some kind of trade-off. To put it bluntly, there is an element of ‘close enough’ with Discovery

» Product: Ansys Discovery 2021 » Supplier: Ansys Price: on application ansys.com

1 Ansys Discovery ●

manages to add depth of functionality without adding complexity to the user interface

Live. For many users, that’s fine. Others, by contrast, much prefer finer, more accurate results over speed.

And even for that former, ‘close enough’ group, an issue with ADL is that while it provides them with quick insight into product performance and a way to vastly accelerate experimentation with the interplay of form, function and physics, this is achieved at some remove from their validation tools.

All of which brings us to the present day.

Ansys has now launched a system – Ansys Discovery – that builds not only on the work done with Discovery Live, but also with other products in its portfolio, including Ansys AIM. In short, the company has delivered a system that enables users to carry out fast-paced experimentation using real-time solvers, but subsequently validate them further, as needed, using a more traditional solver (such as Ansys Mechanical or Fluent), just as they might in a more traditional workflow. So, shall we explore Discovery?

USER INTERFACE The first thing that’s going to hit you when you open up Discovery is that the user

interface is configured a little differently to other systems. The basics will be familiar – a ribbon across the top, offering operations categorised either by overall function (such as display) or by workflow step (design, prepare and so on). You’ll see a tree to the upper right that gives you control over your geometry tree as well as the physics that you have defined.

You’ll also notice three items at the bottom of the large model interaction window. To the left, you have a radial menu that gives you access to display controls (shading scheme, for example), standard views, and the familiar view cube/triad control.

In the centre, meanwhile, you’ll find another widget – the stage navigator. This is where you’ll control the stage you’re at in your simulation process and where you will receive information about the task you’re working on. This includes solving status, but also feedback on what the system needs to complete a study – we’ll explain more about this in a moment.

To the right, you’ll see the solve and results widget. This gives you direct control over starting and pausing your solves, as

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2 well as post-processing options that enable you to control the results that are displayed on screen. To see how this all works, let’s work step by step through a job.

IN USE The first step, as usual, is to define the geometry for your simulation study. To do this, ensure that the stage navigator is set to ‘model’. This will bring up all of the model handling tools you’ll need. While many simulation tools require that you import the geometry from another system, Ansys Discovery has the benefit of being built on top of the SpaceClaim platform. This gives you a number of advantages.

The first is that your import options are wide and pretty well-rounded-out. There are not many geometry formats the system can’t work with; these include analytic geometry in both native and standard formats, as well as mesh data. (In fact, SpaceClaim comes with some very nifty mesh-editing tools.)

You also have the option to model up your geometry from scratch, using SpaceClaim’s direct modelling tools. The reality is that, for most projects, you may well be using both kinds of geometry – particularly when you start to explore the interactive experimentation that’s possible here.

Either way, assuming that your geometry is in a fit state, your next step is referred to as ‘Explore’ in the stage navigator.

EXPLORE MODE – TIME TO EXPERIMENT This is the stage that follows the existing Discovery Live capabilities most closely. The goal is to take your geometry model and start to add in physics-related information.

This ranges from things like material definition for the parts in your project to adding in your physics attributes. (For the former, there’s a good pre-built library, acquired in the purchase of materials data specialists Granta a while back. This can, of course, be expanded.)

Ansys Discovery can carry out both structural mechanical studies (for stress/ strain, modal simulation and so on), as well as thermal and fluid flow studies.

What Ansys has done is remove the need to define the type of study you’re carrying out at this stage. Simply add in the physics entities and characteristics of the model and the system tells you when it’s got enough information to begin solving in real time.

Taking the example of the bracket shown in Figure 1 (opposite page), we added in the materials, loads and constraints. Once sufficient information is defined, you’ll notice that certain areas activate.

One to pay close attention to is the simulation information display, situated above the stage navigator. This gives you visual feedback about whether you’re ready to solve, the status of a solve, and what’s still missing. As with all simulation systems, there are often points in the process where things get missed, or you’ve failed to provide enough information.

You’ll be prompted about what needs doing by a hexagon with a speech bubble that appears. From here, you can also set up new studies within that project. This will be key later on.

