CAD: programming custom stroke rhythms for a pedal-powered cam-timed sex machine

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Hobbies, Crafts, & Houses > CAD: programming custom stroke rhythms for a pedal-powered cam-timed sex machine

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

Sweet, finally somewhere I can come and vent about the garbage software I use without making GBS threads up YOSPOS.

I'm a mech eng and though I have some prior experience with SolidWorks and CATIA (gently caress I miss CATIA) I now spend my life using NX. NX is a massive CAD/CAM package now developed by Siemens that can trace its lineage back to the late 70's and was called Unigraphics until the mid 2000's, so you can immediately date someone by what name they've internalised.

As much as I like to whine about it, NX is actually pretty drat good at what it does. My role is primarily solid modelling, with a healthy mix of 2D layouts and also some surfacing thrown in from time to time designing castings. As a company we also use it for CNC programming, and the software has tons of other capabilities we don't touch like sheet metal design, electrical layouts and even fairly esoteric stuff like specific ship-building tools. I would say NX's primary strength is flexibility, because I can do a full day's work in two environments and NX will near-enough let me do whatever I want in there.

All CAD software has idiosyncracies, but I think NX's age makes it more prone to them than most. For example, almost everything in NX is a part file; A solid model? part file. An assembly? part file. Drawing? part file etc etc. I can open a solid model in the drafting environment, or a drawing in the modelling environment, and there's situations in our workflows where both of those are helpful. This is both a blessing and a curse, it lets us do some things that I don't think many other CAD packages would let us get away with but it can also be a nightmare to explain to people unfamiliar with it. "Open this assembly drawing, drop into the modelling environment, change the line weight of that part then go back into drafting" is a word salad, but also perfectly valid instructions in NX.

Tl;dr: NX, it's the Microsoft Excel of CAD software. Ancient, idiosyncratic, incredibly powerful and a disaster in the wrong hands.

(I still miss CATIA)

# ¿ Mar 20, 2021 00:58

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 04:10

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

Sagebrush posted:

lmao. I think this speaks more to the utter shitpile that is OSS user interface design than anything actually good about SolidWorks, lol

like yeah I prefer SolidWorks over any other solid parametric modeler, but I've been using it for nearly twenty years and I'm fully aware of its conventions and quirks. There are so many dumb hacks and useless error messages in the program and you just learn eventually how to avoid making them happen.

(snip)

This is doubly hilarious to me because the one thing I preferred in SW vs CATIA or NX was how integrated the UI generally felt. All the time I'm using it I am very aware that tools in NX were written at different times by different teams with different UI concepts in mind.

It's ironic too main tool we all use to design things is often so poorly designed itself.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2021 13:02

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

One word: spacemouse. I'm at the point where I keep reaching for it while playing city-builders at home, and watching people at work manipulate models without one is almost physically painful.

*E* Wow that was a terrible snipe. Instead of my non-stop bitching, what is everyone's favourite feature of the CAD package(s) they use? For me right now it's NX's synchronous modelling features, aka "butcher this model with reckless abandon". I'd never use it on a real finished part, but for just mocking up quick ideas and hacking together non-parametric models it's really excellent. I'm working on a project right now with a lot of different companies involved and models being passed back and forth, and being able to go in and essentially brute force someone else's imported model has been a lifesaver.

jammyozzy fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Apr 20, 2021

# ¿ Apr 20, 2021 21:29

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

You may or may not be pleased to know my work pays £££ for NX and it has many of the same constraint issues. Some days it just seems to be determined to gently caress with you, orienting every part back-to-front and then flipping entire assemblies around to align them with the widget you just added.

I wish there was a way to force behaviour by selection order or something, like always move part 1 to part 2, because the way my brain works 99% of the time I'm grabbing the 'loose' part first then trying to constrain it to something I perceive as 'fixed'.

# ¿ Nov 2, 2021 14:10

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

Enjoying commenters online insisting the solution to assembly constraints being kind of a pita to manage in NX is temporarily constrain things to position them then completely un-constrain them again. :stare:

That might work for all the hobbyist NX users out there(?!), but the idea of doing that in a real assembly with moving parts is giving me nightmares.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2021 08:01

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

I actually had no idea that existed! I was imagining those chucklefucks doing that in a big professional environment, but maybe they really are putzing around in NX at home.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2021 22:56

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

biracial bear for uncut posted:

drat I'm getting old, no wonder I'd never heard of this (my copy of the Machinery's Handbook is from 1989 holy loving ).

I've inherited an SKF catalogue of a similar age that has "Printed in West Germany" emblazoned on page 1. It's just a few months older than I am.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2021 13:49

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

biracial bear for uncut posted:

Holy gently caress

I've described software as 'by engineers, for engineers' before (looking at you optistruct) but I think this takes the cake, good grief.

Out of morbid curiosity, do you have to provide your own MS Access license to make it, uh, "work"?

# ¿ Nov 30, 2021 22:35

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

A Proper Uppercut posted:

So in reference to earlier discussion on the best way to use SW for designing my tooling. Been meaning around in a sldprt file. I like how using sketches on multiple planes works/looks-

Issue I'm having now is importing to CAM. Is there a way to export two sketch planes like this and keep the Z distances intact? Or a way to export a solid model as a wireframe? I tried IGS but couldn't seem to get anywhere.

I just want to avoid using solids in my CAM if possible as it's much easier to work with lines/curves.

I'm afraid I can't help with your exact issue, but I am so relieved to see you trying out working with sldprt files. Even as a non-SW user the description of your previous workflow was setting my teeth on edge!

