LEDAS Blog
Will ChatGPT Replace Programmers At LEDAS?
Sep 12, 2023You must have heard of ChatGPT, that artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. It interacts with humans in a conversational way by supporting queries made in natural languages.
For developers, ChatGPT’s most attractive feature is its ability to generate code in any programming language. But how useful is AI-generated code? Let's find out by asking ChatGPT to solve some simple tasks that arise in CAD development projects. (We conducted this study some time ago; since then, ChatGPT has perhaps become smarter.)
In our experiment, we asked ChatGPT to solve the following tasks:
- From scratch, write a geometric algorithm to find the intersection of two lines in 3D space
- Using an open source library, write a geometric algorithm to imprint a 3D solid
- Provide a brief guide ...
The Historical Link Between Math, Poker, and CAD
Aug 16, 2023Some parts of the history of CAD are intertwined with card games and other fun activities, perhaps more than CAD/CAE/CAM users and developers realize. One of the most famous events occurred in the late 1980s when Jon Hirschtick trained the MIT Black Jack team.
Using his techniques, the team won millions in Las Vegas, which then went on to blacklist him from their casinos. You may have seen the movie or TV series about his amazing journey, going from university to winning at casinos, and then using $1 million of his winnings in 1993 to create SolidWorks, the first – and then best-selling – mid-range mechanical CAD package to run on Windows (now owned by Dassault Systѐmes). Later, he went on to lead the development of Onshape, now owned by PTC. You ...
We’ve launched our Web site with a new language, this time in German. Through https://ledas.com/de/, we are making information about LEDAS services more visible to potential engineering, design, and manufacturing customers in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and other German-speaking countries.
Germany is well-known as the leader of European manufacturing, and one of the leaders of manufacturing worldwide. As our company from the very beginning was focused on the European market of engineering software, we managed to get into contact with German businesses rather fast.
Case History: CAM Software Success
CAM (computer-aided manufacturing), including additive manufacturing, is one of our six areas of expertise, and it is the one with which we have been working with German firms the most.
Our biggest project to date was dedicated to machine ...
Salutations à Tous les Lecteurs Francophones!
Greetings to all French-speaking readers!
Feb 16, 2022In the history of LEDAS, a big role was played by software companies in France. Our company got its start in 1999 by landing work with French CAD vendors. Since then, LEDAS has provided B2B R&D (business-to-business research and development) services to several well-known CAD and CAM companies in France in the field of computational geometry. This early experience helped shape the corporate culture of engineering software development at LEDAS.
Contracts with customers from France have been the longest in the history of LEDAS, two of which worked with us for over a decade. For Dassault Systèmes, LEDAS helped develop geometric constraint solvers and a 3D modeling kernel used by the CATIA mechanical design system. Another contract was done with an award-winning CAM company in the aerospace industry. ...
Deciding Which is Better: Plug-ins or Applications
Nov 08, 2021Many of LEDAS’ projects are developed as plug-ins for CAD software programs, ranging from powerful systems like CATIA to lighter weight solutions like Rhino. Oftimes, we help our customers decide on which direction their ideas are best developed: in the form of a plug-in or as a standalone program.
In this post, I reflect on why and when plug-in development is the better approach compared to building an application from scratch. I’ll also talk about the forms of plug-in that are useful in different situations. Learn more about our CAD plug-in development expertise.
Pros and cons of plug-ins
Plug-ins either solve specific problems or add functions that are missing from CAD systems. A good example is CAMWorks from HCL, an ...
Pivot Points In the Story of LEDAS
Mar 30, 2021It’s just before our 22nd anniversary on April 1, and looking back at the history of LEDAS, I see that the first years from each decade were, for our company, the really important ones. Often, these years started new stories and finalized old ones.
Arguably, 2011 was the most pivotal year in LEDAS’ history. Let me list the top five events that happened to our company ten years ago:
- Top management changed completely when co-founder David Levin stepped back as CEO and took on the role of Chairman of the Board. A new generation of young managers, aged around 30 years old, now occupied the CEO, CTO, and COO positions.
- Thanks to advice from an industry mate, LEDAS decided to focus mostly on high-quality software R&D (research and ...
Our Engine-mounted Table
Oct 29, 2020Due to COVID-19, all of our employees at LEDAS continue to work remotely, but we decided not to waste time by being just at home. We did a minor upgrade to our office interior in anticipation of the day we return to our headquarters.
You probably know that one of the key competencies of LEDAS is a set of tools for computer-aided design, some of which you can see in our CAD Solutions list, and so we used them to decorate our entrance hall with an exclusive, glass-topped table mounted on the cylinder block of an actual Mercedes-Benz engine. You can see the result, made by Alex, in the photo.
Engines, by the way, are produced not only by Mercedes Benz but also by us at LEDAS. You ...
LEDAS customer map
May 24, 2020The geography of the locations of our customers has changed considerably during the 20+ years of LEDAS’ history.
From looking at the map of our customers (below), you may think that we began in our home country and then expanded abroad. In fact, the reverse is true, because in its first years LEDAS mostly provided CAD and CAM software development services in Europe, namely to Dassault Systèmes from France.
In the beginning, we concentrated on developing geometric solvers and engines, a rather narrow field, yet very sensitive to quality. Over the following years, overall CAD software market was our primary focus.
In late 2000s, LEDAS Geometric Solver (LGS) was our flagship product, along with our high-quality R&D (research and development) services for CAD and PLM. Many ...
In these work-from-home times, we are seeing a burst of interest in LEDAS Cloud Platform (LCP) as nearly every day our team shows demos to prospective customers.
LCP is a platform on which applications are developed for online 3D modeling, and so I think that the primary reason for the record levels of interest is that companies are beginning to realize that the world and the way in which we organize it might not be the same after the pandemic ends. Businesses are asking their engineers to work from home, and this may well become the way of the future.
With remote work now a must, and because it is likely that full-scale and partial lockdowns will last for many more months, Web and cloud solutions are ...
While working on LGS, the programmers at LEDAS developed similar software for Dassault Systèmes, which were integrated into CATIA and so are used by hundreds of thousands engineers in corporations like Toyota, Honda, Airbus, and Boeing. Much later, LEDAS was asked to develop constraint solvers that ...