SOFTWARE REVIEW
Cadasio Technical documents such as guides and manuals can be a time-consuming pain for designers to produce. Cadasio streamlines the process, coming up with slick, interactive results and helping to ease the burden along the way, writes Stephen Holmes
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n this day and age, bad assembly guides reflect poorly on a brand. Whether customers are enterprise clients or high-street consumers, since everyone started walking around with a small computer in their pocket, they now expect more immersive and interactive methods to get their heads around how a product works or fits together. For this reason, Cadasio has created an online tool to help build attractive, clear documents – product manuals, procedural guides and assembly instructions – that can be as basic or interactive as required. But before we get on to the how, it’s worth considering why such a tool is needed. Manuals are traditionally 2D, and with that comes a lack of detail, limited image angles and the need to take a punt on the reader correctly interpreting them. Most of us will have attempted assembling flatpack furniture, and ended up fudging the process, because two types of bolt look very similar, or we can’t ascertain which way up or in which hole a vital piece was meant to be inserted. In industry, this could make all the difference between an expensive piece of kit working first time, or a very awkward call to the manager that signed off on the purchase of a freshly knackered item. When you think about it, creating manuals requires extra resources that
really have no place in a lithe, modern product development process. It often involves redrawing models, umpteen screengrabs, paying someone to photograph or even film the real thing, annotating each frame, and so on. Companies spent vast amounts of time and money to create 3D CAD models, so it would be mad not to repurpose these in the easiest way possible. This is where Cadasio steps in, allowing the simple creation of guides and manuals that enable the user to decide how plain or immersive they should be.
OFFLOADING TASKS If you want to offload this task from a CAD designer onto someone in marketing, then there are various considerations that must be taken into account. Your plan is going to fail if first, you need that person to have experience using 3D CAD in order to operate the new software (and most marketing types have never even noticed that they have a middle mouse button); or second, it involves spending more money on yet another CAD workstation with graphics card and CAD licence; or third, if your document creator needs to go off on a three-day training course before they can even start work. Cadasio has thought all three scenarios through. In fact, members of its team have previously worked at CAD software
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resellers and seen the sticking points first-hand. Cadasio projects start with uploading CAD data. Either a supported format, STEP or OBJ file can be imported into the browser. It’s an easy option for those non-affiliated with 3D CAD. For those in possession of original CAD models, however, the Cadasio add-ins make it plain sailing to choose the model you want. Currently these are available for Solidworks, Autodesk Fusion 360, Inventor, Siemens Solid Edge and PTC Onshape. Plans for a Creo version are underway. Open the file, click on the Cadasio tab to open a project window and name it, and then the files are sent up to the connected Cadasio account. For the benefit of speed and privacy, original CAD data is converted into a stripped-down, scaled version of the original 3D CAD, which is built of triangles on your machine and then encrypted for security, before being sent to Cadasio in the browser. Depending on how large and complex the model is and the strength of your internet connection, the upload typically takes a few minutes before appearing in your Projects file in Cadasio in the browser.
» Product: Cadasio » Supplier: Cadasio Price: free or from $50 per month cadasio.com
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