GitHub for Engineers 3

[sabrehagen]

Hi Everyone,

I'm new to the engineering world and am trying to understand the online ecosystem. As such I have a few questions!

Is there a 'GitHub for Engineers'? That is, is there a website where I can find people's engineering projects to learn from? Ideally I'd like to download their files, inspect them, play around, etc, in order to learn rapidly.

A second question is what is the established best practice for working on engineering projects with others? Do people use dropbox or google drive? What's the best practice 'work flow'?

Lastly, how do you find out about new interesting engineering projects people are working on?

Thanks,


Jackson

 

[rb1957]

ok, i'll try again ...

looking at how other people solved problems isn't IMHO a whole lot of use to you. You don't know their "design space", the limitations they had to work with, the materials available to them. And without talking to the engineer involved, just reviewing the final drawings,may not be a lot of help either ... why did you do that? what were you worried about ? ...

Of course, there are fields (eg bridges) were I guess some sense can be gained.



another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?

 

[rb1957]

I think too you're reading too much into FreddyNurk's post. "for collaboration" I think refers to sharing work between members of a design team, not making info available to the general public. Eg "Buzzsaw" is an autodesk application, that needs a user login.

another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?

 

[MadMango]

It sounds like you want to view and manipulate other engineering models and assemblies. For personal use, there is nothing wrong with Goggle Docs, SharePoint, and DropBox for sharing files, data, and large CAD models in that order. Also look into GrabCAD and their GrabCAD Workbench, it may be what you are after.

In a professional work setting, we use Arena PLM and Arena Exchange to share BOM info and files with suppliers and other engineers.

"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."

Have you read faq731-376 to make the best use of these Forums?

 

[Sparweb]

Hi sabrehagen,
You sound like you are more familiar with the "creative commons" than the Patent and Trade Office.
Most professional engineering works in the realm of proprietary information. To be even more blunt: it is against the law to share the information we work with daily. This is pretty much the opposite of "the commons". Each has its place, including in engineering. Until you know the difference between public domain data (patents, regulations, design standards, etc) and private data that corporations and individuals own (drawings, schematics, test results) then you will find it difficult to ask for the right thing. Ok I've had my piece to say, critically.

More along the lines of what you asked for: try Onshape. They have a lot of freely available CAD models.



STF

 

[Jboggs]

rb1957: When you say "looking at how other people solved problems isn't IMHO a whole lot of use to you" I will have to respectfully, but strongly, disagree with you. Your reasons for saying that are indeed valid (you don't know their restrictions, etc.) but they are also incomplete. You can never know the full story of the environment in which a design was created, but I have found studying the past work of others to be highly enlightening, and extremely useful. I have seen amazingly creative solutions to design problems. I have also been able to learn about fatal flaws that I was able to avoid in my own work. It also gives one a better historical perspective of the progress of technology, their place in it, and your own. Maybe you didn't mean it this way, but your post frankly struck me as rather closed-minded. I'm hoping you didn't really mean it that way.

 

[3DDave]

"I agree this is immensely valuable information. The fact it is not communicated is one of the greatest losses. In industry, how is this meta knowledge not lost. That is, how is it communicated and persisted?"

It isn't. It is mostly thrown out like trash or kept by those without true talent to prevent anyone challenging their assumptions or analysis.

I was basically fired after 30 years for trying to set up a system to capture this info using a Wiki. The main problem is that a Wiki makes it clear who the contributors are, and how much and what kind of contribution is being made. In my former company I estimated that 80% of engineering time was spent re-gathering information that had already been gathered or waiting for others to go through their private stash or to finally do the work they should have done and didn't, but was buried in e-mails, spreadsheets, presentations, et all, but so disorganized that no one could put together a picture of how a design evolved or how the program was managed.

Guess who doesn't like the idea that they will be exposed as liars? Middle and upper management. I guess one of them was smart enough to see the eventual outcome of documenting how the organization really worked.

 

[GregLocock]

Oddly 'my' (it isn't, I just set it up) Wiki, in the company I work for, is high on the internal search list. There again it doesn't point the bone, if you want to contribute you can, if you don't you don't. (and really, if you want to point the bone, why use such a passive-aggressive method?)

Now oddly enough I set it up because we used to have a sort of blog type construct, and for several years I reported most of my day to day work on that. One day, they killed that system, and encouraged us to 'migrate' to the new system. The migration tool was frankly unusable, so I let it slide.

