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Comment by myegorov | Hacker News Reader

A fellow structural engineer here. I think that there's little room for innovation in the "calc" area. The cost of doing calcs is a small fraction of the overall budget of a structural project. Modeling/drawings is where it's at. The analysis/design toolset of a structural engineer (the FEA/design programs) hasn't changed in essence since the 80's outside of drafting/modeling, and for good reason: the marginal cost of an engineer perfecting their analysis exceeds marginal revenue. There's a sweet spot where an experienced structural engineer knows to stop refining their calcs, with the rest of the effort is spent on detailing, which sets apart good structural design from mediocre.

Where I would invest (if I were Autodesk or their competitor) is in releasing CAD tools for free in exchange for a consent to use the designs/details internally for ML purposes. Would love to contribute if anyone is working on such a product.

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I might be working on something that you would be interested in. MVP is at www.cadwolf.com. I am a structural engineer with an MS from UT Austin. Website in written with php using Laravel and angular framework for JS.

The plan is to link CAD to the mathematics and then link the finite element to this as well. The system would also function as a sort of github for engineering where users can find and use functions to do most standard analysis. Email is in my profile if anyone is interested in talking.

I checked out cadwolf and as an engineer myself I find it very interesting. I am curious to understand a few points: - Why do you center everything around documents? Is it more because people are used to it, or do you believe that they are best fit for design-tasks? - I saw that to update multiple documents after a requirement changes, you need to open them one by one, in the order of their dependencies. Have you tested that this is still a viable approach, once you have thousands of dependencies and multiple users in a complex design?

I really like the equations and how you only allow to make formally correct equations (including units). Anxious to see how this develops.

(full disclosure: I am co-founder of a Software which tries to achieve the same aims using different concepts: www.valispace.com)

What I call "Document" are not files in the sense of a word file. They look like text files because that is what I thought engineers would be comfortable dealing with. However, they function as programs. Documents can be used as programs within other documents as well. Documents fill both the need to solve the calculations and to document them in one place. It eliminates the need to update documentation, have multiple platforms, etc.

There are places for users to upload and store data as well - datasets.

As of now, the code solves equations in javascript within the browser. This is why documents have to be opened when a requirement changes - because I have no server side of the code to solve them without the browser. It isn't a long term solution, merely a step in the building on the platform. My next step is to add a server side code that is capable of solver more complex and larger equations on the server. When that is done, changes to requirements will update documents without the need to open them manually. I plan on using python and there are several large libraries available.

This will allow me to link documents to CAD. When the math changes, the CAD will change as well. Once that is done, I will add a finite element meshing and solution system to create an engineering platform that essentially does everything.

I like your site. It's nice to see other people addressing these problems. I am also an aerospace guy. I worked on the shuttle for a while and then designed some components for the Orion. Shoot me an email if you want to talk more.

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