Originally featured on Innovator’s Insider Podcast by Onshape (Episode 21)
Featuring: Matt Bush, COO and Co-Founder of Hirebotics

Learn how leading-edge companies are weaving Industry 4.0 principles into the products they design. Matt Bush of Hirebotics explains how they think about agile software and hardware co-development, and how the company uses cloud-based tools to build the next generation of welding cobots.

Transcript:

Welcome to the Innovators Insider Podcast. I’m the user group guy, Richard Doyle, and this episode, I got my co-host back.

I got to say, it was it was not a fun experience having to do this thing by myself. Last time, Michael and I’m really glad to see your face this morning.

I really missed you, too, Richard. Great. Great. Yeah. I think we you know, we do a lot better when both of us are here and

and we have some fun and we have a have a good show. I love that show. It was really great show. Well, that’s great content.

I appreciate that. You know, it was really helpful to have Aaron there because he knows the partners he knows the you know, you know,

the people behind the partners. So it was a lot of help to me, and I really appreciate that. So thanks, Aaron. Another shout out for you. I appreciate that.

So today’s show we’re talking about all kinds of different stuff, really. But you can boil it down to, let’s say, industry for point.

Oh, right. And somebody asked me, how would you describe industry 4.0?

And, you know, so I went out and I did a little searching. I did a little bit. I’ll look at history. And I wanted to start with industry 1.0,

because that actually happened a few years ago starting in 1760.

It was it was a kind of a German thought, a German, German way of doing manufacturing.

What it really involved was the mechanization. You know, steam power came along, water power came along

and things changed for, for the better and then in the late 1800s, the early 1900s, that’s when we started having mass production.

And probably everybody knows, you know, Henry Ford was the guy that really, really brought mass production

and assembly lines to to the rest of the world. Electrical power was big at the time as well because no more steam,

no more power. And then it was all the way up until the 1970s we went to industry 3.0

and that’s I guess most of us or some of us that were there at the time

remember that as the digital revolution we started coming up with automated ways of production and computers

where all of a sudden, you know, an indispensable tool, you had to have computers. And certainly robotics started to come around in the seventies

and here we are now, industry 4.0 going on right now. And some of the things that that entails are the smart factories and the autonomous

systems, the Internet of things Iot that’s getting, getting to be really important. Almost everything you touch these days as far as a consumer product goes,

some sort of Internet or Iot connectivity to it. And then the big thing, you know, artificial intelligence

or machine learning so so we’re in a really fascinating time. But even if you go back to the 1760s, I think the I think

all four stages of industry have been really fascinating and I encourage people to take a look at some of the history.

So we’ve got a great guest today right Michael. And somebody that you’ve worked with for a long time.

You’ve been at Onshape for a long time and you know these folks very well. So I’m going to turn it over to you and let you introduce our first guest.

Thanks, Richard. Yeah, I’m really excited to introduce Matt Bush the chief operating officer at Hi Robotics.

How are you doing today, Matt? Good. How are you doing, Michael? Very, very good. You know, you’ve been an on shaper for a really long time.

We appreciate all the nice things that you have say to us. But you also tell us, you know, hard truths and everything, too, along the way.

So we really appreciate your feedback and candor in Onshape is the way it is

because of people like you. So so thank you. So appreciate. You’re welcome. Yeah, we definitely we’ve definitely appreciated the fact

that you guys take what we’re saying and, you know, and act on it. I was just telling a customer of ours yesterday, we were talking about CAD, and

they just they’re on an old, old version of of of a competitive product. We’ll leave it at that. Yeah. You know, I was like, hey, you know, you guys really should look at Onshape.

And I was like, one of the great things is like, every time we have a feature requests, it just winds up in the software

and he was blown away because they can’t you can’t get a CEO to let them upgrade to a newer version. So they’re missing a lot of stuff.

Yeah, I was like, that would never be the case. You’re always on the latest. So we we definitely appreciate it. Awesome. Awesome.

Hirebotics

And your products are really amazing. And and I thought it would be great to share, you know, what you’re doing.