Assuming that you have your study fully defined, the next step is to start solving.

This is done by hitting the green power icon to the right of the screen, switching on the interactive solver. You’ll start to

see your simulation results stream into the window. I’ve been playing with this technology from Ansys since its launch and it still amazes me that you can get results back so quickly – whether you’re performing structural studies, fluid flow simulation or solid thermal.

Because of the system’s interactivity, it’s entirely possible to experiment with both geometry and physics along the way.

You can quickly try out new material options, geometry forms and loading conditions, for example. If you make edits to any of these, your results will stream back in as soon as you finish. And, if you find that too distracting, you can return to the power icon and pause the solve while you make your edits – then switch it back on.

It’s important to note here that while you can bring in complex assemblies, careful use of that data is advisable. Strictly speaking, you should only apply the physics to those parts where doing so is appropriate and define proper contact conditions between them. Fortunately, that’s easy to do – but it’s also essential for efficient use of the system.

It’s also worth noting that Ansys Discovery also includes topology optimisation, allowing you to optimise for stiffness, mass reduction or natural frequency (to maximise or for a target frequency), for example.

Again, set-up is derived from the physics that you’ve already defined, then you add in the topology optimisation targets and the system gets to work.

A little more detail on this may be useful, because this is potentially a very valuable implementation of the technology.

The system allows you to define offsets from the faces where your load and constraints are applied. This essentially

2 Interactive design ●

exploration with real-time simulation of fluid flow behavior within a flow control valve

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SOFTWARE REVIEW

3 protects them from material removal.

Of course, it’s perfectly clear that other features, which might not have a bearing on the physics set-up of the study, might also be needed. Currently, there are no ‘leave out’ or ‘preserve’ features, but using an old simulation trick, you can achieve this by applying a small pressure to faces you want to preserve and that should protect them.

When the system achieves the goal you’ve set for it, you have the option to take the ‘optimised’ body and make it a formal part of the model tree. This takes your results data as a mesh and makes it available.

To be frank, only perverts and additive manufacturing vendors are going to pretend that anyone in real life would take results from a topology optimisation routine and manufacture their product straight off.

But what this does give you is a good set of reference geometry, portions of which you might be able to use to progress further using the SpaceClaim tools that

allow you mix-and-match mesh and proper geometry nicely.

The goal in the Explore stage is to carry out rapid design experimentation using all of the tools available to get you where you want to be. It’s here that the Discovery Live system stops, the intention being that users can take their results and progress them further through engineering, perhaps carrying out further simulation using different tools.

REFINE MODE – DIAL IN DETAILS But if Explore is where Discovery Live ends, it’s also where the new Discovery system really starts to gather pace, building on and enhancing that workflow.

By switching from Explore into Refine mode, you take all of your study set-up and results and refine your model further, using a deeper set of simulation tools, built on Ansys’ world-leading solver technologies, Ansys Mechanical and Fluent.

The same set of physics models are available (structural fluid flow for both

internal and external, as well as solid thermal), the natural frequency modal physics are available, and there’s a topology optimisation solver, too.

At this point, since you’re looking to push your simulation further, you’ll presumably want to dive into those areas where you intend to build an engineered solution to your problems, using the full weight of simulation.

In this environment, the results are not real-time, GPU-enabled. Rather, the resolution of results is akin to what you would expect from a long-standing solver technology – that is to say, robust and comprehensive.

The Refine mode also adds in new capabilities that are unsupported in Explore mode. These include more tools for accurately representing an assembly, for bolt pre-tensioning and for mesh refinement. The post-processing tools, meanwhile, are also built on the same foundation, so knowledge you’ve built up in Explore mode transfers across quickly.

3 Structural analysis ●

of Advenchair assembly within Ansys Discovery. Image courtesy of Onward Project

WORKFLOW: HOW TO MOVE FROM 3D CAD DATA...

1 Import a CAD file or start from scratch. ●

Ansys Discovery is built on the SpaceClaim platform, so it supports proprietary and native formats as well as mesh data.

2 Next step is to apply materials. Here you ●

can see the Heads-Up Display (HUD) widget taking advantage of material data from the Granta MDS Library (now owned by Ansys).

