All About Embedded Datums in Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3.0

- By Jerry Fireman

Discover how Pro/ENGINEER let industrial designers and mechanical engineers create a unique dual-image display LCD screen that allows surgeons to view their operating instruments and a patient's vital signs simultaneously during surgery.

Imagine that you are a doctor performing laparoscopic surgery, staring intently at a computer screen displaying video of the inside of your patient's body.

As you guide the surgical instrument around the patient's organs, you need to be aware of the patient's vital signs, but you don't want to turn your head to focus on another screen and risk losing track of the instrument's location.

Pure Depth, a developer of display technologies based in Redwood City, California, offers a solution to this problem. It consists of two liquid crystal diode (LCD) screens layered on top of each other so doctors can view either one simultaneously.

Pure Depth developed a working prototype, demonstrated it to potential customers, and received rave reviews. Then the company searched for a partner to assist in the development of an enclosure that would look good while providing protection and space for the internal components.

Brawn or brains? Pure Depth needed a partner strong in both industrial design and mechanical engineering, capable of producing a sophisticated design that also met demanding mechanical requirements. Most challenging was the need to produce four variants of the product, each with a different packaging envelope, without the enormous expense of producing four sets of tooling.

Adept Design was the right partner to meet these requirements. The New Zealand based industrial design firm specializes in injection molding and understands both mechanical design and manufacturing processes.

Jason Anderson, design manager at Adept Design, says that Pro/ENGINEER plays a key part in the company's ability to bridge the gap that usually exists between the worlds of industrial design and mechanical engineering.

Translation hinders collaboration. A significant part of the barrier between industrial design and mechanical engineering is caused by the use of different software packages. Sharing information between packages requires a translation process that leaves a lot of information behind and sometimes introduces errors.

"For this project, creating the industrial design in one software package and the mechanical design in another would have been a major nightmare," Anderson says.

Pure Depth required four versions of the screen: a two-image version with and without a touch panel and a one-image version with and without a touch panel. Each version had a different electronic assembly with different external boundaries, and this amplified the design challenge for Adept.

To cut manufacturing costs, the Adept team decided to use a single enclosure and four different sheet metal brackets - which do not require tooling - to interface with the four different electronic assemblies.

"Interfacing with four different brackets and electronic assemblies would have been very complicated in conventional industrial design and CAD software because every issue that needed to be resolved with each of the four variants would have required translating the industrial design into the mechanical CAD environment or vice versa," Anderson says.

But working in Pro/ENGINEER made it possible for the industrial and mechanical engineers at Adept to work simultaneously on the same model with each group controlling their own section of the model.

Mechanical engineers modeled the electronic components for each of the four variants in Pro/ENGINEER. Engineers next developed four different sheet metal brackets designed to interface between the different electronics assemblies and the single enclosure.

Developing an enclosure. Adept needed to create an enclosure with attractive and modernistic exterior surfaces for Pure Depth, and for that the team used Pro/ENGINEER Interactive Surface Design.

Using Pro/ENGINEER Interactive Surface Design, the Adept team was able to create freeform surfaces to produce a stylish, edgy look for the enclosure. They modified curves by moving control points and received real-time feedback as the curves updated. The industrial designers used the curvature plots in Pro/ENGINEER Interactive Surface Design to maintain highlights in the right location while they were tweaking the transition areas.

"With Pro/ENGINEER Interactive Surface Design I could drag the control points until curves flowed smoothly into each other and highlights were positioned perfectly," Anderson says. "Pro/ENGINEER Interactive Surface Design gave us the ability to create a striking design in the context of the mechanical assembly which saved time and kept the industrial design and mechanical engineering teams synchronized, he says.

Concurrent engineering cuts lead time 50 percent. Using Pro/ENGINEER, mechanical engineers established parametric tables based on hard points that guided the freeform surfaces created by the industrial designers. When a mechanical engineer changed one of their positions, the free-form surfaces would associatively update, automating the project.

Suppose an industrial designer moved a surface that was critical from a mechanical standpoint because it carried a boss that connected to the bracket. "With the same Pro/ENGINEER model being used for both industrial design and mechanical," Anderson says, "as soon as the designer changed the surface, the model would update and the mechanical engineer would know that he needed to either redesign the boss or attach it to a different surface."

"The use of a Pro/ENGINEER single master model for both industrial design and mechanical CAD made it possible to produce all four design variants in half the time that it would have taken using the traditional approach where the two groups use their own software," Anderson concludes. "The customer was very pleased that we were able to accommodate their industrial design, mechanical, and manufacturability requirements while meeting their delivery date and keeping design and engineering costs to a minimum."

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