You know, with the community of people. I’m sure everybody knows about robotics, but but the way you, you work with robotics,

I find to be fascinating and really innovative. I think,

you know, robotic welding for hire like how did that how did that come to be? Yeah. So 2015

so many decades ago now in robotics time Rob Goldie’s co-founder and I you know we we decided

there had to be a better way to do robotics or automation in factories. A lot of people really struggled

to put in automation, especially smaller manufacturers but one thing we knew that all manufacturers need to do is hire people.

So like what if we can make a robot that people could hire just like they hire a person

and so we set out and we built the first iteration of our robotics, which was, you know, we primarily focused on machine tending assembly tasks,

very complex skills full turnkey integrations. And our customers literally hired the robot to go to a job.

We build them every week. We turned it into Time Card Weekly based on data coming back from the robots.

And so, you know, and it was a confluence of the ease of use of shoebox

coming out with universal robots and how easy the robots were to work with,

and not just from a software standpoint, but how easy they were to work with because we could put one in the back seat of a car and take it to a customer

like we didn’t have to have three face power, we had single face power. We could literally pick it up and move it by hand easily.

We didn’t have to have large seating closures. And then we also looked at the cloud

and everything that the cloud was bringing and all these tools that were coming out around the ability to build your cloud infrastructure

without really being a software developer, because neither one of us have a background in software development.

And so we set out, we built the system they were fully cloud connected. What that means is they were streaming a lot of data industry, 4.0

industrial Internet of Things, and we use that data for billing. We needed to know how much our customers are actually running these things.

They were going to be all over the country. We had no way of being there to monitor them.

And so we set out to build this cloud infrastructure. We found Onshape. In the meantime, this was early. 20, 15.

I’m still in beta at the time, actually signed up with Onshape, got on and sort of building cells

and it fast forward a few years and we are at

we got approached by Airgas our a division of air guys ready arc and said Hey there’s this huge shortage of welders, we rent

welding equipment, you rent robots, how about we make a welding robot? So we said Awesome, let’s go do it.

So we set up in general and built the first generation robotic welder that we did called Botox,

which is still available today through Ready Art and Airgas and whether you know, what you really got was this.

We said, how do we make the the user experience of using this system different than what traditional robots.

So traditionally even with the Cobalt, you’re on a teach friend that you’re writing code. And so the industry in general

is having a hard time finding enough automation engineers to put robots in. So it’s like, why do you want to trade your I can’t find Walter problem for

I can’t find robot programmer problem because they’re both having a problem. So even, even back four years ago, this was, you know,

starting to rear its head is an issue is finding the right employees. People, people are trained.

Yeah. OK, yeah. It’s been I mean, the automation automation space and the welding, it’s been a problem for a while.

And so we set out and developed, you know, the first robot that you control through a smartphone. And it was a smartphone app that we developed that allowed you

to very simply teacher teach the COBOL how to weld apart

through a smartphone interaction. With well with that that’s that launched

in 2019 at fabric in Chicago a pandemic hit obviously slowed us down a little bit

but we’ve still deployed a lot of robots that year and you know it enabled us to bring out other tools

that we’ve now really taken advantage of you know around the ability to virtually demonstrate the system to users

really highlighted Onshape as we were developing still mechanical parts of the system as we were changing designs and stuff because now we’re all working remote

but we’re all able to get into the same model and work on the model, get in there, do design reviews on the model.

So really for us started to highlight the power of, of Onshape as a cloud tool,

more so than when we were all sitting in office together because when we did a design review in the office, what would we do? We all gathered around one person’s computer and put it on a projector

and the designers now we’re doing design reuse by Hey everybody, log into Onshape and just follow me.

Yeah, right. We’re going to, we’re going to walk through the model and, you know, chat and stuff.

And so last year we launched what we call Cobalt Welder, which is our second generation welding product, brand new app, brand new cloud infrastructure,

more intuitive. We took everything that we learned from the first generation product and fixed everywhere.

People had issues in the way we know where people had issues. It’s because it’s a cloud connected product. We can monitor how people are using the app and where they’re getting stuck,

what questions are asking us because it’s got built in support, users go directly in the app and ask us questions

about how to do something, or I’m having this issue or whatever it is. And so we’re able to really track

and monitor what are all the conversations we’re having over time. And how do we go resolve those problems.

