Charting the Course

Success in the fast-paced marine electronics industry requires the ability to bring innovative products to market quickly.

 

Lowrance -- specializing in sport-fishing sonar and global positioning system mapping instruments -- recently utilized Pro/ENGINEER from PTC to develop a family of three sonar chartplotter units in only six months, less than half of the time that would have been required using previous design methods.

 

Lowrance engineers were assigned to develop a family of marine electronic devices (LCX113D HD, LCX-28C HD and LCX-38 HD) that combine sonar capabilities for locating fish down to 3,000 feet with global positioning system (GPS) and mapping features that provide depth contour mapping of lakes and coastal waters. Lowrance was asked to beat competitors to market with products that deliver features such as 600 by 800 pixel color graphics and internal hard drives up to 30 GB.

 

Differences in the envelope of key components in these three products meant that each required a substantially different mechanical design. In the past this would have made it necessary to design each one sequentially with little overlap.

 

Industrial designers would have first created the look for the family working in their own environment. When it was completed, they would have turned it over to engineers who design the first product from scratch, then move on to the second and third products while incorporating whatever components could be recycled from earlier designs.

 

"The three projects would have taken a little over a year to complete using these methods," says Steve Swisher, senior mechanical design engineer, Lowrance.

 

With Pro/ENGINEER in its toolbox, Lowrance engineers used the parametric design and assembly modeling features to design the three products simultaneously as tightly coupled assembly models, referencing many of the same parametric component models. This approach greatly increased their ability to utilize common components in the family of parts.

 

"Rather than designing components for one product and waiting to see if they could be used on the other members of the family, we designed components upfront to meet the requirements of all three products," Swisher says. "So we were able to reuse many more parts than in the past."

 

The components were linked together in parametric assembly models so that common components only had to be changed once to update their references in all of the products. Likewise, the individual instances of the components were adjusted parametrically to fit the individual products.

 

"All three products were designed on the same datum plane so when new components were utilized they were simply aligned to the datum plane and you've got it," Swisher says.

 

The new family of chartplotters includes some of the first products developed since Lowrance changed its design process to promote concurrency and commonality. First, Lowrance Industrial Designer Curt Rainbolt created the outer shell look using Pro/ENGINEER Interactive Surface Design Extension.

 

Pro/ENGINEER Interactive Surface Design Extension provides the surface modeling capabilities of an advanced industrial design tool such as the ability to tweak control points for curves while watching surfaces update in real time to, for example, perfectly position highlights. These capabilities are provided within the Pro/ENGINEER environment, dramatically increasing the potential for collaboration between industrial design and mechanical engineering.

 

When Lowrance industrial designers and mechanical engineers worked in different environments, the time required to translate design information from one environment to the other meant that, in most cases, the design was handed off from industrial design to mechanical engineering at one defined point in the process.

 

Now, with Pro/ENGINEER, the two disciplines work within the same environment and both industrial designers and mechanical engineers can work continuously and simultaneously on the same model, with each group controlling their own section. Mechanical engineers can view the industrial design while it is being created and provide feedback that helps industrial designers get the design right the first time.

 

In the new family of chartplotters, the modernistic shell created by the industrial designers encompassed multiple components so mechanical engineers divided the shell and provided offsets to create the bezel and keypad. While the mechanical design was being produced, industrial designers kept tabs on the engineering design and had control over any required adjustments to the shell. Then, if an industrial designer moved a surface the model updated instantly and the mechanical engineer knew that he needed to redesign components that attached to that surface.

 

Lowrance engineers leveraged the design geometry to perform interference checking within Pro/ENGINEER and exported the design geometry to computational fluid dynamics software to analyze electronic cooling. Preliminary models were provided at an early stage to groups responsible for building and testing the new products. Giving these groups input from an early stage in the process contributed to the fast launch.

 

Later, the design geometry was exported to create computerized numerical control programs used to produce the tooling used to mold the enclosure, bezel and keypad.

 

"Being able to do all three projects concurrently while re-using components to a much higher degree than normal helped us cut a lot of time out of the design process," Swisher says. "The result was that we were able to beat our competitors to market with some exciting new products." -- JERRY FIREMAN