PREFACE

I am mentioning a lot of software products and software companies on the webpage. The expressed opinions are my personal and based on my personal experience working with the products. I am trying to be objective. I do not work for any of the companies listed on the page.

From Unix to Windows

It is difficult to switch from Unix to Windows: after the nice text based OS I have to deal with numerous windows and hidden user interface items.
Tools for the text processing in Windows practically do not exist. It makes easy things, which you can make in a minute in Unix virtually impossible in Windows. What are you going to do with all the scripts you wrote in Shell or Cshell? Do not despair, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Unix emulation on NT

The most popular toolkit is probably Cygnus -- GNU toolkit which contain Bash, find, grep, sed, gawk and bunch of other familiar stuff. The toolkit is free, but unfortunately it is not very stable. It crashes sometimes when you run long Shell scripts, it does not have Cshell. We can only hope, that the next version will be more stable. The toolkit also contain a pretty stable version of PERL. There is a stable version of tcsh, it is a good quality product, but unfortunately it is using Win NT command shell for the execution of the commands, that is why you should be careful using it ( download page)

You can get a good C Shell from Hamilton. It is actually a toolkit which has some Unix utilities. The product has a good quality, but it does not work the same way as Unix C shell, it was redesigned. If you have a lot of complex C shell script, I would think twice before using it. The cost about $350, I do not think it worth the money.

Company called "Professional Software Solutions" have developed "UnixDos" toolkit which works on NT, 95 and DOS. Price of the toolkit is less then $100. The toolkit does not behave like Unix utilities, do not have shell and have plenty of bugs. "Professional Software Solutions" do not have plans to make the toolkit UNIX like. Meanwhile you can check their website.

Good old TCL/TK toolkit works on 95 and NT (more stable on NT) you can get a lot of good info from TCL/TK website www.tcltk.com

Emacs, editor of all editors was ported to NT and 95 and can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.cs.washington.edu/pub/ntemacs . You might need to use some tricks in order to use shell in emacs, ftp and some other commands. I will submit the information later.

Combination of Tcsh, Cygnus and Emacs can create quite good and familiar for Unix users environment.

If you feel that you need more information -- send me email and I will try to help.

Software for Production Engineering

There is a wide spectrum of software products devoted to the Production Engineering, it designs or help to design different manufacturing processes. There are a lot of companies on the market with different kinds of packages, which have pretty confusing concepts: "Virtual Manufacturing", "Virtual Factory", "Digital Manufacturing", "Digital Plant" and so on. I prefer CAPE (Computer Aided Production Engineering), because it is consistent with CAD and CAM. Let us try to make it clear for a regular guy.

Discrete Event Simulation

When you design a manufacturing process, you want to make sure, that you do not have bottlenecks on your manufacturing line (lines), that cycle times of all the workcells are synchronized. There is is a class of products which is capable of doing it and it is called "Discrete Event Simulation". There are a number of companies developing such kind of products:

"Autosimulation" has pretty good products;
"Deneb" has a product called "Quest" (the company was bought by Catia);
"Simple++" is a product of German company "AESOP" , the company now belongs to Tecnomatix group.

I listed the systems because they have quite good 3D visualization and are integrated with other products like robotic simulation and assembly. There are other products on the market, but I did not have a chance to work with them.

After creation of the production line you want to brake it into production cells and to deal with every cell individually, it can be manual or mechanical (CNC, Robotic or CMM). I would call the software products "Process designers".

Process designers

Manual operations

Product involved in manual operations should be able to help process engineer to make sure that:

it is phisically possible for a human to do it (can be reached by hand , not too difficult or heavy);
percentage of population (both men and women) capable of performing the operation is satisfactory;
people involved in the process will not be getting tired to fast and the work will not harm their helth in a long term.

There are number of products, which can do it

Ann Arbor company "Transom" has the best product on the market. The comany was bought by EAI (Engineering Animation Inc.). Their product called "Transom Jack". As far as I know they have quite good API, which allows to integrate their human motion and ergonomic analysis
"Deneb" has an ergonomic product called "Deneb/ERGO"
Tecnomatix has "Robcad Man" pruduct based on the ergonomic engine of German company "Anysim", which now is also a part of the Tecnomatix group;
Safework has a good product.

Basically the functionality of the products is very similar and it is quite difficult to choose one you need. You would have to look at their ergonomic analysis (may be not suitable for you), user interface, platform (Unix or NT). If you are a developer and would like to incorporate some human simulation and ergonomic analysis, I would think about using "Transom Jack".

Robotic operations

Are very interesting part of the process design. Software for the robotic operations should allow:

design robotic workcell;
insert 3-d model of the workpiece (workpieces) into the workcell;
create points were technological operations (like welding, gluing, assembly) should be conducted;
define motion parameters for the robot;
create motion sequence or program;
check collisions and perform adjustments to avoid them;
check and fix errors in a program;
calibrate the cell;
download the program to the controller of the robot.

There are multiple products on the market which can do it. I would point on some of the most popular products an their features:

"Igrip", product of "Deneb";
"Robcad", product of Tecnomatix Technologies ;
"Workspace", product of ...(do no remember name of the company).

Igrip and Robcad were originally Unix based (both have some kind of NT versions), Workspace is a PC based product. Workspace by quality and functionality is far away from both Robcad and Igrip. It was developed much later and includes a lot of features similar to the features of Robcad and Deneb, but somehow it is still not ther; it is also cheaper accordingly.

NT version of Igrip looks almost exactly as it's Unix version, functionality is also similar. Robcad have some kind of NT version and they promised to hve a full version on NT.
Problems with NT stuff -- it still cannot compete with Unix workstations by productivity. If you buy NT and Unix workstation of the same price, Unix will give you mach more power than NT . It is wery important if you have to deal with heavy geometry ( a lot of surfaces, etc.). Unix is also much more stable. For example I had to reboot my SGI workstation once in 2 month, but both of my NT computers are crashing twice a day.

Let us go back to Igrip and Robcad. As I mentioned, functionality of the both products is very similar: both have process specific (arc welding, spot welding, paint, etc.) applications, both have

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Last modified on Friday, February 1, 1999