General renewal of the cabling interface

[AlessandroFerri]

I'm a longtime Creo user (from Pro / Engineer 16) and a former PTC employee.

I would like PTC to invest in the renewal of the Cabling interface and workflow that I think are definitely dated.

It is not possible that in 2020 this module still has a strong presence of the old hierarchical menus it had in the old Pro / Engineer (especially with regard to the harness part).

While up to the Mid 90's was understandable the massive use of these hierarchical menus (due to the lack of power of the graphical cards), now it makes no sense.

As PTC is pushing towards the augmented reality that needs a Digital Twin, this Digital Twin should be easily built by designers even for the Cabling / Piping point of view.

If PTC wants to continue to be a market leader in the MCAD sector, must not only develop new "Wow" technologies (such as topological optimization, for example ...) but also invest a part of the new subscription model revenues to update and improve its fundamentals without which everything else makes no sense.

[Pettersson]

I can only agree. There needs to be a serious update on the Cabling interface. Every time I hold a Creo update course, the users ask me "What about Cabling? Has it been improved?" and I'd love to be able to answer something more than just "Now you can do striped cables!". Though fixing the fixed length problem was a huge relief!

[AlessandroFerri]

Other considerations that can be made are the following:

1. Browsing the internal database of the CREO courses, the last update of the Cabling and Piping courses is related to CREO 4.0... therefore also the training material is definitely obsolete (or maybe there is nothing really new...).
2. The disheartening thing is to compare the Cabling and Piping solutions with the homologous solutions of the other MCADs which are definitely simpler to use and much, much... much more intuitive.
3. It would also be also very interesting to integrate these two modules with Mechanism. I would like, for example, to see a cable fixed to a mobile element that deforms itself when this element moves (to identify problems of excessive stretching of the cable itself). Other MCAD can deal this... so it is a problem that can be solved...

[S_Edgenear]

Definetely agree with point 3 above. If Creo wants to simulate real world envirnonments, having the possibility to simulate moving parts that have cables attached is a must. Also, in our case, in molding industry, we often need to simulate the space available to hoses attached to moving parts in a mechanism. Currently even if we use flexible components to model the hoses, they are static and do not update in real-time in mechanism. It should not be too difficult to make a vertex program in a graphics card to do skeleton (spline based) animation of a few points representing the outer diameter of a hose (or wire in electrical assemblies). This also applies to springs, either helicoidal, or laminar based. We could even generalize the concept of realtime flexible components, now that we have multibodies capabilities since Creo 7, to have one of two bodies inside a part rigidly assembled to an external component inside an assembly, and any spline that conects the moving body to the static fixed one, to be able to be real-time animated as long as the "flexible" geometry consists of a single sweep feature (with circle, square,  or any kind of profile).

Also related to the simulation of wires and hoses, when using a spline to define the "path" of the wire or hose, this spline should have the possibility to control it's length. Currenly we can only define a spline by passing through vertices, the length is a result of those locations. We should have the possibility to define a spline tentatively passing through certain points, but with the added constraint to have a fixed length (even if its approximated with small line segments). This would make it easy to animate in realtime, since Creo would only be animating those vertices of the small line segments, changint their positions, but not the length of the line esegments, thus, ensuring that in the mechanism simulation, we have always the same length of wire or hose to see if is getting stretched too much in maximum and minumum mechanism positioning. When testing the maximum position, we could come to the conclusion that we need to increase the length of the wires or hoses for the mechanism to function without breaking the wires or hoses. After defining the maximum length, in the mechanism we would further see in the minimum mechanism position, if there is enough space fot the wires or hoses to bend and be compacted in a confined space. If the hose or wire is defined as multiple small line segments, instead of a traditional spline through points, and defining the minimum bend radius, Creo would be able to calculate the minimum angle that the small line segments would be able to deflect to respect the minimum bend radius.

[AlessandroFerri]

The funny thing is that if you take the piping application you already have roughly this behavior for the pipes (minimum radius and fixed length pipes) but of course, as the pipe is an assembly feature , its regeneration is frozen in the moment you get into Mechanism Application.

The outcome is hence that the length check can be only "statically" performed within Piping or within standard Application changing dimensions and regenerate the assembly.

As you said, it should not be so difficult to join the dynamic preview behavior of the features (that already exists in part mode in Creo) with flexible components deformations within Mechanism.

An unattached dynamic preview with a geometry compliance and interference check is in my opinion not so difficult to achieve...

[Alex_Y]

Thanks for the comments everything.

I think we have 2 completely different topics here.

1. Modernization of Cabling UI

2. Flexible Cables/Hoses

I would prefer to have 2 separate ideas.

Regarding UI modernization, I completely agree and want to let you know that from now onwards, every release will see a fair amount of resources invested in UI modernization (conversion of Menu Managers to Dashboards) and usability improvements. All UI will be an incrementally updated and modernized sooner than later.

Regarding flexible cables, it's a much bigger topic that is in the future roadmap but not in a short term.

[AlessandroFerri]

Thank you for the feedback Alex. I'm eager to see implemented what you just posted. 

Regarding flexible hoses/cables take a look at this link  (given me by a Piaggio senior designer).

It would be nice having something similar in Creo, isn't it ? 

Let me know your thought about this topic.

Regards

Alessandro