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.