3 Again, the HUD is used to define ●

boundary conditions directly in place on your model. Your data is added to the model tree to the left.

4 Click Solve to instantly see results and ●

to review displacement values as well as stress and strain plots. These are all now inspectable and live.

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4 In other words, you’re using the same tools you used for experimentation, so in Resolve mode, you can dig in to additional options that yield higher fidelity results.

Of course, it might be the case that you want to explore even further still. Since you’ve already got the physics set up and have already conducted studies using the Ansys Mechanical or Fluent solvers, it makes sense to be able to wrap up that data and push it into standalone tools, too.

This is entirely possible. In fact, the system provides you with direct links into those systems that are the targets for data already set up.

of tools. The breakthrough speed of computation and the interactivity that Discovery Live has brought to the market has the potential to transform workflows at any organisation that adopts it.

Why? The answer is that Discovery



at your fingertips if you then find that your simulations take all day – and vice versa.

With Discovery Live, Ansys has managed to combine the best of rapid modelling technology from SpaceClaim with the GPU-enabled Discovery Live solvers, in order to build a system that allows you to dive in and quickly try out new ideas and concepts.

That’s extremely useful, certainly. But with the new Ansys Discovery, you don’t just get speedy simulation.

What you also get is a far deeper understanding of the behaviour of a product – the kind of understanding typically associated with more traditional, triedand-tested simulation tools.

In short, it’s the best of both worlds – and that’s quite a remarkable thing to behold.

4 Use of a heads-up, ●

at-cursor interface makes working with Ansys Discovery super-efficient and interactive

You get a deeper understanding of the behaviour of a product, of the kind associated with traditional simulation tools. It’s the best of both worlds – and that’s quite a remarkable thing to behold

IN CONCLUSION Ansys Discovery is the logical next step for the company and for its new generation

 Live allows users to truly experiment with fundamental factors of geometry, material and conditions of use, in order to identify an optimal solution to an engineering problem. After all, it’s no good having rapid modelling capabilities

ansys.com

...TO A COMPREHENSIVE SET OF VALIDATED SIMULATION RESULTS

5 To push things further still, you need to ●

move into the Refine stage. Here, you can define contacts in your assembly through predictive behaviour.

6 Now it’s time to solve the study and to ●

measure reaction forces, displacement distances and confirm sizing of various components.

7 At this point, you can re-start your ●

experimentations and change the behaviour of the design using Discovery’s built-in modelling tools.

8 Once your edits are complete, you can ●

then quickly run through the exploration and refinement stages to explore design options and have the results update.

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HARDWARE REVIEW

T3DMC / Scantech iReal 2S As the capabilities of 3D scanners become broader, new workflows become possible.

Al Dean takes a look at a new device from Scantech that supports both blue light as well as infrared scanning, making it ideal for a wide range of scanning jobs TECH SPECS » iReal 2S » T3DMC » Blue & Invisible light » 24 bit colour support » Point to point resolution: 0.200 - 3 mm (blue) 0.500 - 3 mm (infrared) » Point accuracy: 0.1mm » Target accuracy: 0.200 mm/m » Optimal scanning distance to surface: 400 mm » Scanning area: 200 x 135 to 400 x 330 mm » Weight: 0.91 Kg » 12 month warranty with extension options available » Price From £9,995 + VAT » t3dmc.com | 3d-scantech.com

T

he 3D scanner market keeps on growing. As we’ve discussed before, new technologies and capabilities are becoming more widely available, at a range of price points to suit different budgets.

While it’s still possible to match specific products to specific industries, each with their own niche requirements, many customers face a bewildering task identifying the right scanner for them.

That said, some scanners stand out from the rest in terms of their capabilities. The iReal 2S scanner from Chinese company Scantech is a good case in point, offering blue light and infrared structured scanning in one handheld device. DEVELOP3D got the chance to put the iReal 2S through its paces, courtesy of The 3D Measurement Company (T3DMC), the master distributor in the UK for Scantech’s products.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS The iReal 2S is a compact unit and the T3DMC team has done a pretty bang-on job of packaging it up for use. It arrives in a flight case with scanner, cables and USB sticks all tucked away, nice and neatly. Setup is a breeze, using the software in tandem with the supplied USB-dongle and a simple dual-purpose cable to connect the unit.

