The Autodesk line of mobile apps seems to be growing all the time, but I wanted to focus on a few of the apps that are beneficial for when you are not in the office but still want to let that engineer swagger come out. Two of them have been around for some time while the third is actually an update of a previous one.
Force Effect and Force Effect Motion both allow you to do Simulation anywhere for free body diagrams. Force Effect Motion was recently released and allows the user to perform studies with linear actuators and motors and even show trace points. This has really been a nice benefit to me when I am inspecting a user's machine and I can quick snap a pic and use it as the background for my FBD or Motion study while in the field. The other side of this coin is that I can then transfer the FBD back to a DXF in my immense Autodesk Cloud storage and then access back on my PC. Oh yea, the reports are cool too, it can save my images, equations, and graphs of data.
And if you have an Android tablet or phone, don't worry, I hear its coming soon for that.
But what if I don't have a camera on my device or the product doesn't actually exist yet? Well look no furthur than Sketchbook Mobile Express or Pro (lots more features for a cheap price). Simply start sketching your idea in the canvas and then apply that to the Force Effect app of your choosing as a background. I will also go on record as saying in the past I was not a fan of Sketchbook for Engineers...I am eating my words in this post, it has REALLY grown on me for design work.
Check out how these apps can work in conjunction with each other in the video below.
Don't have any tablet to do this cool sketching? Well fret not, you have Sketchbook Designer in your Product Design Suites. Well post on that tomorrow with a little more detail about how we are going to get into design with these concept sketching tools.
These tools look great for design work, but what is the difficulty in doing this work on a tablet? Are you easily able to do more intricate designs with your finger?
Posted by: Snap Button | 06/08/2012 at 11:23 AM
Actually the system is pretty forgiving and does a good job if you do a fair amount of pinch zooming to get it just right. There are also stylus' that can assist with this as well.
Truly the more effective system for Sketchbook is using the Desktop application that comes in the Design Suites. With that you can use a Wacom tablet for even better control and more design options.
Posted by: Mark Flayler | 06/12/2012 at 08:13 AM
I have been using this for concept ideas for my undergraduate dissertation, but is there any way of transferring the data to PC in order to obtain a print out? Thanks
Posted by: Daniel Payne | 09/23/2012 at 08:16 AM
For each of these products you absolutely can. For Force Effect you would use your free Autodesk cloud account.
Posted by: Mark Flayler | 09/23/2012 at 08:41 AM