So we launched the last product last year, some new hardware configurations, but a lot more magic

between how you interact with the hardware and the software. So when you’re in the app, you’re not actually talking

directly to the robot, you’re talking to a cloud server. The robot’s talking to a cloud server, and then in the cloud the two are being joined.

But to be able to simply tell the app like, Hey, I want to do something, I want to teach a point, and then on the robot click a button

and instantaneously that point drops into the app. You know, I want to change what I’m doing in the app so I can

touch another button on the robot, and it will change what the app is set to so I can balance between error motion and welding, for instance.

And, you know, all that’s for a hardware interaction on the robot, but the app is changing its interaction as well, right?

So we have this very seamless hardware to software interaction going on, and it makes the experience for a lot of our users very magical.

The first time they touch it, they’re like, This is just amazing that I can teach an entire part in a matter of minutes how to weld it.

And I never had to touch the phone other than to start the program and hit Save. Like I did

all of the teaching touching the robot. And that’s very, very, very different.

Than the experience most users have today with robotics, where they’re on a teach pendant and everything they do is on that teach for it,

even for a cobalt where they’re using their hands to move the arm around their something, to pick up the teacher and type things in for the most part.

So it’s been very magical how we’ve we’ve been able to pull all that stuff off. Yeah, it seems magical to me.

Welding

The last time I welded something, I was back in shop class and tech school and it’s right there by hand.

So this is really magical to me too, to hear that you can literally from your mobile device in your hand, like program a robot like that.

That seems incredible to me. And you’re able to get so much data, so much, you know,

information, you know, because it is hooked up, you know, SAS to the cloud. You’re able to make it better.

You know, you’re able to, you know, learn a lot, I bet. Yeah. And that information.

Yeah. I mean, we give all that data back to the users. And so they’re able through the app and it’s now also a web app.

So you can be on your desktop, for instance, or your laptop, but they’re able to go mine that data as well and create dashboards

and charts and metrics for how they’re actually using the system. So utilization rates,

wire and gas consumption. So if you want and how much wire you guys are consuming every day, just chart it

part production cycle times. All of this data is just there. So I was at a customer yesterday, just got a system doing some training.

They actually have engineering interns in for the summer that just got their Monday. When they showed up, there was a box with a robot in it.

They were told to put it all together, which everything is done online so I mean, you just click, there’s a QR code on the box, you click the code

picture out to the instructions for how to build the thing. And so they get it all together. I show up, I’m doing some training with them and I mean, no joke.

We started training around 930 yesterday morning. We were done by 10 a.m. by 1030. They were welding production parts. Oh my.

You know, and they were setting them up. I wasn’t doing anything other than, you know, just making sure they were doing it right

and helping them with some of their world settings because these are, you know, they’re three kids from endurance schools. Do you go to New Jersey school in New Jersey and the others,

a school in Tennessee. So they’re not welders. And they did have they have another intern that has learned how to weld over

the last few summers comes in and actually works with them on the world side. But he’s still got a welder. Welder.

And so, you know, I was able to help them understand some of the weld settings that they needed and they were just blown away

by how quickly they were able to teach parts. I think by lunch, we had taught our third production part

that they had, you know, and ramparts and they look better than what they’re getting today by hand.

Cycle times were incredible. I mean, we were doing parts and, you know, 12 seconds of welding,

these are small parts and they’re like, I can’t weld it by hand in 12 seconds. I’m like, I can’t pick up the torch and get ready to weld.

I was just going to say I wouldn’t even put my welding helmet on properly in that amount of time. Right and so when they see that, because I was talking to the CEO and he’s like,

Oh, we got to be able to put all these parts on, I’m like, Oh, no, you probably don’t. You probably only need to put one or two on the table.

And once he saw what it was running, he’s like, You’re right. He goes, We are way over thinking how to make this thing productive.

It’s just productive. And I was like, Well, that’s the advantage of a robot, right? They’re going to be very productive.

I said, The advantage of our system is you’re productive and teaching it instead of taking a day to teach apart, you can take 10 minutes right?

