VICTORIAN COMPUTER

Although it looks nothing like today's desktop PC, an analytical engine—designed more than 170 years ago by British mathematics professor Charles Babbage—anticipated the first general-purpose computers by about 100 years.

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., is now displaying a prototype of Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2, which is said to be one of the earliest designs of an automatic computing engine.

The Babbage Difference Engine No. 2, on display this year at the Computer History Museum in California, is the second of only two ever built. The engine, based on a mid-1800s design by Charles Babbage, an English mechanical engineer, is widely considered an early precursor of today's computer.

Babbage first described his machine in 1837, but continued to work on the design until his death in 1871. Because of financial, political, and legal issues, the engine was never actually built during his lifetime.

The Babbage Difference Engine No. 2 on display in California is the second of only two ever built, many years after Babbage's death. It is newly transported from London— where it has just been completed. Based on Babbage's design, the difference engine comprises 8,000 parts made of bronze, cast iron, and steel. It weighs five tons and measures 11 feet long and 7 feet tall. Museum visitors can see—and hear—a demonstration of the engine working.

The original analytical engine was to be powered by a steam engine and be nearly 100 feet long and more than 30 feet wide. The input for programs and data were to be provided to the machine via punched cards, a method used at the time to direct mechanical looms. For output, the machine would have a printer of sorts, a curve plotter, and a bell. The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read in later. It employed ordinary base-10 fixed-point arithmetic, according to the museum statement.

Speakers during the exhibit's opening events included Nathan Myhrvold, who commissioned the building of the engine in London, and Doron Swade, who built the first Babbage Engine in 1991 from Babbage's original plans.

The exhibit is scheduled to run through May 2009.

CAD DOING WELL

Sales of CAD technology are expected to continue their growth through at least 2012, according to a recent market research report.

The CAD software market increased 20 percent in 2007 compared to 2006, according to Jon Peddie Research of Tiburon, Calif. The firm tracks the CAD industry and recently released a report projecting sales to 2012.

According to JPR's research, CAD sales by software marketers totaled $5.2 billion in 2007, an increase of 20 percent from 2006, when revenues reached just under $4.4 billion.

In 2008, the CAD market will grow to $6 billion, an increase of 15 percent, the report predicts.

The firm predicts that CAD sales growth will continue through 2008 in spite of a potential U.S. recession. Strong growth continues in the emerging economies that will offset contractions in the West, according to the report.

The industry has been on the upswing over the last five years as a result of several factors, including hardware advances that have moved 64-bit, multicore computers into the mainstream, and broader acceptance of 3-D techniques, according to the report.

Also helping with the upswing—in a culture known for a conservative rate of change—are the smaller businesses willing to invest in new technologies, according to JPR.

SUPER 3-D CAMERA 

Your camera has one lens and takes two-dimensional photographs.

But what if your digital camera saw the world through thousands of tiny lenses, each a miniature camera unto itself? You'd get a 2-D photo, but you'd also get an electronic depth map that contained the distance from the camera to every object in the picture—a kind of super 3-D.

Stanford University electronics researchers, led by Abbas El Gamal, an electrical engineer, are developing such a camera built around their multi-aperture image sensor. The plan is to create a camera that takes pictures that are really detailed depth maps, invisible in the photograph itself but electronically stored along with it. The map is a virtual model of the scene, ready for manipulation by computation.

The team has so far shrunk the pixels on their image sensor to be much smaller than pixels in standard digital cameras. They've grouped the pixels in arrays of 256 each, and they're preparing to place a tiny lens atop each array. "It's like having a lot of cameras on a single chip," said Keith Fife, a graduate student working with El Gamal.

The team says that its multi-aperture camera will look and feel like an ordinary camera or a cell-phone camera.

Here's how it would work:

The lens of an ordinary digital camera focuses its image directly on the camera's image sensor, which records the photo. The lens of the multi-aperture camera, on the other hand, focuses its image about 40 micrometers above the image sensor arrays. As a result, any point in the photo is captured by at least four of the chip's mini-cameras, producing overlapping views, each from a slightly different perspective.

The outcome of the process is the detailed depth map.

"You can choose to do things with that image that you weren't able to do with the regular 2-D image," Fife said. "You can say, 'I want to see only the objects at this distance,' and suddenly they'll appear for you. And you can wipe away everything else."

One potential use of the technology is facial recognition for security purposes. But there are a number of other possibilities for use, including biological imaging, 3-D printing, creating 3-D objects or people to inhabit virtual worlds, or creating 3-D models of buildings, Fife said.

The researchers are now working out the manufacturing details of fabricating the micro-optics onto a camera chip.

RETHINKING IC ENGINES

An Australian company recently took an idea for an internal combustion engine from idea to prototype in about half a year.

Bradley Howell-Smith designed and patented the engine in the 1990s. As described in the U.S. patent's abstract, the engine "comprises two counter rotating multilobate cams, which are acted upon by a pair of diametrically opposed pistons which are rigidly interlinked by connecting rods. Differential gearing is provided to time the counter rotation of the cams."

In July 2006, Howell-Smith conceived of a variation on his original design. Called the X4, the new design would reduce by half the size and weight of most engines of similar capacity. The challenge now was to take the idea from concept to working prototype in just seven months.

"We had a company coming to see us in February 2007," Howell-Smith said. "They weren't expecting to see a working model by that time, but we wanted to impress them with what we could do."

By this time, he'd formed Revetec Holdings Ltd. of Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, to bring his engines to market. The company consists of two people. Howell-Smith does the design work and Paul Moitzi, a machinist, builds the prototype engines. They both use the computer-aided design software Solid Edge from Siemens PLM Software of Plano, Texas.

