IronCAD’s expands CAD Productivity

We’re excited to announce latest release of IronCAD 2018 Product Update #1.This update extends powerful functionality added in 2018 in addition to many usability improvements to increase design productivity in your design process.

The 3D CAD platform of choice among metal fabricators and custom machinery equipment manufacturers, IronCAD’s 2018 Product Update #1 adds features specifically designed to increase detailer productivity by streamlining the steps needed to move 3D designs into the 2D production drawings.

Since collaborative design workflows are critical for fabricators and machinery manufactures, IronCAD 2018 Product Update #1 also imports and exports to the latest native CAD formats, supporting collaboration between design groups that use different systems.

Key features of Product Update #1 including enhanced game-changing bulk drawing feature and a dramatically improved shrink wrap modeling simplification utility for more secure, more inclusive file sharing to support active collaboration.With the new process improvements for the bulk drawing creation, parts and assemblies can now be selected and can store predefined templates that automatically populate the bulk creation process. This stored information can be used in conjunction with IronCAD’s powerful Catalogs of pre-made designs, speeding up the reuse of existing designs and saving countless hours that might otherwise be spent preparing designs for detailing.

Product Update #1’s shrink wrap enhancements include more advance preparation options for packaging up designs and reducing outputted data such as shell representations of designs, supporting secure file sharing options for diverse use cases.

Continuing IronCAD’s reputation as the easiest-to-learn 3D CAD platform on the market, Product Update #1 also includes usability improvements such as:

Quick feature creation from existing geometry by simply pushing and pulling on face handles to create positive and negative shapes.

Streamlined interface that improves access and navigation to many common commands.

Simple reconnection tools that support IronCAD’s intelligent attachment capabilities making it easy to relocate connected elements.

For a full list of IronCAD 2018 Product Update #1’s new features, visit www.ironcad.com/blog/ironcad-2018pu1.

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Building a Banked Track Is a Balancing Act

Mitchell Machine Works is in the business of building complex machines. Hailing from Dalton, Ga., the company has been known the world over for its Magic Carpet, a hydraulically driven roller system that can roll up, or roll out, an entire sports field of turf in a matter of minutes.

Mitchell Machine Works was founded in 1967 by the company’s self-described “chief engineer, owner and just about everything else,” Mark Mitchell, who has gained a reputation for being someone who can design and deliver complex machines. Because of this pedigree and his previous experience building the Magic Carpet, Mitchell picked up the phone one day and found himself with some surprise business. On the other end of the line was a company that needed Mitchell to build an indoor running track.

Taken at face value, building an indoor running track doesn’t seem all that mechanically complex. A track’s essentially an oval. A flat oval.

But there was a catch.

Instead of being flat, the indoor running track that Mitchell was being asked to build had to be hydraulically driven, because, you see, some indoor track events use a banked surface, not a flat one like its outdoor counterpart.

As you can imagine, building a banking hydraulic indoor running track isn’t a straightforward endeavor. In fact, building such a machine requires some 200,000 pounds of steel and 72,000 components (including 72 hydraulic actuators)—and that doesn’t even take into account the 7,000 work hours required to build the machine. What’s more, for an indoor track to work properly, it has to work in perfect harmony, with each of the hydraulic drivers that lift the track’s banks working in unison with its nearby neighbors.

As Mitchell described it, one of the biggest issues facing the design of this track was figuring out the complex control system that would be used to govern how each hydraulic actuator worked, because as Mitchell noted, “given the torsion in the system, no cylinder could be more than 10 mm out of line with its neighbor.” To transform this seemingly intractable problem into something more manageable, Mitchell looked to IronCAD.

Mitchell's Hydraulic Track in IronCAD

Although Mitchell is familiar with CAD, he turned much of the actual CAD work over to RJ Saucier of Genesis Technology Systems. Working in concert with Saucier, Mitchell was able to create a robust CAD model using IronCAD that gave him great insight into how the hydraulic system worked.

Once Mitchell’s vision for his indoor track had been modeled, Saucier and his team set out to analyze how the track’s movement would affect its overall performance. Using IronCAD’s finite element analysis (FEA) tools, each component in the assembly was tested, and when errors that would affect the performance of the track were found, the design was slightly modified.

“One of the best parts about IronCAD is the fact assemblies are so easy to use,” said Saucier. “You’re never hung up with constraint sets, so when a client comes in and needs a quick change, say, this component needs to be moved over one-sixteenth of an inch, IronCAD can do that quickly without having to untangle an assembly connected mess.”