You know, we have customers that have traditional systems and, you know, they’re blown away when they do time studies internally that,

you know how much faster we teach apart but the fact that the traditional robot to our robot,

the cycle time really doesn’t change the robots, actually. Well, the part about the same amount of time

but they can be so much more productive as a robot programing team because now instead of only getting maybe one part a day, I can get ten parts a day.

Right. You know, programed in set up. So yeah, we’re finding a similar analogy happening in the world of Onshape

Onshape

when you automate Onshape with feature script and things like that, you know, and creating your own custom features for your business, you’re able to,

you know, you’re pairing hardware engineers with software kind of ways of thinking and you’re going to be able

to instantly make your your business more productive. It’s we’re seeing it in lots of places, but this is a really cool

way of solving multiple problems with a workforce shortage. With more reliable and faster.

You know, it’s just it’s and in the setup is just instantaneous. I mean, that’s incredible.

You have to be able to do three jobs before lunch. Yeah. And so, you know, we did the same thing.

So especially when you’re doing a full turnkey integration systems, we did a lot of feature scripts, right, so that we could drop certain features

that we always had. We just dropped them into the model, you know? So one of the ones that we did early on was dolphins.

We use a lot of dolphins and automation because you’ve got to make sure things are located correctly. We said the dolphin tool, you literally you click the

datum, it’s a drop a dolphin there oh, I want not just a dolphin, I want a shark,

you know, dolphin what they call a dolphin ring. It’s actually take a boat through the center of the dolphin.

I want to chunk part number, get it out and it dropped it in or I want to first. So part number, done it on it, dropped it in,

make sure everything was tolerance correctly on the front side backside. So we had slips at press fits and

or you could drop in ISO Standard dowels or NC Standard dowels

and just drop them right in with all the proper clearances. Right. And so it really, you know, just that one little feature and it didn’t take

us that long to write it, but it was amazing how much that that freed up our engineers to go think about other things in the design

because I no longer had to worry about did I get the tolerances right on that part or because you know, we only bought one of something usually.

So is it going to come in and be able to go together? I don’t know. Oh Lord. And so that was something that we were able

to take out of their minds of thinking about. We did same thing with like Tool Flanges for the robot we had. It’s all functional.

Just drop it at the center point of where you want the tool flange boom. There’s your tool flange. They have a button in Onshape, you hit the button

and in land you select where you want it in and it’s done. You don’t have to think about it. Yeah, yeah.

Puts all the right bolt patterns that all pins everything in correctly so that you know, I just want it to be centered here.

Boom. Done and so there was just a lot of little tools like that that you look at.

You go, Well, it only took 5 minutes to do it every time. Yeah. But you know, we have every engineer trying to do 12

systems a year times, however many engineers we have. Well, that’s starting out adding up to hours a year that we’re saving.

High throughput

Right, right. Well, people probably expect, you know, high throughput, you know, when when you’re working on a consulting project with, with the client. Right.

You know, they, they, they, they want your robots because they want to do things faster. So you have to also be prepared.

Well, and when we were doing the higher model, so when everything was being paid out by the hour,

we didn’t collect any money until the robot started working its job.

So think about like a temp agency where you say, hey, I want to bring in this temp worker, but before I’ll pay them, they have to be fully trained.

Right. Your job, Mr. Temp Agency, is fully trained, this employee, before they come on site.

And that’s what we were having to do is basically fully train the robot before we ever got the first paycheck. So the faster we could do that, the more we could compress that time,

the faster from contract signing to first paycheck. Mm. Mhm. Right. And of course we’re paying costs all along the way.

We’ve got, you know, components for buying engineers. We’re paying right in. Engineers don’t get, you know, they get paid by the hour or by paid a fixed fee.

So the longer it takes them to complete something, the more we’ve paid that engineer for the design work. So everything we could do to cut minutes and hours out of a job

you know, benefited us. So we did a lot of stuff around. We have very standard libraries and Onshape of like here’s our sensor catalog

it’s already in Onshape. You just go to the catalog, everything is by vendor part number. I want this part and those are the approved sensors

that we have, our approved cables or pneumatic systems. We already had pneumatic manifolds that were built, already assembled,

ready to go drop them in your model configured when the configurator came out. It was a great tool because we were able to simplify a lot of what we were doing.