You’ll need to ensure you have an available high-speed USB 3 slot to hand and a power outlet close by.

The iReal 2S weighs in at just under 1kg – and considering that this unit is packing both blue light and infrared capabilities, that’s pretty impressive. Once in your hand, the unit is well-balanced and its single button is in easy reach at the front of the device. The software is pretty simple to use: fire it up and it will take you through the calibration process. The calibration plate is supplied in the flight case. You scan that to get the device working at the appropriate resolution and accuracy. Once that’s done, you can get to work on your scanning jobs.

IREAL 2S IN USE

1 Weighing in at ●

under 1kg, the iReal 2S is a compact, welldesigned unit

As mentioned, the iReal 2S offers both blue light and infrared scanning. Both use a structured light approach, but given that appropriate use cases and results differ between the two, we’ll deal with them individually in this review.

But first, a quick note on tracking, which applies to both methods. Basically, the scanner can track geometry using three different methods: geometry features,

texture, and registration markers.

Tracking on geometry features works best when the target is uniform in colour but complex geometrically – think castings, for example. The texture method works best where there’s a good variation in texture and colour across the form of a part.

Registration markers, in the form of small, reflective dots, will be pretty familiar to anyone who’s done some scanning in the past, and the iReal 2S can be set to use a mix of these. Typically, some experimentation with methods will be needed to get the best results for your particular use case.

Now let’s discuss the difference between blue light scanning and infrared scanning, as well as how they might be used.

Blue Light: Blue light scanning offers users an upgrade from the white light scanners that dominate the entry level in the professional scanning market. Using blue light means less interference from ambient light and less scatter of light off your objects, thanks to narrower wavelengths.

That translates to a cleaner, crisper scan.

When you’re setting up your job, you’ll see that having the blue light option selected on the iReal 2S will give you a resolution of 0.2mm to 3mm, 0.1m point accuracy, and a scanning area of between 200 x 135 mm ~ 400 x 270 mm within the working range of 300 to 600 mm from your object (400mm is optimal). There is also a lighting option, which can help reduce shadows and delve into the deeper crevices of organic objects.

Infrared Light: Infrared scanning excels when you need to scan more complex objects, particularly organic forms – for example, the human body. These days, there are plenty of use cases where engineering teams may need to scan such forms, accounting for human skin, hair and so forth, such as the creation of bespoke medical prostheses. There are a number of reasons for this. First, infrared is invisible, so you can scan around the eyes without the subject having to close them. Second, it does a particularly good job of scanning hair, something that traditional white light scanners really struggle with.

Once in use, the software gives you some pre-baked options for scanning objects, particularly the human body. While these don’t represent the full capabilities of the system, they serve as a good starting point for test scans.

1

And once you have a feel for how the system works, you’ll be more comfortable diving deeper into the full range of options.

This is where you can define not only the method used, but also the resolution of scan, the tracking method, and whether or not the system is capturing texture maps at the same time as physical form. If you’ve identified an ideal set of definitions for your type of work, these can be saved as a preset, making them immediately available next time around.

GET SCANNING So if you’ve got your scanner calibrated and your options defined, let’s get scanning.

Hit ‘Next’ and you’ll be presented with the main working screen. There’s a scan viewing window with a range meter to the left. This will show you how far you are from your object while you work.

To begin, hit the button on the front of the unit and it will perform a preview scan. This will show you a preview capture live from the scanner as points on the screen; you’ll also see a preview from the camera view. If

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Goes Here



everything looks good, hit the same button again and you’re scanning.

Depending on the options you have chosen, you’ll see the geometry and texture start to appear on screen as you move around the object (or indeed, rotate the object in front of the scanner).

What you’ll also see is that the on-screen indicator shows you the range between the object and the scanner – around 400mm is the sweet spot for both blue light and infrared modes. But you’ll also notice the coloured gauge on the rear of the unit – something that every manufacturer should add as standard to their scanners – which gives you colour-based feedback.