With this analysis at hand, Mitchell and Saucier were able to articulate their assembly and move the track as it would move in reality. Because of the integrity of the geometry in their model, Mitchell could accurately measure how much each hydraulic cylinder would move at different points along its path as it was raised and lowered. With those numbers in hand, Mitchell was able to give the programmers developing his control system detailed instructions describing the positions of each hydraulic cylinder as it moved through the banking operation.

“Trying to make 36 cylinders dance together is tough, but with IronCAD we were able to simplify the design control system design process,” noted Mitchell.

CAD as an Installation Tool

Beyond the fact that IronCAD was instrumental in designing Mitchell’s track, it also played a role in making the assembly of his track much easier. Not only was Mitchell able to use detailed drawings to transform those 72,000 parts into one working whole, he also used IronCAD’s software to give instruction to the workers assembling the track. Whenever communication problems would arise during the assembly process, Mitchell was able to bring up a detailed 3D model directly in IronCAD and specify exactly how a subsystem should be assembled and why. 

Given that level of communication, Mitchell was able to cut down his time on site and have his track built efficiently.

With one completed track behind him and a second nearing completion, Mark Mitchell is confident that his hydraulically articulated indoor track’s design represents the shape of things to come in multipurpose sports facilities being built around the world. Still, Mitchell realizes that each and every track design will be different, requiring minor tweaks and work-arounds that will alter his original design. Fortunately, Mitchell is confident that he can meet any design requirement thanks to the robust design and analysis tools that he has in IronCAD today.

IronCAD has sponsored this post. It had no editorial input. All opinions are mine. —Kyle Maxey

IronCAD Releases the 2014 IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite

IronCAD Releases the 2014 IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite

Latest update to the IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite brings powerful
enhancements and new 3rd party integrations to customers.

ATLANTA, GA. November 19th, 2013 – IronCAD, LLC, the leading provider of design productivity solutions, today announced the release of the 2014 IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite (DCS). This new release delivers new productivity and collaboration capabilities that reduce the overall time in the design process and enhance data sharing among the thousands of companies and engineers worldwide using IronCAD’s Design Solutions.

The new 2014 IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite of products brings not only customer driven improvements in the design capabilities, but enhances the way customers can collaborate within design groups and with their customers. Users can share data between the IronCAD suite of products that can be leveraged at any level within an organization as well as online with the GrabCAD community and online customer projects. Using the integration with KeyShot, customers can quickly and clearly communicate designs in bid proposals and technical documentation shortening the collaboration cycle while delivering to customers’ expectations.

Key highlights provided in the IronCAD DCS 2014 include:

Delivering Productivity

• Intelligent Editing of Multiple Part Features: It’s common in design to make changes where multiple features that are on the same part or across different parts must adjust by the same amount. With the new capabilities added, users can simply select all the features to be changed and pull a single handle to perform the modification, reducing the need to build complex parametric relations.
• Simple Replication of Parts/Assemblies: Patterns and related features (i.e. links) are used throughout the design to create multiple features in various locations. Typically other parts will be generated to align to these feature locations. In the 2014 IronCAD DCS release, users will be presented with on drop options to replicate the parts/assemblies along these feature locations making it simple to rapidly place these objects in the proper location.
• Behavior Driven Activation of Features: Often users wish to define specific ways in which an object is modified when first applied as a feature or new object in a design. Now users can set specific handles on drop to be active allowing users the ability to directly input driving values. This reduces the time involved to edit features and provides a simpler way to set the desired default editing behaviors on objects.
• Automatic Constraint Connections on Drop: In some designs, it is required to define the way in which objects move in relation to other objects. New intelligent options have been added to automatically define these relationships at the time an object is dropped onto an existing object. A simple example would be an automatic coaxial constraint being applied to a fastener dropped into an existing hole location.
• Intelligent Sizing Handles: When sizing geometry, users may find it difficult to precisely modify the geometry to locations on other objects (such locations may be hard to reach by cursor location in the 3D environment) or they may not understand the rules that define how an object can resize to these locations. New behaviors have been added to allow intelligence to be defined on handles so that they can be quickly resized to these exact locations in other objects by a simple right-click command. Users can simply hit any point near the desired location and they are confident that geometry is precisely sized correctly.   
• Re-engineer with Ease from Existing Geometry Data Including Point Cloud Data: Facet based objects and scanned point cloud data is becoming a common utility in the re-engineering process. IronCAD Solutions support the import of these often extremely large data sets in an optimized working environment while providing quick creation tools to recreate geometry referring to this data.