So we already had preconfigured assemblies that we had an engineer with some free time that set down a configured all these assemblies

based on different ways you put it together and we would just drop it in, you know, everything to try and save them a few minutes when we had a project.

Hirebotics courses

Yeah, it’s great. Yeah, it’s great. It sounds like you’re, you’re comfortable with development and software a little bit and, you know, a little bit of feature script.

You know, there’s, there’s a little bit of an entry, but you know, there’s some courses now we just put out a new course to help make it easier to, you know,

get into the feature script and creating our own custom features like you have. So we’ll put a link to that course in the show notes because.

Because it is. Oh, go ahead. Look, I say one of the, one of the most awesome things when a feature script came out that helped us get up to speed on it

because the courses back then were not that good. That was, oh, I just want looked at how did Onshape build a feature?

It’s all visible. Right? How they make the whole pattern. Oh, that’s how they did it. OK, I’ll do it that way.

Mm. Yeah, that’s it’s a pretty good. You know, we just went and stole, you know, not stole, stored up.

That’s why. We put it there, you know, it’s, it’s. There and explored how the features were built in Onshape to begin with.

Yeah, it’s how do we leverage what they’re doing and understand how it works to really be able to drive this and make these features efficient.

And one of our mechanical engineers who was studying, he had a little bit of a software background in college.

He actually picked it up was the one running with it. He’s the one that wound up writing most of the feature scripts that we had.

Interesting. Interesting. OK, so you paired Mechanical Guy with somebody who’s,

Software development

you know, got some good programing and made it work. That that’s great. Yeah.

So how about the other side of the business for you? Like, you know, obviously you’re doing coding software

development to program this app to to work with the robot you know, how does how does that work at your company?

Like, you know, between the hardware team, the software teams? Yeah. So so we really have three teams within our robotics.

We’ve got what you can call infrastructure software. So that’s our app, our cloud infrastructure, the servers,

all of how the user will interact with the product. From a software standpoint.

We then have our hardware development team that does all of the actual hardware design

in Onshape whether it’s, you know, the robot and actually getting it into the cell,

the different, you know, user interface components, the mechanical, physical user interface components and then we have a robotic software team.

And so the way that all works together is the robotic software team. And our team work pretty closely because we need certain features

in the hardware to be able to interact with the program. We need to understand what the hardware is doing

so we can write the right animatics and stuff around it. So those two teams work very closely together.

We actually have a lot of overlap between the two teams as far as personnel, even IRB.

And then the other overlap is between our robotic software and our infrastructure software teams.

And so a lot of that because we’re trying to move very quickly. So for instance, when we brought out the Gen2 product last year

from when we launched the development effort until we froze the code for final

debug and Go Live was about six weeks. So we’ve

built a lot of our own tooling in-house for the robot side so that we can run the code without actually running it on a robot.

We have the ability to completely unit test it completely end

to end to end to end testing so we can actually build what we call a flow, which is the data structure that’s going to make the robot program work.

We can pre build a flow and actually run the program against that fake data.

And so what we do is between the two teams is we’ll sit down and say, hey, here’s an API layer between the two this is how we’re going

to communicate the data that I’m expecting to receive from the app. We’ll have the following structure, the following keywords.

You know, this type of data and what do you need from us?

Return values, you know, for all the data that you have to show in the app. So one of the things that’s really cool about the app is that you’re in it

you can watch the program execute on your phone. So even though I’m sitting here at my house in Middle Tennessee,

I could be logged on to our sales guys robot in South Carolina

or not logged into Mobile, just go into it my app and he could press play on his robot and I could actually watch his program execute in my phone

right. Well, to do that, that means the robot sending data back to the cloud. And so like they’ll tell us what they need from an API,

you know, what data they need and then the two of us basically go off and develop independent of each other.

I know what our promise to receive from you is you at our promise to give to us. So we go from right robot code.

They often write app and then come together and we start, you know, we’re going to start testing the app against the actual robot code, telling you

what we like about interactions what we don’t like about interactions. You’re looking more at the UI, UX

knowing that at the end of the day the data on the back end is already there because we have that promise to deliver between the two teams.

