People are buying and using appliances everyday that make our lives easier. However, most people seldom think about or consider the components in the things we buy. This ecosystem of moving parts is everything to engineers, designers, and those who work to understand and enhance these modern day conveniences.
Designing the Things People Use
A simple household coffee machine has about 45 parts, while a typical dryer has over 120 parts. Even a car, which is one of the most commonly owned family items, has around 30,000 components that are needed to make it operate. Industrial designers and engineers spend thousands of hours designing these useful products. However, many still run into the issue of selecting and sourcing specific parts for the job.
There are several methods by which engineers collect component data for designs. First, they can do it themselves, by redrawing the part made by the original manufacturer. However, this method is time consuming and may result in low-accuracy. Alternative methods include requesting part data from the manufacturer, or downloading user-generated resources.
This may mean that the designer uses a crowd sourced design on a site such as GrabCAD. One can also choose to download the source design file directly from the manufacturer. Although these are all viable options, the newest and developing method to generate these parts is through a component search engine.
Conclusion
A component-specific search engine has the power to change the game for designers and engineers. Using this software, they can significantly cut down on time and effort spent on searching for parts, and spend it elsewhere in the process. These search engines allow for users to see all variations and models of a specific part in one place.
One can search and filter based on a number of qualities, such as part number, keyword, manufacturer, sketch, or color. Some services are so advanced that even a photo can be uploaded for comparison, and the search queries can be narrowed down to even the geometric similarity of the part.
Saving precious time and resources, it is no surprise that this technology is quickly becoming the new norm across industries.
Source: 3Dfindit.com
