Not BMW Oracle Racing

Here is what happens if you cut the design corners a little too tight when designing a racing boat. "There was a lot wind at the time, and it was raining," said the crew's skipper John Bertrand, his hair still wet as he described the mishap later. "The seas were very difficult for this type of boat. I had my head down at the time, and there was a loud crack, almost like a cannon going off. The sailboat's rig started to fold the boat across the center like a sheet of cardboard. It was a sickening sound to hear the boat breaking up."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA-REPv-ReY

BMW Oracle Racing

Today's keynote was Thiha Win, one of the designers of BMW Oracle Racing's America's Cup boat. Great study fo cutting edge technology done with ProENGINEER and Windchill amongst other tools. Lots of FEA, CFD and laser analysis of wind pressure too. The stress on the lines supporting the rigid "wing" sail ran as high as 30 tons! Thiha mentioned once a pin gave way, and was shot into the mast embedding itself there. Yikes. See more here: http://bmworacleracing.com/en/yacht/index.html

Local wildlife

Not much of a conversationalist, although he did mention something about car insurance. Be fun to see how my Golden Retrievers would react to these speedy little buggers...

No more PTC/User World Events!

Because next year it will be "Planet PTC Live". PTC is taking over the financial & logistics portions of holding the annual event. PTC/User will still do all the portal, technical committees and exploder etc. The organization (as well as the board personally) were liable for any failure to meet revenue expectations at the events. One bad year could send the organization into bankruptcy. PTC/User will still select the expert presentations as they always have. I think this is a good thing as it opens up possibilities that PTC/User did not have the resources to explore. It also exposes PTC/User more directly in these events around the rest of the world. Stay tuned on this one!

The PTC Booth

Seems even larger than last year. Great chance to ask the experts, and the price is right.

Down on the floor.

If you get a chance check out the large 3D screen Virtalis brought. Flat out fun put-on-the-goggles 3D simulator.

Vincent Brings It!

Vincent Philstrom covered the ProE Assembly PUP this afternoon. He did a really nice job. You can only get so close with an iPhone camera, so this is as good as it gets, sorry. Lots of nice assembly enhancements in WF 5.0.

• Some very nice repeat & copy-paste of components (and a RMB repeat command, sweet).


• Some really powerful restructure tools


• Docked accessory window, basically a nicer version of the component window from past revs.


• Explode view dashboard interface with a very nice animation capability to the explode/unexplode.


• Disruption free assembly on missing components. The assembly version of no mandatory resolve mode.


• Some nice automated reference mapping on the unrelated replace tool.

Training on a shoestring

Do yourself a favor. If you are involved in ProE or PTC training for your company, download and review this presentation. Lots of nice resources and maybe some new ideas for you to try.

Pro|E Core

I hope everybody appreciates that I am using the "" instead of the "/" for ProE. Brian Thompson did a bang up job on the ProE core PUP. He went into greater detail on some of the things John covered in the road map & then some.

• Sheetmetal mirror and pattern. We have all been there before and now we have it.


• All the new sketcher tools including some nice constraint tools.


• Geometry pattern. This is like a built in version of the surface copy, pattern, and solidify trick.


• UV patterns, or patterning to a contour like an industrial designer would.


• UDF including a nice auto-place trick.


• A peek behind the curtain on future build enhancements.

Pro|ENGINEER Roadmap

John (Bushie) Buchowski took on the ProENGINEER roadmap in today's second session. The metrics on Wildfire 5.0 indicate it is the highest quality initial release in PTC's history. This is welcome news for those of us contemplating a move to 5.0.
Some of the things to look forward to in 5.0:

• Dynamic editing
• No foreced resolve mode
• Pick & place UDFs
• New ribbon interface in detailing
• New cabling and welding UIs
• Drawing Tree
• Point patterns

Starting things off

The keynote address featured a full line up of PTC management. Dick Harrison, Jim Heppleman & Brian Shepard. There was some interesting corporate information as well as new and scheduled product launches.

Corporate strategy falls into four main focus items.

• Solving important customer problems
• Technology leadership
• Being a stable predictable business
• Efficient operations

Jim spoke to this in his new position as acting CEO. Dick is moving to the position of chairman of the board. Brian talked about some interesting pending product launches including:

• Windchill PPMLink for program portfolio management
• MathCAD Prime 1.0, a large overhaul of the traditional interface to a new paradigm of usability.

Some of the tings we can look forward to in the future are automated interference detection in Winchill 10.0. Notice that was not in Pro/E, but inside Windchill using ProductView data. In addition "Project Lightning" was mentioned. This is described as the CAD roadmap of the next 20 years. The goal is to put to bed some longstanding issues in all CAD platforms dealing with usability, interoperability and large assembly management. Look for a webcast explaining more on October 28th.

Blogging with two thumbs

I am going to see how much, if any, you can blog via an iPhone. We'll see how well I can pull this off. First setback is no pictures... Looks like laptop time will be required to add photos later.
Now with photos! The turn out has been great considering the economy.