# ¿ Jan 25, 2022 09:49

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

I've had NX totally gently caress up DXF curves too. Often it's an inch <-> metric issue but I've also had randomly scale stuff for no discernible reason.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2022 23:41

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

Against this thread's advice and my own better judgement I tried buying Solidworks for makers earlier.

Fortunately Dassault's website reckons my login deets are invalid even though they worked the other day and the password reset link never sends me an email. That's fine though because I can't see the monthly option that's all I wanted anyway, so gently caress me I guess. :shrug:

# ¿ Jul 3, 2022 19:50

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

It's definitely been an experience, but maybe not the 3DEXPERIENCE™️ I was supposed to get.

The reset email never worked and I still can't login so I've said gently caress it and gone back to tinkering with FreeCAD. Coming from SW/NX the workflow is maddening at times but for free software it's incredible what it can do.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2022 12:58

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

Yep, we occasionally do castings that have loads of different height & thickness ribs, criss-crossing at wacky angles. Getting sufficiently large blends on without them pinching down to a tiny radius anywhere is an exercise in frustration.

On the plus side, it's gratifying as hell if you can plan ahead and get one blend from the casting wall to the base of every rib at once. Incredibly fragile and a complete bastard to edit when it goes wrong, but it looks impressive and isn't that what we're secretly aiming for? :v:

# ¿ Oct 9, 2022 00:20

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

NewFatMike posted:

Man there�s a person I kinda have to put up with who is convinced:

1) the SOLIDWORKS hole wizard has bad data
2) that masses calculated by CAD are wrong
3) that using the SOLIDWORKS assembly modeling space is dumb

Which has caused a person I love dearly to spend many hours angle grinding fasteners as well as big pieces of metal to reduce weight, and despite all that effort a failure because the designer didn�t do interference detection.

Just�. Incredible stuff.

It's fun to poke fun at this person OP but it sounds like they might be suffering from post-NX PTSD, likely from an exposure years ago in the aerospace or defence industry, and would benefit from counselling to overcome this trauma and start moving forward with a better outlook on CAD.

(I jest but 2/3 of your list are things that NX actually struggles with: The hole tool is better than it ever has been but dogshit enough of the time that best practice where I work is still sketch + revolve anything remotely complicated, and there are at least three different places to get the mass of an assembly which can all disagree with other. Bonus: Deforming a component typically sets the mass of the entire assembly it's in to 0.000 [units] in one of these places, with no way of forcing it to just use the pre-deformed mass instead.)

# ¿ Oct 19, 2022 19:53

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

I tried signing up for the 3d experience crap months ago and it never worked, the only thing I managed to do was get my email address on Dassault's mailing list.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2022 23:30

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

Using a spacemouse to traverse Excel sheets is one of the best reasons to own one

# ¿ Feb 2, 2023 23:50

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

Spaghett posted:

I'll put it this way: If I saw a model like that, I'd just delete it. Not a loving chance I'm letting that poo poo slide. Good on you for keeping on his rear end.

You made a good point, too. Communicating design intent and where features derive their value is super important to good model making. I'm now in the habit of renaming every feature and sketch so it's super clear what each thing in the model tree controls. Otherwise, it's a bunch of "Pad1, Pad2, Pad3, Shaft1, Pad4, Fillet1, etc." Nobody likes hunting through that poo poo. Sometimes, you get lucky and right clicking the feature on the model and selecting "find in tree" or whatever will take you to the correct place, but it never works when you need it to. That's just how the world works.

One nice feature of NX is "feature groups", which are just folders in the model history tree you can dump features into. You can name them, apply colors to groups independently, I adore them for complex models where clusters of features can be easily lumped together

A poo poo feature is that, somehow, features can get jumbled so they no-longer appear in timestamp order and it can be a nightmare to fix

# ¿ Feb 25, 2023 00:10

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

You can absolutely mangle it even with a PDM system

Ours stores revisions chronologically, but doesn't sanity check the revisions on an up-issue so you can do fun stuff like bounce from letter to number revisions and back, or go straight from revision 1 to 99* in one up-issue

You can also skip revisions which is handy when something in the database becomes horribly corrupted and you need to abandon a haunted revision of a model in-place

*I've never been brave enough to find out how high this can go, and judging by the rest of the software it will probably overflow and implode the entire db if I go too far

# ¿ May 3, 2023 23:39

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

Coming from pro-tier CAD packages, I found some of the UI decisions in FreeCAD ran from baffling to openly hostile. Some of what you're experiencing is just parametric CAD things, but equally things like accidentally over-constraining sketches are a fact of life and the software does not make it easy to diagnose and fix.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2023 13:23

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

My least favourite thing is opening a big casting or something else complex that's already released and finding under-constrained sketches in it.

The perfectionist in me can't let it go, but the realist knows the chance of me accidentally moving something is enormous

# ¿ Jul 5, 2023 20:59

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

NX got a VR button a few versions ago but I've been scared to ever touch it

# ¿ Aug 8, 2023 23:06

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

Thrilling update: I hit the VR button in NX and it told me to gently caress off because we don't have the license for it

# ¿ Aug 9, 2023 12:59

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

If you delete a hole, then put a new hole in the same spot, is it still the same hole? :2bong:

# ¿ Nov 3, 2023 18:19

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 04:10

jammyozzy: Dec 7, 2006; Is that a challenge?

I'm trying to wrangle a mesh body in NX right now, without a license for any real mesh tools, and that makes me sick with envy

# ¿ Nov 22, 2023 23:10

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Hobbies, Crafts, & Houses > CAD: programming custom stroke rhythms for a pedal-powered cam-timed sex machine