Our next talk is going to be on the process of product development in mechanical engineering
using open source software.
With us, his Alexander Sadowski is going to give us an overview of his experience in
some tips and techniques for those of us who develop open source hardware and open hardware
mechanically in open source software.
Please give a warm welcome to Alexander.
Thank you very much for your introduction.
You pretty much nailed the head, the nail on its head, but today I will show you how you can
become a machine manufacturer using mostly open source software, some are free, but not
open source, but it's, yeah, we will see.
So this is mainly, let me first introduce myself, why is this talk even happening?
So I was always very passionate about becoming a machine manufacturer and that's why I
started mechanical engineering in Germany, but what I have learned is that in university
they usually don't teach you how to become a machine manufacturer, so I had to learn a lot
of stuff on my own.
Why I was a student, I started developing a free printer with a heated heat chamber
this was like 2015, so this is like nearly 10 years ago, but when I could see a V5 license
expired, I wasn't able to open any of my files anymore, and that's when I learned about
freecats, and I started building my own products, and for example a work-holding fixture,
used for CNC milling machine, which I actually sold a couple pieces off, but when one of my
clients asked me about patents and products safety and stuff like that, I got so scared
the way that I immediately stopped selling the products, and I had to go back to the drawing
board and think, well okay, what about these topics, I need to learn all about those,
and I started working at the major German machine manufacturer, which is called Rope, they
have like turnover of 2 billion euros, they're very huge, they do production lines for
electronic electric motors and stuff, and after there I learned everything I needed to
know, it was kind of an opportunity which presented itself, and it was a little bit of
luck that it could actually learn stuff and I wanted to learn there, and right now I'm
helping others become my machine manufacturers, and that's why I created this guide,
this is obviously not the guide that you can just read, this is just a presentation, but
hopefully you can learn something, and if you will have questions after talking, it can
always ask me. So who is this for? It's for manufacturing startups, which usually struggle
with finances, and by using open source software, they can lower their financial risk
a lot, also throughout this guide, they will learn how to deal with patents and product safety.
This is also for establishment machine manufacturers, which I already with my company work
together with, and we even, they don't use open source software throughout a whole product
event cycle, but they can still implement open source software at individual steps, and
also this is for a frequent community, which I'm most active in, to showcase freecat in context
with other software, so that people can actually understand what goes in to freecat and what
goes out of it, so I'm very excited to show you how this all works. Here's just a quick overview,
we will be first taking a look at requirements, then we will be taking a look at patents,
determining what product concept we choose, it's preliminary design, detail design, and the product
life cycle management. So first of all, you first define your requirements of your product based
on marketing research and put them into a table, this is a liberal office kelp table, which you
can easily create, and it usually has the column headers, number requirement type, and person
and charge, then using those requirements, you can do a patent search using the spasnet.com,
where you can have access to 150 million patent documents, and your first goal is to reuse
those 150 million patent documents to 200 results by just looking at patents that are older than
20 years, this way you don't have to keep in mind all the patent infringement and stuff like that,
and using those 200, you can then focus narrow down even more by clicking like the store button
and every patent, and then using that, you can hopefully narrow down the 150 million to just
20 patents, because the reason why you do this is you have to read all of them, and you cannot
read 150 documents, 150 million documents. So the goal is to get to 20, I cannot describe this process
in full detail, but yeah, it's about forming the query that you need. Then the 20 patent documents
that you get out of that, you put them in a table with the document linked title IPCCPCD
classes for documents, representative drawing, so you can easily have an overview of all your
patent documents, and usually you should also put their first claim or independent claims of the
patent. You can do all of this in the book office account, and on the right side, you can see how
this could look like, then using all of these patent documents that you have acquired,
you create different variations of your new product that you are developing, and you create
also a table where you combine different patents, and then later on you determine which one
creates the best solution. After you have selected what patent documents you will be using for
your new product, you create some kind of product concept, and you can do this easily in
the process in press, or mostly you will just do a hand drawing, which is enough for that step.
Then with your product concept, what you have to do is, you have to look into products,
if you do also a topic that I learned while working at the machine manufacturer, and in product
safety, you go through the whole product lifecycle of your product, and see where dangers arise,
and to what measures you have to take into account, to lower the risk to a acceptable level,
and you can do, this is called the risk assessment, you can do this risk assessment also in
LibreOffice, and how to do such a risk assessment is defined in ISO 1200, 1200, 1200,
and this can be done in LibreOffice Calve, with all the information that you have acquired,
you can do some preliminary design on your new products, which you will also be done inside
of LibreOffice Calve, and as you can see, you can do a lot of stuff also on paper,
and what I usually like to do is create hand drawings and put them as images into LibreOffice Calve,
and then do my calculations, therefore forces, temperatures, dimensions, tolerances, and stuff like that.
