Design Environment

As mentioned in my bio, I’ve written software in and around CAD for years, and in the course of my career I’ve learned and used quite a number of them.  With a few exceptions, I found that I could work with any of them, and that in spite of their strengths and weaknesses, they all got the job done.  As you could imagine, at my office they use a world-class top-of-the-line CAD system, but that is utterly out of the question for my home use because it costs more than a daughter’s wedding – several of them, actually!  The features I look for are these:  3-D solid modeling, associative assemblies, motion, interference checking, model-to-drawing associativity, common industry compatible file output.  That means just about anything will do.

So the issue isn’t really which one I use, it’s that I use one at all.  I can sketch an idea with a pencil on paper, but until I actually model it and test it out, it’s nothing more than a good idea.

Not everything needs to be modeled though, like some decorative welding I’ve done around the house was just a pencil & paper sketch, and my son-in-law’s goat corral wasn’t even that!  But everything in my Hardware Projects was modeled and analyzed.

If you’ve browsed my Software Projects, you will notice the slant toward solid modeling software.  I like to write software that analyzes behavior as well as rely on commercial software, like Finite Element Analysis (FEA) that predicts structural failure under loads, but I can also conduct specialized analysis, and optimize the design to my own particular criteria.

I also anticipate that when I get into CAM/CNC that I will end up writing a bunch of software to optimize that process as well.  I understand that the time saved at a machine (by implementing CNC) is offset, somewhat, by time spend in at the computer.