When you’re done, click the button again to finish. Assuming that you’re going to carry out more than one pass of your target object, you can then dive in and look at your data, identify any gaps and add additional data. With luck, the system will pick up position and let you add it in. If not, you’ll need to perform multiple scans and register them together using the software supplied.

2

POST-PROCESSING & EXPORT You’ll then need to work through postprocessing. The first step is to trim away excess points from the original scan. This can be something of a learning curve with any system, but once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty easy.

Once you have a good, cohesive set of points that represent your required surfaces, you then end the scan and start turning it into polygons. Again, there are clean-up tools available to remove islands of points or singular clusters that you may have missed. If you captured texture along with your scan points, you can adjust the output texture for brightness/contrast/ saturation, just as you would a 2D image.

You’re then ready to export your data to the format you need. That might be as a simple list of points, if you’re moving it into a points-capable system such as Geomagic or Polyworks. Alternatively, you can tessellate those points into a more readily usable format, such as OBJ or STL. It’s worth noting that the point cloud you’ve created probably needs to be reduced. If you start trying to tessellate off the basis of the one million or so points you’ve captured, you’ll soon find out how bad an idea that is.

A better approach is to reduce those points sensibly and build your tessellation off the basis of a reduced or decimated point cloud. The software gives you a good set of options to accomplish this, presented to the user in a simple dialogue. It also offers a number of presets and gives you a preview of ideal file size compared to the current state – really useful if you’re trying to hit specific limits.

IN CONCLUSION The iReal 2S is a very interesting bit of kit.

The software included is perhaps not as sophisticated as some offerings, but it’ll certainly get you and your data where you need to be.

3

4 The combination of blue light and infrared in a single device is compelling.

After all, many teams regularly need to capture both hard surfaces and more organic forms, sometimes within the same project. It’s something many may already be using multiple devices and processes to accomplish, so the iReal 2S offers a real chance to consolidate.

The iReal 2S’s main selling point, however, is the infrared. It’s quick, risk-free and comfortable for human or animal targets.

It captures excellent data, appropriate for many workflows. All in all, there’s a great deal to be said for having both blue light and infrared in a single unit, especially one priced under £10,000. Impressive. t3dmc.com | 3d-scantech.com

2 The scan interface ●

is clear and usable 3 The on-unit ●

distance gauge is super-useful 4 Infrared is perfect ●

for capturing organic, textured objects

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HARDWARE REVIEW

Scan 3XS GWP-ME Q120C [Intel Core i9-10900K] » Greg Corke finds out what Intel’s new mainstream 10-core CPU brings to the table in this 5.0GHz overclocked workstation from Scan » Intel Core i9-10900K CPU (10-cores overclocked to 5.0GHz) » Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 GPU (8GB GDDR6 memory) » 64GB (4 x 16GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3000MHz memory » 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus PCIe 3.0 NVMe M.2 SDD + 2TB Seagate Barracuda SATA HDD » Fractal Design Define R7 chassis 547mm (l) x 240mm (w) x 475mm (h) » Asus ProArt Z490 Creator 10G motherboard » Microsoft Windows 10 Professional 64-bit » 3 Years – 1st Year Onsite, 2nd and 3rd Year RTB (Parts and Labour) £2,499 (Ex VAT) scan.co.uk/3xs

WHY SIZE MATTERS Intel has had its work cut out over the last few years, trying to squeeze more and more out of its 14nm manufacturing process.

Up until the early 2000s, Intel was shrinking the transistors in its CPUs every couple of years, but with delays to its 10nm manufacturing process, it’s now been stuck on 14nm since 2015.

But why is this important? Having small transistors isn’t everything, but it can have a big impact on performance.

Smaller transistors need less power, so they can perform more calculations without getting too hot and you can pack more onto a piece of silicon.

W

ith delays to its 10nm manufacturing process, Intel has been working hard over the last few years to get even more out of 14nm.

In single-threaded applications, percentage performance increases have been relatively small, generation on generation — single digit, in fact. So, in order to add value, Intel has been steadily increasing the number of cores. This is great for multithreaded applications like ray trace rendering, but less so for CAD. For years, Intel’s top-end mainstream desktop CPUs had four cores as standard, but in 2017, Intel started to ramp things up with the 6-core Intel Core i7-8700K. For each subsequent generation, it added two cores and this has now led us to the 10-core Intel Core i9-10900K, which launched in May 2020.

