Free Software Tools for Mechanical Engineers

The world is changing.

The garage tinkerer-become-entrepreneur of yesteryear is now a .COM entrepreneur. The men who once spurred economic domination of the western world are now writing lines of code. No longer do you need a factory to build wealth - and so our economy which was once based on manufacturing is now on the decline.

Those who once had a variety of carpentry tools, metal workshops in their basement are now turning to 3D CAD, CAM, rapid prototyping and the internet.

You are now sitting in front of the tinkerer's new workshop. You just didn't know it.


So I'm transitioning in my career, and what will I be doing to fill the time between different cubicles? You'd probably guess I'd be crossing off those bucket list items -- trekking in the Himalayas, ski bum at Tahoe, putting in two killer workouts daily in hopes of pulling off a 10 hour Ironman??

No - I've decided to sharpen my Engineering skills! (and perhaps invent a thing or two-- but that's all I'm telling you). I have certainly been neglecting plenty of things over the past 8 years at my current job as a medical device engineer, but mechanical engineering is a big field, and I have been inspired to become more competitive. Since I expect to have some free time during my job search, I'm going to be honing my skills, digging in books, reviewing old texts, and best of all, trying new things.

One problem. Generally doing many types of engineering from home mandates those expensive software programs available to you by default by working at Corporation XYZ. After all, I'm not going to WRITE software to assist the design of my gift to the world, right?

Fortunately, I'm a problem solver and the best tool any engineer can have is resourcefulness. After scanning the web, I've learned that there is plenty of free alternatives to the tools I've been using.

Here is a list of what I've found so far. I very much hope to make this an easy access point for other engineers, designers, and creators to find tools to solve their dilemmas.

This post will be under construction for quite some time, I imagine.


CAD
The heart of Mechanical design, but we're long past the days of AutoCad 14 and MS Paint. Solidworks is quickly becoming the market leader, followed by the likes of Pro/E and Autodesk's Inventor.

FreeCad - The best completely free 3D Parametric CAD software on the net.

Alibre - Low cost, professional grade. The first release of this software was heralded as "XCAD", and free liscenses were given out to the public. Nowadays, a 3D CAD package very competitive to Solidworks and Inventor is now available to you for $99.

AutoDesk Alias

Numerical Analysis & Modeling.
Matlab is the hands down king of numerical modeling in industry, but again, not cheap.

As always,
Wikipedia is frequently a good place to start.

SciLab is free, has many of the same features.

GNU Octave - numerical analysis program with syntax very similar to Matlab. I've noticed that Wikipedia entries on mathematic topics are beginning to crop up with Octave code included. Exciting!

Imaging

Image J Developed by the NIH, this is great for analyzing Xray photos, but It's also useful for doing just about any analysis of greyscale. Simple and intuitive.

Gimp Photoshops's free cousin. Tons of power and easy to learn as tutorials are showing up EVERYWHERE online.

Blender - 3D graphics modeling and rendering. I haven't used software like this yet, but it appears to be very powerful.

Office Software

A free version of computing tools very similar to Microsoft Office.


Gliffy does what Visio does, but for free, and it doesn't take up any space on your computer.

Way more tools, with much wider scope than engineering.

Another good place to poke around.


What free tools have you found? I'll add anything you as a Mechanical engineer or Product designer/Developer see as useful to what you do.

(as a sidenote, my home computer is an Apple. Many programs of the programs I list will be compatible with multiple OSs)

Surgical & Aircraft Grade Marketing BS

Let me vent regarding a pet peeve of mine, educate the blogosphere's collective mind, and perhaps influence consumer perception.

I get really pissed off when I see consumer products marketed that are constructed of "surgical grade" or "aircraft grade" alloy/steel/aluminum/titanium. The inkling that this stuff is made out of some kind of advanced superalloy is totally bogus and misleading assertion.


First things first.

The two greatest criteria in selecting a metals for use within the body are:
1) that it is inert to blood and other body fluids
2) it will not undergo corrosion in the time from manufacture, sterilization, and aging. Or in the body if it's implantable.

