One of the largest projects implemented by LEDAS involved 40 person-years. The project began as tool creation and optimization software for welding machines from OR Laser company. Over subsequent years, the scope expanded to include cutting, marking, and engraving processes, and then added support for innovative machines that conduct additive manufacturing with metal powders.
The CAM product supports more than 15 types of machines run by controllers including those from B&R, Aerotech Motion, Polaris CNC Motion, ScanMaster, Arduino, and direct connections with KUKA Robot.
Powered by its base of strong and functional C# software, and its many innovative machines, this customer was acquired by a major US laser vendor in 2018.
A top-10 CAM company before its acquisition by 3D Systems, Cimatron used LEDAS Geometric Solver 3D (LGS 3D) technology for modeling complex machines with moving parts, including injection molds.
Existing solutions were approximated by polygonal meshes, which caused poor results for machines with parts that touch during movement. The solution was to replace the inaccurate meshes with our LGS 3D technology, because it works with exact geometry, and not polygonal approximations. We integrated it into Cimatron’s CimatronE software with great success, along with the ACIS geometric kernel. Cimatron addressed the problem of collision resolution with help of geometric constraints from LGS 3D.
This long R&D project for a leading European CAM software company began in 2011, lasting more than 30 person-years. LEDAS landed the project due to our expertise in the field of CAD/CAM, especially in writing sophisticated geometric algorithms. One of the project goals was to develop advanced methods of automating and optimizing punch machines, and then integrating the code into an existing application written in C/C++.
The project scope was expanded when an ambitious C# project was added to the ERP/MES/WMS/MLM (engineering resource planning) area so that users could trace materials and parts during the full lifecycle. The hand-over of the project occurred at critical moment when the previous development team became stuck in an unstable code base that suffered from too many buggy functions crashing the software. After the development was transferred to LEDAS, our team stabilized the project and then improved the performance by ten to a hundred times.
As a result, the software project received several innovations awards, and then was licensed to many other companies that work with composite materials and sheet metal, including aircraft, helicopter, and automotive manufacturers.
This project for a major German provider of advanced milling and drilling tools was dedicated to developing enterprise software for its engineers. Supported machining tools have multiple steps, such as many blades, chip flutes, high-quality inserts, and so on. The total volume of these projects exceeded 15 person-years.
The list of problems we solved included developing specific parametric models and software for milling tools and other processes; integration of AutoCAD and BricsCAD processes with modeling in Creo (former Pro/ENGINEER); and many others.