So, when you have done your preliminary design, you can then move on to detail design,
which usually involves creating your 3D cat model, creating your technical drawing,
and exporting the step, the XFPDF, whatever files are necessary to produce your final product,
and obviously I've used Frequette here, I'm very involved with Frequette, we are pushing it in the
industry, and there's an obvious choice for me. Something that cannot be calculated in the preliminary
design step, because the geometry may be too complicated, so for that you would do a VM simulation
in pre-pomax, pre-pomax is very similar to Abacos, if you know about that, and yeah,
how you do a VM simulation is you import the step 5 from that you export it from Frequette,
you find your boundary conditions, mesh the geometry, and solve your case study, yeah,
this is done with pre-pomax from Matei, then arises the question, how do you manage all of that,
and one solution is to create a bunch of folders where you put in all your stuff, and on top of
that you can also use the SVN solution for visioning, you can create servers and make collaboration
either this way, and here I have used Visual SVN and Tortois SVN as the open source of
alternatives use Google Drive if you don't care about your files to be leaked. I mean,
this is not, I'm not saying this is a negative thing, if you actually have five that you don't care
about if you get leaked, use Google Drive is very easy to use, yeah, and then in order to not do
all of the stuff with the folders and managing users and having all of this headaches, you can
resort to a PLM solution, which does many things from many of these things, and we are actually
developing an open source PLM solution, which will be compatible with Frequette, so yeah, that's it,
thank you very much for listening, and yeah.
Yeah, so really interesting to see patterns being used actually to extract information rather than
as a weapon against other companies, how do you feel in general is this sustainable source of
this kind of information or modern patterns basically useless? Patients are very misunderstood by
makers, I think, I personally also have the patent, and what you said is that if
patterns always have to be a source as a weapon, use as a weapon, and I say no, and mostly they
are not used as a weapon, my experience, large companies actually open for others to create
their own patterns, and they are ways of which you can easily create patterns on your own with
little financial posts, and patterns are a great source of very specific information, and once
you learn how to deal with them, they are not scary anymore.
So you already have brought at least one machine really into the market with your own process,
so yeah, so I have got a pattern for your safety screw, which we are trying to manufacture,
but with my company we do this stuff at other companies, so we help them to implement this whole
process. Okay, so do you have sort of a GitHub repository or a blog post about this process,
and which tool you're using, like basically a written form of what you just explained?
What part of it? Like the process in general, so let's say a step-by-step guide for an
idiot like me to just take that and then go through it, or that maybe I understand it correctly
that this is your consultant business then. Yeah, so what you're asking is if there's more
information on this whole process, right? Yeah, so there is, we have published actually published
a lot of stuff about it, we are publishing a lot of case studies on LinkedIn and Twitter mainly,
and yeah, you can find more information, but we have also planned to release a book on exactly
this topic, because there are so many steps involved, I obviously cannot present to you all the
stuff in just 20 minutes. All right. On my wondering, the examples you've shown are for
pretty simple devices, does this workflow change in any way when you deal with larger summaries?
What, so you were thinking about this or this one? Right. I mean, these are just examples.
You can do this, like for example, in FreeCats, there are specific ways that you would
do create small projects and it would create bigger projects in different ways. So there are
differences, but if you want to learn more, you can we can talk about this. I had another question
about the patents, so if I understood you correctly by using old patents, you gain some safety against
patent infringement, but you also said you could combine several old patents, and then I'm wondering
if you don't create a risk, because then you're creating something new when you're combining several
things, although each thing is an old thing. Okay, so what you're asking is if there is any risk
in combining multiple patents which are not, which are not active anymore, there is some risk,
there is always risk. The manual in business, there is always a risk, but this risk is solo,
and also what many people misunderstand, especially the makers, even if you're infringing on a
patent, the company which also patent will usually just want some money from you, which you have.
If you don't earn any money, you usually don't have to pay anything, usually. And this risk
of you just having to pay a lot of money, because of nothing is nearly zero.
Any more questions?
All right, thank you very much. Thank you very much.