Novedge Pulse™ of Lauri Põldre

5 Problems You Can Solve with CrowdsourcingCrowdsourcing. It’s a hot topic right now thanks to developments in technology. Before, there were barriers to asking a large group for input and ideas. Now, these barriers are quickly falling away. The Internet is always on, which makes it faster and easier to connect the world’s talent. Books like Makers and Decisive are bringing [more...]

GrabCAD Tips: The Kernel, Why CAD Systems Don’t Play Well With OthersQuick, what kernel are you running? If you answered that question immediately, this blog post isn’t for you. If like most CAD users you’ve heard the term “kernel” but aren’t sure what it is or why it’s important, keep reading. In fact, if you’re like most CAD users, at some point you have struggled to [more...]

New Challenge: Ultimaker 3D Printer Toy DesignDesign a creative toy that is ready to 3D print for the chance to win an Ultimaker 3D printer, one of the best selling and most well-known printers out there! Participants will have to impress an all-star jury of experts including Ultimaker, PCmag, TCT Magazine, 3D printing Industry blog, Ground3D, Protospace and GrabCAD, so show [more...]

Top Five CAD Collaboration FailsWhat if the secret of success were actually failure? Failing is all about testing what you believe in the real world and then learning from the results. I’ve been able to learn so much about the failures experienced day to day by our community of engineers with our customer development process for GrabCAD Workbench of “Learn [more...]

New Design Challenge: Casing for Lite Plus BatteryLite Plus developed a lightweight Lithium-ion 12v starter battery for spirited driving, longevity and performance. In our newest design challenge, they need you to create two new casings for their Lithium-ion 12V car battery! Join us in rethinking the battery. Cars have changed dramatically in the last 50 years, but their batteries have remained the same. With new [more...]

Top Unanswered CAD questionsDo you know how to set a camera path or import a DWG? There are some burning CAD questions out there that have not gotten help… yet. Each question answered with a tutorial, short or long, will help many other engineers get the job done better and faster. This is what GrabCADrs are all about so [more...]

Red Dot Award 2013 Design CompetitionThe last round for the Red Dot Award Concept Design competition has started! Designers, engineers, and manufacturers from all over the world can submit their design concepts and prototypes. The Red Dot award is known around the world by companies, studios, universities and designers alike… Build on a single idea. Design problem solving products. Show [more...]

Challenge Results: Lite Plus Gets New Battery Designs from the GrabCAD Community!Lite Plus has some great things to say about the entries for their battery design challenge and for the top-notch interactions they had with the GrabCAD Community. We saw some tough questions, beautiful designs, and lots of thoughtful work from our GrabCADrs! 1. Concept Tesla by Andreas Enebrand Lite Plus liked the Nordic design influences and [more...]

New Challenge: Bolt Your Hardware ProductBring your hardware product and we’ll bring the experts! Bolt is a Boston-based hardware startup incubator that wants to help you get your idea from prototype to manufactured product. We’ve seen their place and these guys have some serious tools and know-how! Share your product idea and get a chance to win a spot in their [more...]

Creaform Put Us to the Test Engineering Contest – And the Winner is…GrabCAD is happy to share the announcement that one of our GrabCADrs took home the prize in the Creaform Put Us To the Test Contest! We’ll let them tell you all about the winner and the progress of his project. Congratulations to the winner and thank you again to all the participants who submitted work [more...]

New Challenge: Build models for reuse!Create a model with clear design intent and a tutorial to go with it for our latest Challenge! Picture via Fateh Merrad’s Tutorial: http://grabcad.com/questions/how-to-create-a-rim-of-an-audi-r8. GrabCAD wants you to lead the way in creating content that is made for reuse and sharing. We think the best way to do this is baking your design intent into your [more...]

MWL – Electric CADThe recent Challenge with NOKIA reminded me of the great models we have that focus on all things electric. Whether it’s circuits, motors, connectors, switches, or other accessories – GrabCAD has plenty of electric CAD to keep you busy this weekend. Get inspired, start a new project, or find something cool to set your scene [more...]

Get to know the new GrabCAD measuring tools!It’s almost midnight, you just remembered your niece’s birthday (tomorrow) and you start to panic! There is no time to go to a store or rush an online gift.  As you try to come up with apologies in your head, you catch a glimpse of your 3D printer sitting in the corner, gathering dust. A [more...]

New Challenge: Creative Bike Accessories for VelodroomGet inspired to create new, inventive bike accessories for the Velodroom product line! Their current lighting system, watch this video, is smart and practical, they start when you start and stop when you stop. They rear light even turns on when you brake. What would you create in Velodroom style for the daily bike commuter? [more...]

New Challenge: Design Nokia Lumia AccessoriesWe are happy to share that we have paired up with Nokia to give our Community the chance to dream up some cool accessories for the Lumia 820. They are brainstorming what they could create to take advantage of their new wireless charging system and need your help. What do you imagine? Match the brand [more...]

Challenge Results: IDSA Color Aided Design RenderingThe idea was to bring CAD to color and color to CAD. A record breaking 557 entries did just that! The winners of this Challenge were recently announced at IDSA’s 2013 The Color of Design Conference and they all are worthy of a big congratulations. We also want to celebrate the original models they used to [more...]

A Brief Introduction to CAD File FormatsHave you ever noticed that there are more types of CAD files than there are CAD systems? A precise gear (left) as compared to a tessellated gear (right). Not only do most CAD systems create several different types of files, there are a myriad of interoperability formats that have different advantages when collaborating with your [more...]

