CADD
What is CAD? Does it mean Ctrl + Alt + Del? Yes it definitely means the three-finger salute founded by David . J. Bradley , But the CAD that I would like to explain is Computer Aided Design – which are computer based tools used to assist designers ,engineers, architects etc in their design activities. In this galloping world of today CAD has proved its importance so much that the design of the simple coffee cup which we use for our bed coffee ,the modeling & animation of the cartoon characters which we see on Cartoon network to the complex design of a space shuttle launched by NASA can be created using the different CAD related software. Earlier CAD was the acronym for ‘Computer Aided Drafting’ but the improvement in technology and introduction of a vast design and analysis features made the term ‘Computer Aided Design’ more popular.
The transformation from agricultural to an industrial era led to a lot of upheavals on the economic front .But as the industrial world is proceeding at rapid phase so is the manufacturing process which has seen drastic changes. Here is the importance of CAM –Computer Aided Manufacturing, as the name suggests it means using the computer technology to manufacture products. So manufacturing of products is controlled by various degrees of automation using CAM system. Many manufacturing processes in present day factories and industries are auto mated using cam system like robotics.
Are CAD and CAM related? Definitely why are they not? The design of any product is done using the CAD systems and they are put in to the manufacturing process using CAM system. Let me explain this using a very simple ,the coffee cup which I said about earlier ,The CAD system provides the different design of the cup and it is put in to manufacturing using the CAM process. Depending on the customer the design is changed using the CAD systems and bringing about simple changes in the CAM system it can be manufactured in bulk. So this reduces the hectic work of completely starting from scratch to manufacturing a product Isn’t it wonderful? Moreover the perfection and reduction in time had made CAD/CAM system much popular. Even though CAD/CAM says “sit back and relax” it simplifies a tedious task but it ofcourse needs the supervision of men.
History of CADD
Doug Ross was the person who coined the term “Computer Aided Design” .The first Cad software developed was SKETCHPAD by Ivan Sutherland in 1960 as part of his PhD thesis at MIT. This software uses a pen to draw on the monitor. No other CAD software has developed such great directness with the interface thus showing the ingenuity of the designer. But the first commercial CAM system named Pronto was developed in 1957 by Dr.Patrick J Hanratty. Therefore Dr.Hanratty is known as the “father of CAD CAM”.
The first commercial application of CAD was in the automotive field in 1960’s.As it became popular it spread to other industries also. In the 1960’s and 70’s only major companies could afford computers with CAD. Some of them were General Motors Corporation (GM) using DAC-1 (Design Augmented by Computer) in 1964, Renault (Bezier) using UNISURF in 1971 for car body design and tooling. The 1960’s and 1970’s also saw the foundation of CAD systems like United Computing, IBM etc.As time swept the 1980’s showed the transformation from 2D to 3D.This was the real boon for the designers and architects. It helped them to workout whatever was in there mind directly into CAD with the X,Y and the Z axis.
SynthaVision from Mathematics Application Group, Inc.( MAGI) was the first 3D program developed in 1972.MAGI was established for the purpose of evaluating nuclear radiation exposure. SynthaVision did this by tracing light. It was considered as a 3D program because it had a geometry of 3D primitive solid. and it used the solid modeling as well as ray tracing to create images . Avions Marcel Dassault, a French aerospace company, brought the source code of CADAM ,a very popular 2D cad software of the 70’s, from lockhead and worked on it to develop CATIA (Computer Aided Three Dimensional Interactive Application), which is one of the most popular software till date. The other major developments in 1980’s was the release of BUILD a solid modeling software, Romulus & Uni-Solid .
History was really created when Autodesk released its first version of AutoCAD-AutoCAD release -1.It became so successful that the first word that anyone thinks when talking about CAD is definitely “AutoCAD". The other major contribution in the 1980’s and 1990’s were Pro-e Engineer in 1988 by PTC. SolidWorks in 1995 by Dassault Systems, Solid Edge in 1996 by Intergraph.
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