sammcf

I mean, it's a really easy issue to work around (if occasionally time consuming), most people who use the software are familiar with the issue, it's not enough to make me want to change CAD package given the massive sunk costs one rapidly accumulates using a particular package...I guess there's no real incentive for the software guys to devote time to fixing this when they could be working on new features or whatever.

In a better world, I'd love for bug fixing, or even just polishing workflows for existing features, to be as high of a priority for CAD companies as new feature. However, only one of those things is seen as growing the install base...

Metal isn't that expensive I guess but still, several hundred dollars and a turnaround time increase of a week+ minimum isn't always on the cards for every project. Sure, if I had unlimited time and budget, I'd physically prototype and field test everything. Client demands tend to take precedence. Part of being a good engineer is balancing those concerns, learning which parts of the design and manufacturing process can be trusted implicitly and which assumptions must be rigorously tested - suffice to say I've been a lot more stringent about sheet metal design in the years since.

>Now admittedly the guy does put the responsibility on the operator, but it appears CAD packages can indeed calculate this for you. So long as the right info was input into the program, the formula should be programmed correctly and the operator should be able to have confidence in the results!

"Should" is the operative term. I can tell you with that having hand checked the automated results of several CAD packages at developing sheet metal flat patterns and finding unexplained variability and errors too many times to count that if you want confidence in the dimensional accuracy of a sheet metal part, you need to develop it by hand. Especially for anything over 5mm in sheet thickness. As far as I'm concerned you really can't engage in sheet metal design without being able to manually verify the development results, so in a sense it is up to the designer regardless of the capabilities of the CAD software.

To be fair, I'm picking on one of the hardest physical manufacturing processes to actually get right - even CNC brake presses have a great amount of variance in calibration (e.g. the amount of bend allowance you need to make for various sheet thicknesses...) across different suppliers, materials, etc to produce physically identical parts. The valuable lesson for a fresh designer is don't trust your 3d representation of the part, don't trust the manufacturer specs on ANYTHING and always prototype. I'm guessing this is why people tolerate it - the world with 3d CAD is still a vastly nicer place to be an engineer than otherwise, so we just rationalise away the shitty parts as a reasonable price to pay.

I had a tremendously embarrassing failure in a sheet metal part designed in Solidworks due to a bug in the way bend allowance is calculated. The long story short is that the flat pattern developed by SW was about 10% dimensionally inaccurate which resulted in a rotating part binding up in the field and going blammo. This was years and years ago as a fresh young designer, so I reported the issue to my reseller and the response was essentially "yeah, you're gonna have to take that into account." I've since learned that this sort of idiosyncratic difference in calculating certain values, particularly things like bend radii and bend allowance, things like beam extensions on structural frames, etc, is par for the course for CAD packages. Pretty much every engineer I know has learnt this lesson the hard way.

I guess it's not really a bug per se, just hidden behaviour that you have to learn about and take into consideration.

That's super cool, thanks for the info. I might hit you up at a (much) later date for a chat about it!

Don't get me wrong, it's gonna be a while, but I'll certainly be making whatever...this...ends up being available to all

Literally started wireframing this exact thing this morning, although with the default resolution, if you will, being a week. My plan was to be able to preset a small catalogue of "templates" for various days (eg I always have to put the bins out on Sunday, because garbage day is Monday - so my Sunday template will have a put the bins out task at 7pm every single time), then fill up the work hours with work tasks. After a late night conversation with some buddies about how each of us asks our wife several times a day what we are meant to be doing, exactly, at that moment, I just want a todo app that can answer the question for me.

Gonna have a crack at Elixir for this, should be a fun project for getting to grips with a new lang.