To find out what this new mainstream CPU brings to the table, we tested it out in the new Scan 3XS GWP-ME Q120C workstation, which was also fitted with an Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 GPU and 64GB of DDR4 memory, a spec well-suited to the CAD user who also does a little bit of CPU rendering, real-time viz or VR. The Intel Core i9-10900K has a base frequency of 3.70GHz and a Max Turbo of 5.30GHz. On paper, this looks to be a big step up from its predecessor, the Core i9-9900K (8-cores, 3.60GHz base, 5.0GHz Turbo), but it’s not that straightforward.

Intel CPUs have long been rated by base frequency and Turbo Boost. When first introduced, it was all quite clear — base being the standard operating frequency that is guaranteed, and Turbo Boost being a dynamically enhanced frequency, which the CPU can potentially reach.

In recent years, however, things have become more complicated, and the Core i9-10900K actually comes with three different boost modes. And, to be honest, it’s all a bit confusing. There’s one for all cores (Turbo Boost 2.0), one for two cores (Turbo Boost Max 3.0), and one that only works when the CPU temperature is below 70ºC (Thermal Velocity Boost).

Anandtech does a great job of explaining the differences (tinyurl.com/Intel-Turbo).

To some extent, this is all a bit irrelevant for this review, as Scan has overclocked the CPU so that all 10 cores run at 5.0GHz. However, to give users of single-threaded CAD and BIM software a potential boost, there’s also the option to swap to a standard profile, which can be easily enabled in the BIOS. This leaves the CPU at stock settings and allows it to turbo on one core up to 5.3GHz. Well, that’s the

theory at least. In our single-threaded Solidworks CAD test, we only saw the CPU go marginally above 5.0GHz, and only from time to time. It didn’t get near the single-core Thermal Velocity Boost peak of 5.3GHz. Swapping to stock settings had no impact on the time it took to export our Solidworks IGES model, which was 75 secs on both profiles – exactly the same time it took the 9900K. More importantly, with the standard profile, when rendering in Luxion KeyShot, core frequency went down to 4.4GHz. This still gave good performance, completing our 4K test render in 225 secs. With two additional cores, it was 30% faster than a stock 9900K (293 secs) and 11% faster than a 4.9GHz overclocked 9900K (255 secs).

However, when the 10900K was overclocked with all cores running at 5.0GHz, it brought the time down to 204 secs, which is quite a substantial saving.

Armed with this information, we saw little to persuade us to run this machine at standard clock speeds, although in fairness, we did our testing on the hottest day of the year (33ºC). It could make a difference in a cooler environment.

We also tested it with point cloud processing software Leica Cyclone Register 360 and the 10900K had a small but significant 10% lead over the 9900K, despite the software not using CPU cores as efficiently as a ray trace renderer. See tinyurl.com/leica-CPU for more on this.

On the graphics front, the machine performed well, delivering good performance in viz tools Enscape and Autodesk VRED. For CAD, the Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 is probably overkill, but for a machine that is also well-suited to viz, it’s a good solid choice. The single-slot GPU also works well with VR, so long as your models aren’t too large.

64GB of DDR4 memory is plenty for most CAD-centric viz workflows and it’s spread across four DIMMs. For larger datasets, it can go up to 128GB with 32GB DIMMs. Storage is a solid combination of 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2 SSD,

accompanied by a 2TB Seagate Barracuda HDD for data. Additional storage can be added, including a second M.2 SSD or SATA HDD. The Fractal Design Define R7 case is a notable step up from the Corsair Carbide 275Q that we often see in Scan’s Intel Core workstations. It’s more solid and well-built and benefits from two additional USB Type A ports and a USB Type C port on the top. There are a couple of downsides, however. It’s larger, presumably so Scan can accommodate the substantial Corsair H150i 360mm hydrocooler that keeps the machine running very quietly, even in an unusually balmy London. It’s also a bit tricky to get to the HDD, should it need to be replaced.

In a world where component manufacturers are seemingly obsessed with bright lights, it’s refreshing to see a motherboard that’s beautifully understated.