And so then it’s just a matter of there working on how we actually interact with the app and we’re working on how the robot consumes that data and how you interact with the robot.

So it really cool because the first few weeks that we were running even code on the robot, we had no real data.

We would literally go put a file on the robot, go execute against that file, and it was a file that we hand typed out

but we can make it move. And so by doing that, you know, it really allows us to move very quickly in development because

neither one’s waiting on the other. We’re able to move very fast between the two teams. But we also do the same thing with hardware.

You know, when we’re doing the hardware, we have certain interfaces. We know the robot has two interfaces. It’s got a base flange and a tool flange.

It’s the same promise, right as software. The robot promises to deliver a flange that looks like this and a flange

it looks like this. And we’re going to meet to him. So we know on the table looks like this. We need an adapter that meets this promise to this promise done.

You know, we need we need the following buttons because we need the following physical interaction between the robot. We need an emergency stop.

We need a play button, we need a stop button. We need a, you know, safety input, which is, you know, welder on or off.

And we need a oh, we’re going to have this operator input button where the robot can turn on a light

and the operator can press the button and the robot will come back to work. So we start to define what these interfaces look like at the other day.

I don’t care what the physical part looks like, I just care about what the interfaces. Because if I know I’m going to get the following inputs and outputs from

the hardware, the physical hardware, well, I now know how to go work with that in the software. Yeah.

So now we can turn the designers loose to say, Hey, go design me a mechanical system to the best of your ability.

That’s cost effective, good esthetics, you know, whatever it is,

just make sure that you give me the following interfaces and we’ll know from a hardware or software simple way that we’re able to interact

with those. Yeah, you’ll start with a functional specification and then it’ll kind of parallel off into each of the different phases of mechanical and software.

Functional specification

Yeah, that makes total sense. And then build it based on the functional specification. And because we are such a software driven company.

So we really look at ourselves as a software company before we do as a hardware company because no matter what we’re doing, whether it’s the robot, the app, right?

We’re writing a lot of software. I mean, I have more guys in the company that are software backgrounds

than we do hardware backgrounds by a significant number

and so one thing that we love about Onshape is the fact that the PDM function

is basically like get like we use for software. It’s so it’s, you know, just like we do a pull request on software to interact,

you know, to ingest something into the, the main branch of our software. Oh, we do a release and onshape of some branch

to ingest it back into the main branch of the sort of the hardware. And so for us, the workflows are so, so similar

that it just it makes us all have a similar language within the company. So we’re talking about releases, we’re talking about pull requests,

we’re talking about branching and main branch feature branch,

whether we’re talking hover or software, we all have a shared language, right? Which is definitely very different.

Than any other software, you know, cats software I’ve ever been on. Yeah. Yeah.

Software vs Hardware

You’re able to use these agile methodologies, you know, with, with Scrum and product owners and, you know, branches.

It’s, it’s, it’s totally awesome to hear that. And more and more companies are like you where there’s a lot of software

to their products. So we’re hearing what you’re saying a lot now. So it’s it’s really starting to happen as the electromechanical product

design teams are working more together. They are understanding the benefits of an Onshape style version management system.

Totally inspired by it. Totally. I mean we yeah we really did want it to be a nice visual approach too,

to what they do for branching off and trying out different ideas and, you know, features, you know, you know, it’s

I think we’ll be putting out some content soon on this as well to kind of show really, you know, step by step how to use Onshape in this type of workflow.

So but people naturally just do it in your situation. Yeah. You know, so it’s really about teaching

the people who are used to the waterfall type approaches and stuff. So tool. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, the more industry 4.0 really rolls out, the more Iety rolls out, the more interaction we’re going to see with hardware and software teams.

You know? Absolutely. You know, we’ve got a mechanical engineer on staff who is also a software engineer,

so he can design mechanical products and he can also write the software that runs well. It’s great.

You know, it’s, it’s, it’s the best of both worlds. I’m a mechanical engineer by background. I’m not a software guy.

I have learned through absolute need to write software and now spend way more of my time in software than I do hardware.