Although he had been contracting out analysis work, when Howell-Smith started work on the X4 engine, the current release of Solid Edge included Femap Express structural analysis software. He decided to test the linked CAD and analysis system.

Because Howell-Smith did the analysis work himself, the design and analysis process that formerly took him two weeks was done in a half-hour. In-house analysis also saved him the $1,000 to $2,000 fee he paid the analysis contractor, he said.

Howell-Smith started designing the X4 on July 10, 2006, and finished modeling the entire engine before the end of the year. The prototype is now built and is undergoing testing and tuning.

PROTOTYPES AT THE READY

Searching for a customized production part? Boot up your computer.

Quickparts Inc. of Atlanta has updated its QuickQuote Online storefront, which customers use to buy rapid prototypes, production parts, and tooling.

QuickQuote analyzes an uploaded 3-D CAD file provided by a customer, then offers an automated price quote. Users upload their files and select their process, quantity, material, and finish.

This updated Web site gives users greater ability to create multiple quotes from multiple processes, view images and dimensions of the files they want to quote, and choose when their part ships, said Ronald Hollis, Quickparts' president and CEO.

THE COST OF DOING BUSINESS

For most companies, tracking the time spent on each job offers a variety of dividends.

Eight years ago, Šlechta s.r.o. of Políkno, Czech Republic, changed direction. The former toolmaking company began specializing in the hand polishing of aluminum and steel mold inserts. And demand grew fast.

Now, the company has 35 employees who perform mirror-finish and surface polishing. Customers are drawn from a variety of industries, including packaging, consumer goods, and auto manufacturing, said Martin Lepic, the controlling manager.

With that kind of job variety, managers knew they could drive future job and financial efficiency by studying each job close up. They wanted to examine how long each job took and what exactly it entailed. Such information also would be useful for accounting and bidding purposes.

To figure out the cost of each current job, the company recently put in place the job management system called MyWorkPlan from Sescoi of Southfield, Mich. The system exchanges data with the company's external software packages, such as its CAD systems, Microsoft Office products, and accounting packages.

The new system helps Šlechta generate more accurate quotations based on historical information. The company now uses the software to analyze customers' drawings, control purchasing costs, and keep track of stock levels.

Of particular interest to Šlechta is the software's capability for keeping records, Lepic said.

"Monitoring the hours spent on each job is far quicker now, as is recording the working hours and attendance record for each operator," he said. "We also have better control of our production schedule."

Shop floor terminals record manufacturing times by logging operators against each job, giving managers information about each task as it happens. Having this level of data allows the company to advise its customers of the exact status of each job and provides a warning if a task overruns its allotted time, Lepic added.

SHAKER AND FATIGUE TESTED

There's no need to shake a blade in real life when engineers can shake it in a model.

When Hamler Test and Analysis, an engineering consulting firm in Cookeville, Tenn., performed shaker fatigue testing of a gas turbine engine's compressor blade, engineers used finite element analysis software.

The company specializes in vibration measurement and experimental vibration analysis, said Jesse Hamler, HTA's president and chief technical officer.

Hamler Test and Analysis used FEA software to analyze the compressor blades of a gas turbine engine like the one shown here.

One company recently asked HTA to perform physical fatigue testing on a compressor blade from a stationary gas turbine engine used for power generation. The testing was needed to verify the client's analytical vibratory high-cycle fatigue-life prediction method, Hamler said.

"The first phase of this shaker testing involved vibrating several blades to failure at the first bending mode, and the second phase involved testing several blades to failure at the first torsion mode," he said.

But Hamler didn't actually vibrate the blades. Instead, he relied on FEA software from Algor Inc. of Pittsburgh to simulate such a test and determine the optimal blade setup.

"I was able to simulate different ideas and hardware configurations without having to spend time or money to physically make the hardware for each setup," Hamler said.

BRIEFLY NOTED

SpaceClaim Corp. of Concord, Mass., has released SpaceClaim Professional 2008, an advanced version of the company's 3-D design tool. /// 3Dconnexion, a company in Fremont, Calif., has released a 3-D controller especially for use with notebook computers. It's called SpaceNavigator. /// A provider of digital design communications software, Infotech Enterprises GmbH of Leonberg, Germany, has released a new version of its CAD viewer called SpinFire Professional. /// Simulia, a Dassault company in Providence, R.I., has upgraded its Abaqus for Catia version five finite element analysis product to revision 18. /// Ansys Inc. of Canonsburg, Pa., has released Engineering Knowledge Manager, a new product for simulation process and data management. /// Autodesk of San Rafael, Calif., is shipping updates to its line of mechanical engineering and design software for manufacturing. The 2009 product lineup includes new and enhanced versions of the Inventor, AutoCAD Mechanical, AutoCAD Electrical, and AliasStudio product lines. /// DeskArtes of Helsinki, Finland, has introduced 3Data Expert software version 8.0 for 3-D printing, rapid prototyping, and simulation data transfer and manipulation. /// ITI TranscenData of Milford, Ohio, has released STEPcenter Enterprise Server, a software application that automates the translation, validation, and distribution of standard for the exchange of product model data. /// Coade Inc. of Houston has released CADWorx Design Review 2008 for review of CADWorx and ancillary plant design models. /// QuadriSpace of Allen, Texas, which makes 3-D design software, has upgraded its namesake software to version 2008. /// The provider of 3-D modeling and rapid prototyping software, 3D Systems Corp. of Rock Hill, S.C., has begun shipments of its V-Flash Desktop Modeler.