Update: IN-Motion, a Motion and Dynamic Simulation Addin for Autodesk Inventor has been launched by us.
Its been quite some time since I blogged. I was pretty much occupied with the Confusion I had in my mind, as I had hit a Cross-Roads of my career. After quitting my job at HeroHonda R&D, I teamed up with my mentor, Aik-Siong Koh in US and we started off with AR-CAD in April 2007. Since he is an expert at CAD (Motion Simulation) and he had used Smalltalk to develop freeCAD, I also had to learn Smalltalk to help him in further development. Our initial plan was to develop Motion Add-ons/Add-ins or Plug-ins for various CAD software such as Autodesk Inventor, SolidWorks, Rhino CAD and others. Somehow in the due course, we thought of exploring Web 2.0 using Seaside, which is a web framework built on Smalltalk. The idea was that I could learn Smalltalk and also explore Web 2.0 as we had plans for integration of Web and CAD.
We started developing Caartz using Seaside. It took us a long time to get it out. During this period, I learnt Smalltalk, Seaside, OOP, Basic Linux Setup and Usage, various Web related configurations such as Apache, load-balancing etc. When Caartz was launched, it was just a lot of things we had learnt and we had no plans to make money out of it. Since I had gathered experience in Web domain, I completely forgot that I had to return to CAD to make Motion Add-ons.
Then I helped a friend to develop a couple of websites and took a Web Developer Job in a Bangalore based Services Startup. Though the work there involved me in whole life cycle of a project and was very challenging, I thought I was missing something there. Being a Mechanical Engineer from a reputed Engineering College with a lot of interest in CAD, I had a feeling that I was not doing what I was supposed to do. After a couple of months in that Web Startup, I quit it and again I have teamed up with my mentor in US to develop CAD Add-ons.
This time, we are very serious about our path we are going to follow to become a very known name in Motion Simulation Domain. We have completely revamped AR-CAD website as the first step. My mentor already has Motion Simulation code in Smalltalk. I am learning VBA and .NET C# to develop an Add-in which talks to both Autodesk Inventor COM API and our Smalltalk code. As of today, I am able to make simple VBA Add-ons for Inventor and hopefully within next 6 months, we would be ready to sell our Motion Add-ons for Inventor. Once it is done, we would then develop Motion Add-ons for other CAD software.
Jist of my post is that I had come across a Crossroads a year ago and chose a road which took me to Web 2.0 domain. Somewhere down the line, I realized that I wasn’t enjoying it and came back to the crossroads and now I have chosen the road which takes me into CAD world and I am glad that I am finding it interesting and challenging.
Hey maga….
All the very best in yr endeavors !!!!!! Rock on dude !!!!!
Hey great read mate!!! well done!!!
I was going to ask if Caartz was on the Seaside success stories, and look, there it is! Congrats.
@Randal
Thanks for visiting and posting on my blog. We did start off with Seaside to develop Caartz, and havent updated it since its launch. Somewhere down the line, we have plans to build a Seaside App which can take an AutoCAD file as input and do some manipulation/cleaning of the file and give the user a cleaned file. My mentor has the cleaning code in Squeak. Lets see how it goes.
Interesting.
Glad to see someone on the API side of 3D modeling systems. (I happen to be working on the Maya API)
Just thought of offering a helping hand, if you need anything with programming. ( I don’t mind improving my mechanical skills in return 🙂 )
Feel free to check my blog http://blogs.msdn.com/gpalem or the website http://www.geocities.com/krishnapg/
Thank you and all the best.
Gopalakrishna Palem.