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How do I support legacy 2-D drawing files in a solid-modeling CAD/CAM system?
May 21, 2007
The full text of this question is: “Since converting over to 3-D (solid modeling) CAD/CAM technology, we’ve been paying annual fees to support our legacy designs that exist as 2-D DWG files. It’s gotten so that the cost is too high for the value we get out of the files, but we can’t get rid of them because we need to support the products they represent. What can we do?”
The fact that you are asking the question implies that you have switched from Autodesk’s AutoCAD for your 2-D modeling to a non-Autodesk 3-D tool, such as SolidWorks. If you’d stayed with Autodesk products, you probably would have migrated to its Inventor 3-D tool. The company provides a migration path for its users moving from AutoCAD to Autodesk Inventor.
Supporting legacy intellectual property is a challenge, especially for machine designers whose creations have reasonably long life cycles. It was not a problem, of course, before the days of computer aided design and manufacture (CAD/CAM) because the means of archiving mechanical designs had not changed significantly since the Egyptians first sketched on papyrus. Back then, you drew original plans on paper, distributed working copies to the folks doing the work, and archived the originals in the Royal Library at Alexandria. Barring Caesar’s legionnaires being careless with matches (which did happen, finally torching most of the intellectual property of the ancient world in 48 BCE), your designs would be as fresh in 1850 AD as they were in 185 BCE: you find the drawing; you read the drawing; you make the part.
CAD revolutionized creating drawings. Instead of hours painstakingly redrawing originals by hand for every engineering change order (ECO), you could quickly modify whatever needed to be modified in silico and saved the revision under a new file name.
Of course, CAD turned all the drawings created since the last fire at the Royal Library into so much legacy IP collecting mildew in the back of a warehouse. That was the start of legacy-IP problems.
The problem with computerized archiving systems is that you’ve got to have computers to read ‘em. Furthermore, the computers have to run the right software to read ‘em in the format they were saved in. Further-furthermore, computer formats seem to change every time the wind blows!
Frankly, we have better records of births and deaths in Medieval England than we have from some of the early scientific space missions. All it takes to read the Domesday Book is a good reading lamp (and permission of the appropriate librarian—but that’s another issue), while equipment to read some of the archived spaceflight data has been obsolete for 30 years.
We also won’t visit the deck of over 1,000 Hollerith punch cards encoding the radio-telescope analysis program I worked on in graduate school. That stuff was written in FORTRAN IV and I doubt if there’s still a computer left in the World that runs that runs FORTRAN IV. The cards are now composting in a landfill somewhere in Massachusetts.
Enough technophobic ranting! Those who know me well already recognize that I’m a closet Luddite who won’t stay in the closet.
What you really want is help dealing with your legacy DWG files.
SolidWorks provides a free migration path from DWG files to its solid modeling environment. Aaron Kelly, director of product management at Solidworks, suggested one of two options, depending on what you really want to do with the legacy IP.
If the technology the DWG files represent really is no longer actively developed, you may need no more than to open, view, or print the files. In that case, you can use their DWG viewer (which also goes by the name eDrawings).
If, on the other hand, you anticipate making additional ECOs, use DWGeditor. That software allows you to make changes, as well as save in another format.
These utilities are part of a series of tools that the folks at SolidWorks provide to entice you from AutoCAD’s 2-D over to their 3-D tools.
Note: This information is provided to aid engineers who have already committed to using SolidWorks tools for 3-D modeling. Control Engineering does not recommend one vendor over the other.
Posted by Charlie Masi on May 21, 2007 | Comments (1)