Enhanced Collaboration and Sharing

• Fast, Easy, Accurate Visuals with KeyShot: Users can now quickly transfer and update designs directly into Keyshot to use theiraward winning rendering capabilities to quickly produce realistic visuals for communication in bidding, final presentation, and technical documentation of products.
• Online Collaboration and Sharing with GrabCAD: The IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite today provides real collaboration by enabling users to communicate design data seamlessly throughout their design process within their organization. The GrabCAD Integration is a natural extension for our solutions that offers customers the ability to directly share files and projects within their online design groups and with the GrabCAD community at a simple touch of a button.
• Direct Access to Components on TraceParts: Users typically require standard or purchased parts to be used in their designs. With the TraceParts integration, customers have access to hundreds of supplier catalogs and over 100 million CAD models and product datasheets suitable for the design, purchasing, manufacturing and maintenance processes.
• Live Design Modifications between Rhino and IRONCAD: IronCAD has had a long standing connection with Rhino to provide the ability to make use of Rhinos strong surfacing capabilities. User can edit design features from IRONCAD in Rhino that may require more complex surface alterations. These edits will be automatically update in IRONCAD while maintaining existing relations to these modified features. This capability has been extended to support the latest versions of both IRONCAD and Rhino giving user the most recent advances to create and edit their designs.
• Enhanced Process Between Design and Collaboration: IRONCAD COMPOSE is a free product that allows users to deliver their standard components in a lightweight and IP protected way that can be easily dragged and dropped together to automatically configure products. Often it may be necessary to make additional design changes to these configurations to meet customers’ requirements. Now users can load designs originally created by customers in COMPOSE into IRONCAD to automatically convert these to editable precise design geometry. This allows users the ability to make the desired design modifications easily on the customer configured files and quickly send the results back to the customer for validation.

In addition to these key improvements the 2014 DCS focused heavily on additional customer driven improvements and the quality and stability of the product. The 2014 DCS also includes the latest versions of ACIS™ & Parasolids™ modeling kernels, Techsoft 3D HOOPS™ Visualize Platform, and Spatial’s 3D Interop translators to provide seamless data translation with standard and native industry CAD formats.
The 2014 IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite is available for immediate download for via the IronCAD website at www.ironcad.com/download.

"IronCAD is committed to delivering true productivity through performance, flexibility, and collaboration and this release confirms our commitment." commented Cary O’Connor, IronCAD’s VP of Marketing, "Customer’s now have more power in the design making it faster to create, modify, and finish the design tasks. In addition, they can extend their collaboration with the many new enhancements and integrations to improve the communication process among their customers leading to higher customer satisfaction and shortened time to market.” he continued.

About IronCAD

Based in Atlanta, GA, IronCAD is a leading provider of 3D Design Productivity Solutions that deliver the highest levels of customer satisfaction and productivity. Solutions that can be used either standalone or as complementary collaboration solutions which can be used throughout the enterprise. Its flagship product IRONCAD has won many industry awards for its innovative technology and leads the industry in its ease of use and design productivity. IronCAD products are being used successfully by thousands of customers worldwide. For more information on IronCAD, call 1-800-339-7304 or visit www.ironcad.com.

IronCAD Announce IRONCAD COMPOSE - “Configure and Communicate”

IronCAD Announce IRONCAD COMPOSE 

“Configure and Communicate”

IronCAD delivers enterprise wide collaboration and sales configuration tools for free!

ATLANTA, GA. May 30th, 2012 – IronCAD, LLC, the leading provider of design productivity solutions, today announced the immediate availability of IRONCAD COMPOSE. IronCAD users around the globe have always been extremely productive within their modeling and design departments. Many users today use IRONCAD to design products, but also a growing number have adopted it as the tool of choice to create, one off, customer specific assemblies using their standard parts and components. In industries such as Factory Automation, Office furniture, Kitchen layout, Shop layout, Exhibition Stand design, Shelving and racking solutions and even boatbuilding and yacht fit out, IRONCAD has always led the way, with its powerful tools for assembly and configuration  

Today with the introduction of the new IRONCAD COMPOSE product, these companies have been able to expand the potential for their users, by providing a new tool to allow anyone in the workgroup to collaborate and work effectively, referencing the company’s core design data. 

IRONCAD COMPSE offers all the functionality you would expect from a basic viewer, but a lot more. COMPOSE is a tool that can be used across the organization, from a point of sale configuration and demonstration tool, to a viewer for use in manufacturing.

· Simple Viewing - It can open and manipulate all standard IRONCAD file formats (and with the low cost add-on translator, can also open files from all mainstream CAD products) and can take measurements and interrogate the file structure. 