Matt black with a touch of bronze, the Asus ProArt Z490 Creator 10G not only looks good, but is also part of the reason that Scan can do a stable 5.0GHz overclock. It also has a trick up its sleeve, in that it comes with a 10 Gigabit LAN card, rather than the standard 1 Gigabit LAN, which will be useful for shifting large design viz or point cloud datasets quickly across the network.

CONCLUSION The Core i9-10900K is a solid, if not standout, new CPU from Intel. For CAD, it’s arguably the fastest money can buy, but you’ll only really see an improvement if your current machine is a few years old.

The biggest benefit will come from the additional cores; anyone with a 4-core CPU, standard in CAD workstations until a few years ago, will experience a massive reduction in render times.

But Intel is no longer the only CPU manufacturer in town. Those who take design viz seriously, will likely get more from the similarly priced AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, which has 12 cores, even though performance in CAD will take a small hit.

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THE LAST WORD

E

CREDIT: VOLKSWAGEN GMBH

lsewhere in this issue, there’s a feature looking at what the EU’s forthcoming Right to Repair legislation might mean for manufacturers (see p28). In short, it looks likely they’ll need to ensure their appliances last longer and be ready to provide spare parts for up to a decade.

For now, this applies to washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators, televisions and lighting. But there are moves all across the world to make those companies that build all kinds of products responsible for their longevity. And if they want to be able to sell into these territories, then they’ll need to factor repairability into their design and engineering workflows and best practices.

Of course, it never used to be this way.

The manufacturing industry rapidly moved from ‘making things up as we go along’ and ‘everyone does it differently’ in its earliest mechanical engineering work, to realising that standardisation makes everything a little bit easier for everyone.

When it comes to threads, fastener forms and much more, manufacturers have all bowed to standardisation eventually. If we could only convince our American cousins to move to metric, we’d be set.

So what of standardisation within product ranges? Modularisation and platform approaches are nothing new. The reuse of components has been a driving factor for

years, internally and between vendors. A quick look at the automotive market shows that platform-sharing is common and has been for decades.

So why is it that when I need to repair my lawnmower, I can’t just buy a few blade from Bosch or whoever? Instead, I need to identify not only the product number, but also the variant. If you can remember when you bought your lawnmower, you’re a better person than I. Surely there’s a better way?

One example of how things could have been was the venerable Volkswagen Beetle. With a development history that suggests we should probably burn our copies of Herbie Goes Bananas, it emerged in the post-war era to become a symbol of demoncratised personal transportation.

A period print advertisement from the 1960s showed off how standardised the car was. As you can see from the reproduction from the right, it was possible to swap components from different years with ease. (Though in practice, as I found in my formative car-tinkering years, a blue hood off a ‘59 model roughly translated to: “And you’ll need to drill out the mount holes again to fit it back onto anything made after 1960.”)

That said, the interchangable nature of VW parts was something to admire. I’m sure it’s much the same these days. Your Skoda has the same switch gear as your VW, your Audi or even that god-awful Porsche Cayenne that’s parked outside the school every day.

CREDIT: VOLKSWAGEN GMBH

While lockdown has meant time to fix all those items on the ‘that can wait’ pile, it has also necessitated a dive into the world of spare parts for Al Dean, who wonders if now is a good time for the ‘right to repair’ movement

Perhaps as we come to realise the wasteful nature of how we live, things will change. I’d like to hope they will, but somehow, the rampant nature of human consumption probably means they won’t – until it’s too late.

In the meantime, let’s all try to be more ‘60s VW’. Let’s design parts that can be easily replaced and that incorporate some kind of interchangeability. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a result like the one VW created, inspired by the Beetle ad all those years ago. If anyone else remember the Golf Harlequin, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Above: A Volkswagen print ad, boasting how interchangable parts mean longer lasting vehicles Below left: The Golf Harlequin, inspired by the above print ad Image credits: Volkswagen Gmbh

GET IN TOUCH: Email al@x3dmedia.com or, on Twitter, @ alistardean. He inherited his grandfather’s 1972 VW Beetle and loved it to bits, right up until he discovered the downside of a small car with a rear engine on a wet ring road one Sunday morning.

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