I am not aware of the interface method Creo uses for wiring or resolving connections, it could be purely graphical with no resolving at all. If so I would assume that the electronics/pcbs you can see in the original article are likely just 3D STEP models exported from the ECAD package into Creo.
Sadly, the market does not currently (to my knowledge) present engineers with one single software solution for ecad->mcad>wiring>assembly>release, instead relying on various software packages, licenses and extensions on these with each user (company) forging their own local workarounds to bridge or replace specific steps of the process.
The best way out of unconscious incompetence is having a mentor, but knowing to get a mentor is often a test of your ego, which can be the hardest part to overcome.
Depends on your area. I live in a small town and there just aren't that many people you can meet. Maybe there's an online mentoring site to connect people out there?
Back in 2009 I put several hundred hours into the diablo 2 mod called Median, which turned into Median XL. Should you ever want a successor to Diablo 2 this was it. The craft that went into this by its original author BrotherLaz was exceptional, who was outstanding at creating content within the games restrictive modding mechanisms. The balance of all the content was just so finely tuned; BrotherLaz really had an instinct for this stuff and the effort really showed. Whenever we complained about anything on the forums BrotherLaz wouldn't just give in to the whining; instead disappearing for a few days and coming back with a complete solution that nobody saw coming, whether that was an overhaul of a whole skill tree or something way out from left field, as if there was a whole room of experienced game designers behind workshopping every idea. But there wasn't. And every time we would all love the mod even more.
BrotherLaz went on to operate under the pseudonym Enai Siaion on Skyrim mods (including the very popular Apolocypse spellmod) but I've no idea what he/she has worked on since then. A content creater to watch out for.
Just browsed their website...this looks massive. Might be tempted to go back to D2 just to try this. Looks like it's still in development all these years later.
From what I can tell of the latest release trailers it looks to me like the bulk of Laz's work is still in there despite it having 10 years more dev since I played it, a majority being after Laz handed it over to the community, so I would be cautiously optimistic that it's still the transformative mod it once was!
I was recently trying to find a solution like this after discovering that my car cannot have an aftermarket radio or hud install without ensuing a whole world of pain. The alternative I landed on though was this:
Well something had to be done. People could buy any head unit they liked. There was even a DIN standard size and connector and they would talk to the car's built in display. Aftermarket units were often far better. How is a dealer meant to sell $MANUFACTURER units with a market like that? (/s, clearly)
I've once left a car that I fully intended to buy because the dealer would not deliver it with a DIN slot. I absolutely hate integrated audio/media/navigation solutions, they always suck and a couple of years down the line nothing will work with them.
I struggle to get creative when constrained to the chair and have noticed I go a lot more frequently to the whiteboard to brainstorm a problem now that I'm already standing at my desk. That doesn't mean I get better results, only that I find the office space offers more to me in general when I adopt that active stance. This is going to sound lazy, but I'm in an open office and i also find I am less resentful about having to walk out of the room to get some thinking space when I'm not having to sit down and get up again all the time.
One thing to note vis a vis long term health is that standing with good posture requires using your glutes, hamstrings and abdominal muscles. If you fully commit to a standing position and don't do some basic strength exercises in these areas you may end up tilting your pelvis forwards a lot, which makes the whole body tighten up. Ironically its people with back problems who are the most keen to adopt standing desks, but if you have a history of back problems or a diagnosed condition often the last thing you want is your whole body tightening up as this could encourage injuries. This is one reason why the general advice is not to underestimate the effort or concentration required to transition to a standing lifestyle, and to take it slowly and mindfully.
I am the only person with a standing desk in an open style office layout of a few dozen people, and i can tell you that this anxiety is increased by several orders of magnitude when everyone else in the room sitting down can see what you are working on at a glance.
I have persistently encountered the same problem in this space. Most people I've worked with write documents using the last formatted document they made as a template for the next. Tracing back through their history of documents you find that they are all based off one person who decided it was a good idea to mix fonts and colours of headings, and mess around with font sizes and then save it all as default heading and text styles, and then everyone after them just uses these saved styles to save time because changing them would mean having to work with frustrating aspects of the tool (MS Word).
So my question is, how can I get people to care about this? I've argued for a properly defined corporate style guides as well as adoption of typesetting systems like LaTeX but nobody wants to hear it. Am I just in a minority by being put off by poor typographic and formatting choices and should find more important battles at work? It concerns me that customer facing documentation is severely lacking in quality.