That's when I invented my idea of 'corporate Alzheimers'. So, these days I use the official backup methods, and put no effort into alternatives (which I'm not allowed to do). A company that can't maintain its intellectual capital will die, and it deserves to.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

 

[MadMango]

I like the phrase Corporate Alzheimer's. I've witnessed several engineering notebooks round-filed in several companies in the past. A few I saved, many I didn't.

"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."

Have you read faq731-376 to make the best use of these Forums?

 

[hendersdc]

3DDave, Years ago we spent a ton of time developing a tool we called the "knowledge index". After a project was finished or during its progress for larger ones the engineers were supposed to go in and explain all the decisions made, constraints, and lessons learned from a project. The tool was great, easily searchable, detailed without being overly cumbersome but it took time to fill out. We worked in contract design and couldn't bill the time for internal documentation in excess of project deliverables to our customer, especially since it would be used to improve other customers products. So what happened was that no one was willing to schedule the time for engineers to enter the data since it wasn't billable and the tool we spent so much effort developing was never used.

 

[sabrehagen]

hendersdc: what an unfortunate waste! i'd love to draw on your experience in that situation. if we were to optimise that system and pick the human tasks that required least effort and time, but had the highest value to future teams/jobs/contracts, what would those tasks have been?

 

[hendersdc]

Unfortunately the devil is in the details and a quick synopsis of something like "we needed to accommodate tolerance stackup" is not nearly as useful as all the options that were considered and why something worked in that particular instance along with associated diagrams/pictures. Moral of the story is that if you want to save time in the future by referring to past experience you need to take the time to properly document the past experiences which, unfortunately, takes more time and associated lost revenue than we were willing to commit.

 

[sabrehagen]

Are computers and project management software helping improve this? Do you see any areas that could be improved?

 

[KENAT]

"Are computers and project management software helping improve this?"

No, because they are just tools and it's how the tools are used that matters.

Posting guidelines faq731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

(probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​

 

[3DDave]

The 'knowledge capture' systems were terrible because they require on-going commitment. But a lot of information can be captured and linked (and its the links that are important) by using a system that acts as a repository that is as easy to use as file folders. Too many people start off with the idea they can build a bureaucracy and that will solve the problems.

My favorite current state-of-the-art is someone makes a spreadsheet, then e-mails it to the 20 participants. They, of course, have to decide what folder(s) of their own to store them in, and then some of them make changes. Now they have to decide if they want to keep versions by date and will either change the name or create folders with date-names. Then a few will send updates to others and what was 1 spreadsheet easily blossoms into 50-100 copies/versions which are of no discernible pedigree. Then there are the follow-on emails discussing the contents of the sheets. And those get filed or saved as msg files somewhere.

Having repeated this same thing with multiple dozens of spreadsheets, word-processed, presentation, et al documents, a new guy comes on and he has no old e-mails, there's no reasons available for the various versions. Maybe a new supplier is being considered and they want to make a change - but no one knows why anything is like it is. (I have seen drawings that they won't remove Datum symbols from, even though there are no Feature control frames and nothing uses the Datums, because they don't know why they are there and don't want to change a thing.)

Were I in charge somewhere, I'd give the team 5 years and anyone not willing to get along with the Wiki could start watching their increases decrease because it's costing the company big bucks in the long run. That management did not sit in with the engineers and provide them a stenographer/court recorder indicates they had no interest in the value being thrown away.

If there's any sense to a group at all a Wiki is a terrific tool. Where I am now there are hundreds of places to look for information, and none of it is linked. There are some search engines that look to the content of the document, but if it's important to know why something is the way it is - tough luck. Every decision ends up with many of the participants reinventing the wheel. Sad really.

 

[ProEpro]

sabrehagen

Try Local Motors or one of the other projects trying to do open source engineering. I have no idea if the "engineering" they are doing will be useful.

A better resource would be design guides published by suppliers. Some of them like for plastic resins or bearings can be very useful and are public.

Grabcad wants to be the public communication portal for engineers.

Onshape requires the free users to share their cad files you may find something there.

Because people can die from your mistakes it is harder to teach your self engineering than programing.

Don't forget their are libraries full of books on every subject in Engineering.

 

[cloworm]

I think you could consider Fab Labs/Makerspaces/Hackerspaces/Tech Shops to be like a GitHub for engineers.

I am a member of a local Fab Lab (find yours here: [URL unfurl="true"]http://www.fabfoundation.org/fab-labs/[/url]), and in the lab you get to collaborate on hands-on projects with people of all kinds of backgrounds.

Most Fab Labs believe in open-source hardware, and require members to document their projects so that others can learn from and iterate their designs. Many of them have their own platforms for collecting projects so that curious people like yourself can replicate or improve their designs.