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Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

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Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#81

Post by bradfox2 »

DanTheManPR wrote: post #80
syntaxing wrote: post #8

Was a Mechanical Design Engineer for about a decade. Personally, the CAD part was the easy and fun part (Used Solidworks, Creo, Inventor, Catia v5 extensively. Professionally trained in all four as well). The “tedious” part was SAP (part number and material management), drafting, ECN/R/O, BOM handling, etc. I would be more excited for “AI” for PLM like Windchill, TeamCenter, or Cadedge (or whatever SAP PLM packages y…

I've been a Mechanical Engineer for a similar length of time, using Solidworks and Creo, and I concur. I've released many thousands of parts over the course of my career, and I don't think of the modeling itself as a major time sink (provided you have some decent training, and are using a thoughtful approach and not fighting the software). If the AI copilot could actually do all the modeling based on prompts, that wo…

Hey! We're building this. It's a workflow driven automated documentation system for engineers based on your document templates. We started in energy and have expanded into engineering services. Would love your feedback.

fast-draft.ai

Please, please send me an email or dm if you are interested.

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#82

Post by raffraffraff »

71bw wrote: post #72
raffraffraff wrote: post #12

My brother in law is in construction and has built and project managed dozens of houses, small apartment blocks etc. He said that if a building job doesn't require planning permission (small extension, temporary structure, certain farm buildings, large sheds, pergolas, verandas, sunrooms etc) then the customer might ask if he can save money by skipping the architect and engineer. A competent builder can generally wor…

>He said that if a building job doesn't require planning permission (small extension, temporary structure, certain farm buildings, large sheds, pergolas, verandas, sunrooms etc) then the customer might ask if he can save money by skipping the architect and engineer. Very interesting. Where are you located? I guess the US.

Ireland!

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#83

Post by WillPostForFood »

misnome wrote: post #74
WillPostForFood wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been trying to install cadquery on a mac (M1) but ouch, not easy, and not working yet.

FWIW conda-forge packages cadquery and it's dependencies, including on macOS-arm. So micromamba/mamba/conda can easily be used to install it. build123d is being worked on.

Great, thanks! I'll give it a try. Brew -> pip -> cadquery was a dead end for me.

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#84

Post by WillPostForFood »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #83
misnome wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW conda-forge packages cadquery and it's dependencies, including on macOS-arm. So micromamba/mamba/conda can easily be used to install it. build123d is being worked on.

Great, thanks! I'll give it a try. Brew -> pip -> cadquery was a dead end for me.

Got it running, thanks again!

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#85

Post by 71bw »

raffraffraff wrote: post #82
71bw wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He said that if a building job doesn't require planning permission (small extension, temporary structure, certain farm buildings, large sheds, pergolas, verandas, sunrooms etc) then the customer might ask if he can save money by skipping the architect and engineer. Very interesting. Where are you located? I guess the US.

Ireland!

Interesting! Good to know that - God only knows where I may end up later in life. Curious how assuming all the freedom my brain automatically went to "huh, they're in the US". :=D

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#86

Post by christkv »

chadnorvell wrote: post #59
christkv wrote: post #21

Is anyone doing something in the space for architecture mockups? I was talking with a friend who is an architect and he would love a tool that could iterate designs.

Yes! I'd love to better understand what your friend has in mind. Feel free to get in touch at: chad@constructural.ai

It's mostly creating variations of a design allowing the architect to iterate on the design with the customer to reach a final design. Today they have to create some limited set of design proposals using a lot of time and iterating is hard because any substantial big differences requires a lot of man-hours.

As an example when designing a single-family home it took several weeks to provide updated draft drawings. It would be useful for the architect and the customer that variations can be easily generated narrowing down the final design faster.

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#87

Post by jaredmclaughlin »

raffraffraff wrote: post #12

My brother in law is in construction and has built and project managed dozens of houses, small apartment blocks etc. He said that if a building job doesn't require planning permission (small extension, temporary structure, certain farm buildings, large sheds, pergolas, verandas, sunrooms etc) then the customer might ask if he can save money by skipping the architect and engineer. A competent builder can generally wor…

I think it's feasible for someone to do this, and quite possibly the software you described, because these things are so standardized. There's a given spacing for studs of a given size, etc.

I've thought about this for decks, because they are so often so poorly done, yet the design space is almost entirely constrained by code that essentially boils down to looking things up in a table.

Re: Show HN: Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

#88

Post by jaredmclaughlin »

mmmaggio wrote: post #79

Some things I’d love to see in AI for CAD that would be above this are 1) Is it manufacturable - where it analyzes different mfg methods, for feasibility and estimated cost. So many engineers design impossible or expensive to manage parts. AI could help make this not the case 2) as others have said, BOM/SAP/etc. 3) make the drawing for a machine shop

There was a plugin for Solidworks that did something similar for machining. You essentially had a side bar that estimated cost in real time as you designed.

Feasibility I think can be done by rules checking / constraints but cost has a lot to do with the specific supplier capabilities in several dimensions.

As a machinist , yes, let's have AI do drawings, please. Getting rid of professional drafters was a huge mistake. Modern GD&T is complicated - which brings up an inherent problem. Our system of drafting a6GD&T doesn't have an explicit mathematical model - it's just based on practice. Therefore, you need some form of systemic approximation. There's one from Arizona University that NIST seems to prefer.

The other problem with automatic drawings is design intent. Consider that you may have several ways to dimension a hole, but one of them may more clearly express design intent. Pretend we drill a hole in a cube block. For the centerline of the hole, we have two different surfaces to dimension from in each direction. Depending on how the component assembles, it can make a difference given the assumption that the machining is done correctly.

If the dimensions go left - down, when the part is in the machine, it should be setup and programmed with the references on top and left. Correctly done, the tolerancing constrains not only the size of the component but also the best practice machining strategy. Tolerancing for manufacturability isn't something I hear discussed but should be. The other question is - can that tolerance be directly measured, or will it need to be calculated on the shop floor?

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