But you aren’t alone either. I feel the same way and use LaTeX for any important writing (and I didn’t start using till after uni either oddly). My resume, a bunch of guides and documents I wrote in it, as well as a book I published. My editor (with WROX) insisted I had to use a Word template for it, but I just couldn’t force myself to. Instead I wrote it in LaTeX and then made a converter to output into their specific crappy template.
The book “the Mac is not a typewriter” (https://www.amazon.com/Mac-Not-Typewriter-2nd/dp/0201782634) may help get them some idea about style. It is 15 years old, targets print, and is aimed at Mac users, but that doesn’t matter that much.
(For PC users, there is “the PC is not a typewriter” (https://www.amazon.com/Pc-not-typewriter-Robin-Williams/dp/0...), but that is even older, so I’m not sure it will be more useful than the original, unless your users are using WordPerfect or Ventura Publisher)
Even the consistent style part might take quite a bit of effort. I would be happy already if I could make a certain kind of person drop ClipArt and WordArt, and I don't see this ever happening...
There are countless kinds of cheese. How can we make people care about all those. The subtle taste differences, countries of origin or rippening time.
Same with typography. If you want quality customer facing documentation generate it from plain text.
Latex is too hard for mortals, but I’d suggest Sphinx or one of the markdown alternatives. I think atlassian confluence is another even friendlier alternative, with a price tag.
Tools won't make people care, but they can help produce consistent documents.
Atlassian Confluence is a horrible recommendation; it has few tools for typesetting, PDF export is very mediocre and hard to control (there is a plugin that allows you to control pagination), and I once found something that was impossible to produce in its markup (my workaround was to insert a zero-width character and hope no one copied it into a terminal).
Confluence? You mean the terrible wiki like software put out by Atlassian? It’s about as relevant as handing someone a typewriter and telling them to use it as an IDE/code editor. Sure, you can type characters out with both, but does that really make them similar tools?
I wasted so many years trying to learn electronics from books when this is one subject that cannot be mastered without practical work. If reading from books you should at the very least grab yourself a copy of LT Spice and simulate to death absolutely every circuit you read about until you understand what's going on in each one. Do not move on until you do because a firm grasp of the basics is what will take you far in this field. After you've analysed each circuit go hunting online for the devices you used in your simulation and look at their data sheets. Find out through internet research what the most important datasheet characteristics are for different types of devices in different applications (e.g. transistors), for example a MOSFET datasheet might be ten pages long but for digital applications you might only care about only 5 characteristic values on the entire datasheet and never have to look at anything else on there. If you can identify what sort of space you are working in you can cut down the time it takes you to work things out by a lot.
I've found that a good way to learn electronics systematically is not to think about components but to think about requirements and applications in industry. An example in the digital domain: most things have a button on them, so start by wiring a basic momentary switch to a microcontroller and code it to count the signal and output in binary on a bank of LEDs. Now look online to try and find how you might make a latching signal in hardware from a momentary switch signal. Simulate it on LT Spice. Build this new circuit to confirm the signals. Now, wire this into the enable pin of a basic linear regulator IC and get it to latch power on/off to your bank of LEDs. Next try a switch circuit allowing you to perform a short-press latches on, long-press latches OFF function. Etc. As long as you are patient and take time to simulate and understand each signal the understanding of the components themselves should drop into place, at least in my experience.
Can anyone share good sites or resources for a frequent 'technology-watch' of the latest embedded hardware platforms and platform developers such as this? I do a quick scan of the various embedded hardware brand websites (RPi, BB, Gumstix, etc.) every few months but I'd like to be more ahead of the curve.
> It even has it's own subway covering the whole city!
Not the same I know, but Milton Keynes (a UK garden city supposedly planned and designed like an American city) has a mostly interrupted cycle path network covering the whole city, which to some hugely preferable to a subway network. The only problem with this is that things are too spaced out for the average person to want to cycle so barely anyone uses it, which is strange because Milton Keynes buses charge £4-5 per person to travel only a couple of miles.
Example image of wiring an assembly in Creo:
http://www.arbortext.com/-/media/Images/CAD/PTC-Creo-PCX---1...
I am not aware of the interface method Creo uses for wiring or resolving connections, it could be purely graphical with no resolving at all. If so I would assume that the electronics/pcbs you can see in the original article are likely just 3D STEP models exported from the ECAD package into Creo.
Sadly, the market does not currently (to my knowledge) present engineers with one single software solution for ecad->mcad>wiring>assembly>release, instead relying on various software packages, licenses and extensions on these with each user (company) forging their own local workarounds to bridge or replace specific steps of the process.