You know, I’ll drop into Onshape every once a while and do something but it’s rare that I’m in Onshape anymore.

I’m more in software because that’s the bigger part of our company, right?

Because on Chip’s made the hardware, it’s made it easy enough that a one or two hardware guys can handle all the hardware design that we have at

this point. Richard, what are your thoughts on robotic welding?

Matts thoughts

Well, my head’s just spinning here after hearing all of this stuff. I mean, we’re talking industry for point oh.

But to me it seems a little bit more like industry 4.5 that you guys are actually actually exceeding 4.0

you know that. I don’t know. I mean, I don’t I don’t get the the

the joy of interacting with robots very much, especially over the last 20 years because I’ve been, you know,

working in community kind of thing. I do miss the manufacturing areas. I miss seeing how things work.

I miss designing things. So for me, I’m just here to sit and listen and, and just be awed by what I’m hearing here.

Wrap up

Yeah, it really is incredible. It is. I like the way you use the words, man. Magical. I like the

the way, you know, you you I like this promise concept of how you establish promises

between the different interfaces and relationships of both the hardware and the software and how you explain that to you.

That’s something I learned today that I’m going to try to incorporate myself into how I think about things.

It’s really, you know, it’s the this is a really great conversation. Totally.

I think, you know, I think we’re all going to learn something here as listeners. So I really want to thank you, Matt for for joining us

today on the show. Next up, we have Richard with

some tech tips. You know, you’re welcome to join and comment on any of the topics, Matt, or you own or you can you know, it’s we got about 10 minutes, so.

I’ll hang around. Curious to hear the tech tips. Awesome. So, OK, well, you may you may regret your decision after I’m finished here.

Tech Tips

So so we had a little trouble. You know, we’ve been doing these for for the last few episodes where we get the

the Onshape Tuesday tech tip and we get the person that writes that ticket, the tech tip on this show, you know, talk about it on the show.

Well, we had a little trouble scheduling this week. So it’s for a good reason though she she’s at the make 48 competition

you know which is an excellent competition sponsored you know it you know where they’re making complete products in 48 hours

if you haven’t seen the show it’s an incredible show you got to watch it but oh yeah sorry for interrupting. And certainly she made the right choice on which which event to attend today

so I kind of you know it kind of fell on the rookie to do to do our tech tips this week and so what did I do of course I went back and I looked at some of the old tech

tips and I thought, well, I’ll steal those and but I won’t take credit for them. I’m going to go ahead and give the credit where credit is due.

So the first one I want to talk about is creating custom colors, right? So we we all know we can add appearance’s colors to our to our parts.

You can do it through the through the menu. You can do it through the mixer, you know, however you want to end up doing that.

But sometimes you want a specific color somewhere and, you know, like I say, we can we can do that

on the whole part, but we can also edit the appearance of a face. And let’s go ahead and add an appearance to this face.

You can actually use your own values for this. So I happen to know that my favorite color blue is 00 255.

And you can see that it’s added that color to the face the cool thing here is you can actually add that to your custom color so you don’t have to type that in again.

And that’ll follow you around no matter which computer you sign into which you can do this in some other CAD programs.

But you’re going to have to customize your experience for every computer you sign into it. Exactly.

So let’s do that one more time with the B values here’s a color that I think most engineers and designers can can

understand, and this one is very nice. Hmm.

Well, they call that khaki let’s do one more because we can actually do something a little bit different.

I think that’s color my pants right now with you. I wouldn’t be surprised. Michael, I assume that hundreds or if we have thousands of people

listening to this today, that many, many of them are wearing khakis the other way to do that is through a hexadecimal code.

And so instead of the B values, you can go ahead and type in your own hexadecimal code. I just happened to know that f, f, f a, c

d is the color for lemon chiffon. Excellent.

And that’s how you change your colors and add your custom colors. Transparencies, is also supported.

Snap Mode

So I use this all the time. Like, you know, if a part is like, you know, made of glass or plastic or whatever, you can add transparent colors in this box to that tessellation.

Quality thing is one of the unsung heroes, especially if you’re dealing with complex products. Yes.