Strength is often an afterthought for most medical materials. Fitting into the "almost never a consideration" category would be weight. Oh yeah, and stainless steel is relatively cheap.

Check this out. They should really be calling it Cutlery steel. This is from 1915, when most surgery was generally performed with a hacksaw.


The greatest criteria in selecting a metal for use in an airplane are
1) Strength to weight ratio (specific strength, for you geeks out there)
2) Fatigue resistance
3) Creep resistance (for the layman, creep is an engineering term for the weakening of a metal at high temperatures over long periods. I'm not talking about that guy mumbling to himself on a downtown street corner, that is an entirely different creep resistance -- a steely gaze and big biceps are the best in this regard)
4) ability to form into complex shapes
5) corrosion resistance - although aircraft often employ complex coating systems as well.

Anways, generally you hear "aircraft grade" applied to 6061-T6 and 6Al-4V titanium. Incidentally, these are the most common alloys of the two respective base elements you'll find.

Here's something you probably didn't know. simple carbon steel is stronger than pure titanium, most titanium alloys, and almost all aluminum alloys. Care to know what you add to aluminum to make it as strong as steel? Guess! I bet you're wrong! Answer: Copper. about 3% by weight and then a sophisticated heat treatment.

Even better yet, sometimes 6Al-4V is sometimes reffered to "military grade!" That's gotta have every basement nerd jizzing their pants in ecstasy. Actually, 6Al4V is by design almost identical in property to common stainless steel, just lighter. That's about it.

Here's what you'll never see. Some company hocking a "surgical grade" gadget made out of Nickel Titanium, MP35N, Cobalt Chrome, Tantalum, Tungsten, 17-4PH(my favorite flavor of stainless steel), or Platinum.

sidebar: Speaking of Platinum, I don't understand the fascination. Platinum is not an attractive metal -- its a dull grey, nor can it become shiny unless you alloy it with something -- Iridium is generally the choice. But even then it can't hold a mirror polish like stainless steel can, and it's not nearly as hard, and will scratch & mar quite easily.


I bet you've never seen an "aircraft grade" doohicky made from Hastelloy, Waspalloy, Inconel, or CMSX single crystal alloys.

Now. Let me tell you about some cool metals. Brace yourself, this is going to be AWESOME.

Palladium - indistinguishable from platinum but about 1/3 the price, it absorbs up to 900 times its volume of hydrogen under standard conditions.
Beryllium- the lightest of all (mostly) non-reactive metals, it is also extremely stiff. Used primarily in satellites, missles, and supersonic aircraft.
Rhenium - the last metal on the periodic table to be discovered; it is about as dense as platinum, has a melting point second only to tungsten, and its one of the most rare metals on the planet - many times more rare than platinum or gold.
Indium-a relatively weak metal that makes high pitched screams when you bend it.
Astatine- Its isotopes have half lifes of between 8 hours and 125 nanoseconds, so you could have kilos of it in your hand, and it would dissappear before your eyes. Actually, it would emit so much radiation that it would probably cook you down to charcoal in the process, but that's cool, right? Too bad that in all of North & South America to a depth of 10 miles deep, there's probably only about 1 trillion At atoms at any given time. (found that on wikipedia)
Tellurium- a metal that when exposed to humans, even in very low concentrations, gives them a garlicly smelling breathe.
Thermite - a mixture of steel and aluminum that gets so hot that when ignited, a dollop of it could pass through the block of a V8 engine.

So now you can laugh the same way I do when you hear all this nonsense.

Holy Crap this pissed me off.

Watch this.

I felt compelled to write, even though there were many well written pieces from cyclists covering many of my initial arguments. As a supplement, here's what I wrote.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A couple things that have not been touched on:

Miffed that cyclists don't pay taxes? You can thank your heavy vehicles(and sometimes frost) that we cyclists have to dodge potholes on 23mm wide tires. The rule of thumb that Civil Engineers used when designing roads is that damage is proportional to the vehicle's gross weight per axle, raised to 4th power. That means that even the heaviest cyclist accounts for a negligible amount of road wear in comparison to the lightest Honda Civic. Those of you who have heavy SUV's & such pay roughly the same in taxes that the civic driver does. What gives? Pay for your damage!