· Sales Configuration – Enables users the ability to simply drag and drop parts, scale and manipulate parts within the scene to create a unique customer specific assemblies. COMPOSE includes IRONCAD’s powerful SmartAssembly technology, so rules and intelligence can be built in to the parts from the outset. The program can then produce a simple output such as the pricing information required to create a proposal.

· Compelling Presentation - It also provides powerful real-time and photorealistic rendering and even animation allowing users to create compelling presentations with fly through motions, allowing sales and marketing teams to really get buy in from their prospects.

· Seamless Collaboration – Using a standard set of tools and shared data from sales right through design to manufacturing ensures that there are no opportunities for errors or miscommunication. COMPOSE, allows the CAD department to take their data outside the drawing office in a safe and controlled manner.

This powerful new tool is also remarkably simple to learn and to use. Incorporating IRONCAD’s unique catalog structure and powerful TriBall positioning tools, COMPOSE can be picked up by anyone and with the integrated video tutorials, makes learning a matter of minutes.

For existing IRONCAD users, this provides a unique opportunity to share data with a wider audience at no cost. They can even provide the COMPOSE product to their prospects and customers set up with all their own standard catalog parts. 

Engineers using other CAD solutions are also welcome to take up the challenge and try IRONCAD COMPOSE for free. Simply download a trial of IRONCAD and use it to import your geometry and create your own catalog of parts. Then using COMPOSE, start sharing your data inside and outside your organization.

“We have seen a growing demand for this type of product from our user base over recent years” stated Richard Serna, V.P. of Sales at IronCAD. “We see this as a very exciting period, with companies under pressure to sell more effectively, this unique product enables them to take the design to the prospect providing a powerful way to get buy in upfront and also to ensure that the requirements are fed back to the manufacturing team accurately and quickly. In the current economic climate, leading companies need to ensure that they remain competitive and innovative and we strive to deliver the leading edge tools to ensure they achieve this” he continued.

Originally developed as a tool for existing IRONCAD users, IronCAD LLC have chosen to make this freely available to everyone, as an opportunity to share the IRONCAD vision and creative approach to design, with a wider audience. Also under development are a number of Apps and tools to enable users to remain collaborative and creative on the move, working across a number of mobile platforms.

About IronCAD

Based in Atlanta, GA, IronCAD is a leading provider of 3D Design Productivity Solutions that deliver the highest levels of customer satisfaction and productivity. Solutions that can be used either standalone or as complimentary collaboration solutions of a broader PLM initiative. Its flagship product IronCAD has won many industry awards for its innovative technology and leads the industry in its ease of use and design productivity. IronCAD products are being used successfully by thousands of customers worldwide. For more information on IronCAD, call 1-800-339-7304 or visit www.ironcad.com.

IRONCAD Receives “2011 Excellent Software” Award

http://ironcad.com/research/news/2012_02_28_CSIAAward.html

ATLANTA, GA. February 28th, 2012 – IronCAD, LLC, the leading provider of design productivity solutions, today announced its strategic alliance partner in China, CAXA, has received the 2011 Excellent Software Award from the China Software Industry Association for the Chinese version of IronCAD’s flagship 3D Innovative Design Solution, IRONCAD. The China Software Industry Association (CSIA) is a nation-wide organization led by Ministry of Industry and Information of the PRC. CSIA publishes the China Software Industry Annual Report every year and it has long been regarded as the most authoritative, valuable and comprehensive report. China Software Industry Association (CSIA) was founded on September 6, 1984. It was voluntarily formed by enterprises and individuals engaged in software research and development, publication, sales and training, in research and development of information systems and information service providing, and in the consultancy, market survey, investing, financing and other related agent services for software industry. Registered in the Ministry of Industry and Information, CSIA is the unique representative of China software industry. Selections of outstanding products are based on software used across China which has widespread implementation in government procurement, public bulk procurement, and large scale key projects. Thousands of software companies compete each year with a select few receiving the excellent software award. About IronCAD Based in Atlanta, GA, IronCAD is a leading provider of 3D Design Productivity Solutions that deliver the highest levels of customer satisfaction and productivity. Solutions that can be used either standalone or as complimentary collaboration solutions of a broader PLM initiative. Its flagship product IRONCAD has won many industry awards for its innovative technology and leads the industry in its ease of use and design productivity. IronCAD products are being used successfully by thousands of customers worldwide. For more information on IronCAD, call 1-800-339-7304 or visit www.ironcad.com.

Open & Re-Use Multi-CAD Data without having the native Software

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If you need the ability to read and edit native Solid Works, UGNX, Pro/E, Inventor or CATIA but can't afford to purchase a license of each of these applications, then we have an answer for you.

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