Letter to the Community: Why we launched WorkbenchHere at GrabCAD, we want to fight the status quo of the manufacturing industry. We see how technology has driven innovation in industries like IT, travel,and e-commerce. This kind of disruption is desperately needed for the people in our Community, engineers and designers who develop and make the physical products that we all use in [more...]

Challenge Update: Andrew Solomon supports our efforts to create CC glassesGuest post: Alex Kukoff is a 14 year old, half-deaf college student who is looking for a concept design for a pair of closed-captioned glasses in the Eyes to Hear With: Easy to Manufacture CC Glasses Challenge on GrabCAD. Andrew Solomon is the National Book Award-winning and Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression [more...]

Introducing GrabCAD Workbench – Share CAD Files Securely In 3DOne thing we’ve heard from our community members over the last couple of years is that you love being able to view and share 3D models in the GrabCAD library but you’d like to be able to share in a more private setting.  Today we’re announcing GrabCAD Workbench to help you do just that. GrabCAD [more...]

Finally, your favorite 3D files wherever you go!Want to see a CAD file at work, home, or on the go? Now you can view any CAD file in 3D right in your browser thanks to the brand new 3D viewer for the GrabCAD Community! All your files. All in 3D. All the time. Now when you come to GrabCAD to look for [more...]

Interview: Stephen Clambaneva, VP of IDSA NortheastGrabCAD had the chance to talk at length with Stephen Clambaneva, who has been organizing the IDSA NE conference in Hartford, Connecticut as well as the very popular Colour-Aided-Design Render Challenge. In a crowded restaurant around the corner from Times Square in New York City, we chatted for a hour about CAD, Colour, GrabCAD, PLM, DIY [more...]

New Challenge (Pro bono): Accessible Closed Captioned Glasses“Mommy, I can’t hear Grandpa!” That was the first difficulty Alex Kukoff’s hearing loss presented. She struggled to hear her grandfather — he was dying of complications of Parkinson’s Disease — through the cell phone pressed against her ear in the noisy atmosphere of her mother’s bathroom. Alex’s CC Glasses Alex wants to make a [more...]

Molds We LoveSometimes when one is under pressure to get their injection mold tooling done, turning to GrabCAD for a little help is a great idea. When you need 60,000 of something, the mold has to be right, or else you have 60,000 mistakes. There are lots of different designs in our library – many of them [more...]

The Future of Design and Manufacturing at DFM Summit #3GrabCAD recently had the opportunity to speak at the latest Design for Manufacturing Summit in Brooklyn. NY. The intimate setting of mostly small to medium companies in the design and manufacturing industries made for honest and interesting panels. It is clear to our team that the point of 3D content is to help designers and [more...]

Interview with Robert Nightingale – Juror for the IDSA Render ChallengeAt the tail-end of the wildly popular IDSA Render Challenge (568 submissions!), I managed to catch up with Juror, Industrial Designer and Marketer Robert Nightingale and talk shop. As a part of WeCross, a huge open-concept collaborative space near Lower Manhattan, Robert and his small firm RBRTNGHTNGL is a proponent of cross-pollennation of talents, fields and [more...]

We’re Looking for Workbench User Stories – Share yours!Our Business Development Manager Andrew DiVincenzo invites all GrabCADrs using Workbench to share their stories. Big manufacturer? Small workshop? Newly graduated Engineer? Own your own three-person design firm? It doesn’t matter – we’d love to hear your tales. This is what Andrew had to say, “Yesterday I talked to a contractor who was working with [more...]

Models We Love – RhinoRhinoceros 3D, known as Rhino is quite an interesting CAD tool. Widely favoured by Product Designers, Architects and Automotive Designers because of its ‘free-form non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) modeling’, allowing the creation of curvilinear designs easy as pie. There are also hundreds of third-party plugins. At the beginning Rhino was distributed freely, allowing a community to [more...]

testtes [more...]

Expanding Our Focus of Design Challenges to Include Personal WearThe original members of GrabCAD were Engineers, and as such, we concentrated on running Design Challenges to resolve engineering problems. However, we’ve grown so fast that we have thousands of people in many other fields. There are many companies out there that want new aesthetically pleasing designs, like jewellery for example. The question is: Should [more...]

Tips of the Trade – Have to Start Somewhere……might as well start with GrabCAD Tutorial page! We’ve been growing lots as of recent and more GrabCADrs are uploaded (and viewing) some pretty valuable tutorials. Whether you’re a Professional looking to expand your skill-set or a student working your chops, there are plenty of great tutorials – here are some of the best. Aykut [more...]

Models We Love – CirclesIt’s p Day. The Internationally recognized day of remembrance for our irrational yet mathematically constant friend, 3.14159… So this time we looked for the models that reflected the best usage of p in CAD. That would nearly everywhere, sometimes hidden in plain view. Can you think of a moment when you aren’t using p in [more...]

Design and Manufacture with VoxelsGrabCAD is a collection of lots and lots of pixels – and GrabCADrs too. But on your screen, its bit-mapped pixel by pixel. Voxels are essentially the three-dimensional version – a point in space that together forms a shape. Although CAD users are familiar with surfaces, solids, NURBS and meshes, voxels are coming into the [more...]

GrabCAD@DFM #3 in NYC, Challenge Updates, and Help Andrew Make GrabCAD BetterHitting 500,000 GrabCADrs felt good – did we mention we’re really thankful for everyone here? Anyways, so much is happening it’s hard to handle. There are a number of small things that you ought to know about. We are going to be at the Design for Manufacture Summit in Brooklyn, NYC on Thursday, March 21st. Big [more...]