Also keep in mind that it is your right to ride a bicycle, while driving your beloved car/truck is a privilege. Even if you've bought a car, kept it in good maintenance, registered your vehicle in the state, purchased insurance, and have a driver's license, your ability to drive on the state's roadways can be taken from you by a court. None of those things listed above are required by MN statute 169.222 (except good maintenance), and I have never heard of someone ever getting their right to ride a bicycle taken from them (unless they've been killed)--with exception to those suggestions I've read here. I'm American and I love freedom. I have a right to ride a bicycle and I exercise it. Hey--try some freedom on and see how it fits. Free yourself from the gridlock!

I'm also human, and I make mistakes. My driver's ed instructor told me that a good driver makes a mistake about once a minute. Motorists, I've driven in rush hour traffic probably just as much as you have. I know how frustrating it is. You're tired, you're cranky, you just want to get home after a hard day of work, you just paid your $400 car payment, you just paid an arm & a leg for North Dakotan oil that somehow is $3.52/ gallon because of uprisings in Nigeria, and some jerk in another car cut you off. I'm sorry I was dodging a pothole and you had to slow down to 20mph.

I don't condone riding through stop signs/lights. I'd also argue that many people observed in this video are hardly serious cyclists. I noticed most of them wearing cotton and some wearing music players while riding--telltale signs of those who ride infrequently and thus have little experience and knowledge about how to be courteous on the road and responsible cyclists. Ticket them.

By the way, motorists, you should thank me. Every time I ride my bicycle, I'm one less car at the crosstown, I'm 2 less gallons of gas burnt (thus decreasing the demand and theoretically the price), I'm healthier and will statistically be less likely to consume heath care costs that the state or my employer would otherwise assume. I'm also happier--both because exercise promotes mental health, and I have a good excuse to enjoy a beer afterwards with friends.

Math: Something John McCain doesn't understand.

John McCain wants to give us all "a holiday" between Labor Day & Memorial day by suspending the Federal Gas Tax.

That's 13 weeks.

According to NPR, the average American commutes 25 minutes, making my daily commute which is usually between 17& 30 minutes, pretty average.

I fill gas almost exactly once per week, and I consume approximately 16.5 gallons of fuel per fill in my Pontiac 2-door.

Currently, the Federal Gas tax that John McCain wants to waive for this period is $0.18/gallon.

So, when you sit behind a calculator, my benefit, 13*16.5*.18=

drumroll........

$38.61

Uh, thanks. But my fuel tank costs $55 to fill right now. How is this going to stimulate the Economy again? That is, aside from crippling the American infrastructure...

According to Wired.com

But McCain's proposal could cost the government some $9 billion dollars - and more than 300,000 jobs.

The tax supports the federal Highway Trust Fund, which finances road projects nationwide and is already facing a $3.4 billion shortfall, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials says. The American Society of Civil Engineers says every dollar invested in highway infrastructure generates $5.40 in economic benefits through reduced delays, improved safety and lower vehicle operating costs. And the federal transportation department says every $1 billion in highway spending creates 34,779 jobs.

What a great way to stimulate America's "psychological" economic problems. I think the psychological problem is YOURS, John, and it's called delusion.......or, the inability to do elementary-level mathematics.

Good luck against Barack. He's got a law degree from Harvard.

Prolific couple weeks

Work has been pretty exciting in the last few weeks.

Our patent attorney has on his desk at least 5 different concepts that I've either conceived, designed, or both.

I really feel like I'm discovering & fostering some hidden talents, and it turns out that having a creative mind in an engineering office can make you useful.

I really feel like I'm finding my place at my company, I feel more valuable, I'm enjoying work more, and I feel like a well-defined career path is becoming more & more apparent.

...I am an Island

Email conversation from work today.

Me: Vlad, I found 10 wires for that will be acceptable for use in our gage study! Andy

My Russian co-worker: You are Rock. Thanks. Vlad.