ProE Etiquette
How well you get along with your coworkers can have a huge impact on how effective an engineer you can be. I’m not just talking about meetings, but how well you can collaborate on projects. People generally know you don’t pass off shoddy work or incomplete projects to the next person who has to work on it for you. But sometimes I’ve seen exactly that in the design world. Even though most CAD programs track everyone who touched that part or drawing, people seem to think they can get away with things they generally wouldn’t try in a report or presentation. A couple months ago Peter J Francis asked whether MCAD or ECAD was more trouble than it was worth. GEARS discussed his love hate relationship with it but admitted that the skills he learned with ProEngineer allowed him to really kickstart his career. Skills with a particular CAD or…
Courage & Conclusions
There’s been an interesting back and forth on here where Miss Outlier discussed the conflicts of the theoretical versus the experimental in the week where we discussed interdisciplinary engineering and our struggles therein. Miss Outlier expressed her own point of view in working with theoreticians. Cherish then responded with her post the model engineer a sort of defense of simulations. This was on my mind lately as I had a few separate pieces of analyses that I had to complete this week. Last month I asked the question of whether a design can be too robust. I talked about the issues inherent where an engineer is expected to make predictions on the future. Sometimes predictions that have critical safety connotations. These can be terrifying, especially to an early career engineer. In my experience I’ve been asked to do analyses that fall into two separate categories. The first is a theoretical prediction…
MCAD & ECAD… more trouble than its worth? (by Peter Francis)
This is a guest post from Peter Francis, who can be found on Twitter and DesignSpark. Do you currently exchanged data between systems or are you put off by the complexity? Most modern mechanical CAD (MCAD) systems have the capability of exchanging data with electronics CAD (ECAD) systems however this does have its issues and limitations. I though it might be useful to explore what is possible and hopefully demystify the process. First of all why would you want to exchange CAD data between ECAD and MCAD systems? The one of the main aims of any CAD system is accuracy of design information, for most part a sketch on the back of an envelope would surfice for most design work, however with the increasing sophistication of modern products and ever tighter size and performance constraints the connection between electronic and mechanical parts is ever more important. So why do we exchange CAD data?…