Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan

I have used a number of Computer Aided Design and CAD packages. Today, I used Google Sketchup for the first time.

It has some differences, and could be an excellent program, but it just does lots of things (IMHO) wrong.

For instance, it allows you to place a dimension on a line, and then change it. But it doesn’t actually change the length of the line. If it did this one thing, giving it parametrically controllable dimensions, then it would do most of what I want. Instead, I need to create a line or box, (change tools to) place a dimension, (change tools again to) resize it until it is close enough to the size I want.

To make it a bit better to use coming from Inventor, I set up ‘D’ as a shortcut key for Dimension, and F5/6 for Previous View/Iso View. Much better for my muscle memory!

It uses a different paradigm than Inventor, rather than using a series of parts, it really is just a sketch. Having said that, here is an accurate representation of my house. Accurate in some ways, not all.

And the best thing over Inventor? It runs native on OS X.

View Comment (1)  

I don’t know why, but just recently VMWare has been performing rather badly for me. It used to start up to a saved session of Windows in a matter of seconds, but now takes minutes before I can start work. Selecting Unity mode takes another minute or so to get all set up.

Working on anything while VMWare is running is bad news - everything in the system slows down to a crawl, especially during the startup phase, but even whilst running. I used to be able to switch around with ease, and even though Inventor was sometimes a little laggy, it was quite responsive. Now, I need to wait seconds for every operation in Inventor to complete (which may be a Network licensing issue, since the same thing appears to be true of Windows machines on the network, too), and it affects my OS X software, too.

Finally, I had a crash today, where VMWare shut down. I think I’d saved all of my work, but I can’t be arsed waiting for it all to load up again to check. I’ve only got 20 mins to work on the stuff I need to use VMWare for, and I think I’ll just do something else instead of waiting for half of that for it to boot up.

I don’t know if it is an OS X issue, a VMWare installation issue, an Inventor issue or a VM image issue. I only need to keep using Inventor for a couple of weeks, and I have to use Access to write my last lot of school reports. After that, I may be able to remove VMWare and Parallels from my system entirely.

Actually, I think I’ll do a complete reinstall of OS X and all of my applications when I get Leopard. And perhaps I’ll have several partitions: OS, Applications and Data. That way I can have separate backups, that are restorable easily.

View Comment (1)  

I’m still a teacher, at least for the next few weeks.

And one of the tasks I need to do is create a series of worksheets to enable the other guys in my learning area to teach the stuff I am an expert in - most notably AutoDesk Inventor. I generally just teach from my head. I provide the kids with some sheets with drawings on them, sometimes go through a couple of the steps on the projector, and then just wander around helping out those that are stuck.

This is a fine way to teach, for me, anyway. It gives the kids a heap of independence, and it means by part way through the semester, the kids are pretty close to being able to work without my assistance. Setting relief lessons is a piece of cake (Continue with your <whatever> project). It also makes my classroom mostly fun - I can actually often get other work done while teaching.

So, not being able to rely on there being a specialist CAD teacher next year, I’ve had to start writing explanatory worksheets for the kids, most notably for the new Year 8 course that is running next year. I’ve done this in the past, on a Windows PC (which Inventor requires), and using OGrabIt, a screen capture application that is okay.

But not as good as the built-in screen capture with OS X. I’m finding my workflow is much better with VMWare open, running Inventor, and Pages open on the same screen. I just do the CAD steps, press ⇧⌘3 at each step, and I have a series of files I can then crop to size.

Even better, if I have a static screenshot, I can use ⇧⌘4 to grab just the area, or press the space-bar afterwards to grab a window. This was possible with OGrabIt, but required switching of applications, and, IIRC, only allowed for grabbing of the screen to the clipboard. Meaning a paste was required after each step of a process.

Of course, if you hold down Ctrl, you can grab to the clipboard in OS X, too.

The next thing that makes my life easier is being able to work in Pages, rather than Word. Word has these nasty habits like making objects jump around when trying to fine-tune their position. Pages’ guidelines are a bit annoying at times, when it tries to align the centre of two similarly sized objects instead of the left-hand side, but at least when you use the keyboard arrows to move stuff, it doesn’t reach a certain point, and then on the next press jump right up to the very top of the page. I’m fairly sure I blogged about this in the past, it is possibly the most fucked-up-and-annoying thing about Word.

Pages is a lot faster, too. No more waiting for spinning beachballs. The only bad stuff is related to positional incompatibilities when converting back to Word, which I haven’t really checked out that much yet. That won’t really be my problem, though. I’ll give my colleagues a PDF, which they can use to print out, and if they need to make any major edits, they’ll also have a Word document version, but then it is up to them.

Having said all of that, it still takes quite a long time to generate a worksheet for students. I spent at least 3 hours today on one task, that will probably take the kids about 45 minutes to complete. Still, it’s not as long as if I’d used Windows+Word - the rule of thumb there is 10x the student time.

View Comments (0)  

I’ve finally gotten access to an Intel Mac, and have installed Parallels on it. Pretty snappy, and easy to install.