Can serve. Yep. You have an. Art ground object. You can crank up or down the tessellation quality.

You can even configure these things like configuring the tessellation quality of your part instead of D featuring apart

you can configure the tessellation quality and make it look, you know, make a circle look like a hex. But, you know, it’s totally a way of featuring stuff a little bit as well.

And this, but I’m not going to keep going on this because you got two more tickets. We could talk all day. Yep, I have two more.

So let’s talk about Snap Mode. So, you know, I’ve said it on the show before. I said in most user group meetings and I’ll tell anybody that’s listening,

make connectors are absolutely brilliant. One of my favorite things about Onshape and we know that we can go up

here, we can do a fast inmate to get our bolts where we want them. Right. And it picks up.

Come on, right. So that’s that’s your fancy inmate, right? Yeah.

But there’s also something here called snap mode. And when you invoke Snap Mode, all I have to do then is grab

an implicit connector and drag it over and it will pop into place.

And of course, I have the, you know, a key to to go back and forth.

Mm hmm. So that’s what Snap Mode is. And I suspect that a lot of folks haven’t haven’t tried that one out yet.

I’m guilty of not having that button turned on where I could really take advantage of that, especially

if you actually hit the insert menu there, Richard, and insert like a part, you know, just any part, you know, it’ll actually work

even now, you know, so if you had a meet connector, you said, I find it would actually in

kind of jump right into that snap mode instantly. So make sure you have those connectors set up first.

So I’m going to close this out for just a second here real quick because I want you to see something. So this is the podcast tech tips file or document that I’ve been using.

And you can notice this is the thumbnail image for it. Well, if you want to change that thumbnail, it’s really, really easy.

Just right click on the tab that you want to use select as document thumbnail

and now when I close my document, you can see that I have is that email?

Yes, that is my view. Scan your thumb. I did not I did a Google search

and pulled that baby right off the Internet. That’s awesome.

So those are my tech tips for today. I hope somebody everybody learned a little bit of something on that.

I’m still a newbie when it comes to Onshape. Someday maybe I’ll have my own tech tips, but for now I have to go out and steal them.

Just wanted to give credit to Cody Armstrong. He wrote that tech tip on the custom colors back in October

of 2018 snap mode was done by Jenny Johnson. That was earlier this year, January 11th, 20, 22

and changing a document thumbnail that’s our good friend Matt Rau. And he did that tech tip back in December of 2021

and you know that you can always go to Onshape dot com go to resources select tech tips and you’ll get all of the tech tips that have been done over the years

by our fantastic technical services engineers and some other folks at Onshape. So yeah, yeah we’ll put it on, but we got to get Jenny and Cody on.

Outro

I mean Cody, you know, that’s the voice of Onshape, if you will, you know, I mean from the very early days, you know, that’s how I thought of Cody and that he’s just a great guy.

He’s my boss, full disclosure. So. But I can say as an independent third party, Cody’s a great guy.

Yeah. Yes, it really is. And then Jenny know, I worked with Jenny for four years, you know, back in the old SolidWorks days.

So it’s awesome having Jenny part of the team, great engineer, you know, part of many really cool engineering projects over the years and.

And a dynamic. Speaker two Very dynamic speaker you know, excellent person overall.

So really well to have her on. She has a lot of good stories. Yeah.

That’s pretty show, huh? Yeah. It was a great show. Thanks, Matt, so much for joining us. It’s great to hang out with you and,

and got to get down to the mid mid Tennessee sometime. It’s, it’s been too long. Yeah. Because yes, any time you want to come play with a robot, Richard, let me know.

You bet you. That I’ve got one in my lab that we can, you can play with. Outstanding.

So next, the next show. Michael, I think we’re looking at doing something along the lines of Onshape

in education, but we’re still working out the the guest list on that. So hopefully people will join in in two weeks.

For you that have watched or listen today, please subscribe to our podcast so you’ll always know when the latest episode is out.

And if you liked what you saw, we’d sure appreciate a like or two. We really appreciate that. Michael, I am so glad that you are back this week and I look forward to you

not going on vacation anymore. All right. I’ll do my best. All right.

All right. All right. Take care everybody. Thank you. Bye.