Currently installing AutoDesk Inventor, as that’s the only PC-only (other than Eve!) program I use. Actually, running Eve in a VM would be great, as then if it crashed my system the whole machine wouldn’t go down. Not that I’m sure it was Eve causing the crashes anyway…

View Comments (8)  

LMAO!

View Comments (0)  

One thing I wrote about a year ago in an attempt to get some funding for a new piece of machinery for my classroom, entitled Technological Literacy and Computer Control, is now available on my website. I’ve put it in at the date I originally wrote it, which means it never made the front page, hence the reason for this post.

And, I may write some others in the same vein about other topics related to Technological Literacy.

May.

View Comments (3)  

In one of the PC pools at work, I am getting some pretty serious Autodesk Inventor crashes. Basically, the error is occurring randomly, every couple of minutes or so.

The temporary file that the crash reporting program wants to send to AutoDesk indicates that it is a read error in the same memory location each time:

<Exceptions>
    <Exception code="C0000005" text="ACCESS_VIOLATION" address="0x77E7CA0B">
        <AccessViolation type="Read" address="0DB33888"/>
    </Exception>
</Exceptions>

It’s annoying the hell out of me - as it’s only happening in one pool, not the other. I don’t think it’s a licensing issue, as it seemed to happen a few times when I was the only user on the system, not just when there were twenty other users upstairs in another pool.

Things I’m going to try:

• Getting the software reinstalled. Each machine was ghosted from an image, so I’ll try a fresh installation.
• Running without others using the other pool.

Dunno what else to do at this stage.

Update: an even more impressive crash, this time with an extra dialog box:

View Comments (0)  

I teach AutoDesk Inventor at school, and I love using it. I have come across what I deem to be a major issue.

I work from a USB Drive, for a couple of reasons - the main one of them is that most machines I work at are shared machines, and the second (the reason I cannot just work from the network storage) I sometimes take work home. Finally, the USB device seems somewhat faster to access than my network drive. However, my USB Drive doesn’t always mount as the same volume letter. On most machines, it mounts as E:\, however, on the machine I am on now (a different pool), it mounts as J:\. Normally, this doesn’t matter, as files tend not to refer to one another.

What’s not cool is when these locations are hard coded into a Project file. And moving machines means I need to go through and change each location. And then repeat this when I go back to the original computer.

View Comments (0)  

The worlds of Design and Manufacture are changing. Where designers used to ‘just’ design, and have someone else create anything other than foam or balsa models, Technology has forever changed this.

Computer Aided Manufacture is where an object is created on a machine connected to a computer. A representation of the design is created on the computer, and commands are sent to the machine, telling it where to remove unwanted material, or drill holes.

Industrial level machines are used in almost all forms of manufacture, from car parts and assembly at Holden or Mitsubishi, through to cabinet manufacture, and moulds for creating injection moulded ice-cream containers. For all but the smallest companies, and applications other than just prototyping, the per-unit savings in cost, materials and time quickly overwhelm the significant cost of the machines. A machine for turning wood into cabinet parts can cost upwards of $250,000, but is capable of producing one part every few minutes - all identical, and with no errors.

Technological Literacy is having an understanding of modern technologies, and being able to articulate the various costs and benefits of such systems. In short, having and idea of the skills involved, having some experience using the systems, and hopefully being able to transfer the skills from one system to anther.

With the acquisition of a small CNC (Computer Numerical Controlled) milling machine, schools will be able to develop these technological literacies, vital as they are for modern design and manufacturing, to a high standard. The particular machines we are looking at, while much smaller than those used by industry, offer significant similarities to them.

For example: currently students use a low technology method of creating electronic printed circuit boards. They trace a design onto a copper board, and place the product in a chemical that removes unwanted copper. Designs are slow to create, and errors usually result in starting again. With a CNC mill, students will create their own design using computer tools, and the machine will remove all of the unwanted copper. Errors in the design phase result in just a redesign of the board - the computer itself does not make errors in the milling process. Having a machine remove the copper also alleviates the problems in that area in working with nasty chemicals and the fumes they create.

Similarly, students studying CAD (Computer Aided Design) already develop skills in creating 3D virtual representations of real objects, and those of their own design. What they lack is the opportunity to create a ‘real’ version of these objects. Their creativity is limited by their skills. In many cases, students in Year 9 are able to design an object that would require the skills of a master craftsman to create to any accuracy.

With the inclusion of CAM in a curriculum, we can more accurately model industry. Graduates will have a solid understanding of how articles are manufactured in today’s world, rather than just a limited set of skills. This will open up a whole new variety of career paths and career ideas other than those the students already have.

The world of work is forever changing. We need to change to keep up with it, and suitably prepare our students in terms of technological literacy.

View Comments (3)  

That’s purpose is just to trigger Wordpress to update the Post count of each Category.

I’ll leave it here incase I need to redo this operation. It took me ages to tick each category box…

Comments Off