Tag Archives: Greywater

BIM Models Via Reverse Engineering With Autodesk Inventor – Part 9

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This is it. The last of the reverse engineering of the composting toilet series. All that remains are the four knobs on the lower drawer of the humanure maker.

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The exact profile of the knobs is somewhat shady, but with a bit of educated guesswork, they’ll come out great for all intents and purposes. In the image below, you can see that I started by creating a sketch on the lower front face, then placing and centering a point on what I would call the right hand stile of the poo drawer.  The next step is to create a plane 90° to the face using the construction line that was used to center the point horizontally.

The only difference between this plane created on a line and the others in this series is that I selected the line, then instead of one of the Origin planes, I selected the face that the line sits on. The angle was left at the default 90°…   Continue reading →

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BIM Models Via Reverse Engineering With Autodesk Inventor – Part 5

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I figured this series would likely turn out to be three or four fairly long posts as it took 3 or 4 hours to create the original model used in the ComPOWTS story.

As it turns out, hours spent modeling have no relation to the page count it takes to describe said modeling. Whoda thunk?  But back to the modeling. I left off in the last article cutting away the artifact geometry on the top platform thingie—which I think houses a fan, a thermostat, and possibly some other controls. The modeling technique for that was very similar to the one before it.

The holes on the other hand, are a bit different. For these I created a sketch  on the same face that the last extrusion was extruded to (the upper platform), and turned on the original sketch with the dimensioned image so that I could access the dimensions.

I then  deleted the geometry that Inventor projected for me (not needed in this case), and projected the lines shown below……..the outermost edges of the unit in that particular corner…

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BIM Models Via Reverse Engineering With Autodesk Inventor – Part 4

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In the last post in this series,  I left off with a very basic reverse engineered part….which in many cases would be all that is required. In this post I will further refine the model to look less  blocky.

I’ll try to add some polish to the model by performing one more cut using the front profile, cleaning up the artifacts on the top, adding the fillets, creating the pipes on the sides, rounding this and removing that, and adding the hardware…..some of which will likely spill into the next post.

The Front Cut.

In order to perform this cut procedure, I placed another instance of the Front block on a plane I created at the very frontmost extent of the model. To create the plane, I selected the edge shown in the image below (cyan line),  then the YZ plane in the Origin folder.  In the dialog that popped up, I changed the default 90° Angle setting to 0°, then clicked the green check mark to accept the value…

Create a new plane

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BIM Models Via Reverse Engineering With Autodesk Inventor – Part 2

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Envirolet Drawing

Using just a small image with some dimensions on it, and written clues from the product’s literature, a decent representation of a fairly complex model is possible.

I’ve used this technique since I first started using Inventor, and believe it is a hold-over of sorts (modified for Inventor) from my AutoCAD days. At any rate, I used to have to employ this technique far too often in my early days in yacht design. We gave our vendors some slack back then as 3D modeling was still newish to a lot of companies.

Flash forward five years, and it seems as though time has stood still. Finding models of anything outside of  mechanical design world (also pretty limited) is still almost impossible. The polygon prop models used generally for architectural rendering do not count as they are, for the most part, unusable in a digital prototype (BIM).

As I stated in the first article, BIM Models Via Reverse Engineering With Autodesk Inventor – Part 1, all I had to go with for this model was an image with a few dimensions. I also knew from the text description that the larger plumbing connections were 4” and that the drain was a tapped hole for a ½” I.D. hose barb. In this case, that should be good enough.

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BIM Models Via Reverse Engineering With Autodesk Inventor – Part 1

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As anyone who has delved into the world of Digital Prototyping (also known as BIM) knows, most manufacturers are total slackers when it comes to providing models and information for their products.

Here is how things almost always go. You go to the manufacturers website looking for an accurate 3D model of the AG3 (Awesome Gizmo 3000), and you find out that the manufacturer has what looks like a scanned brochure as a website. Not a good sign.

So you look around and find that the site is nothing more than a “look how swell our products are” site with no real design information beyond a rough size and possibly a neat java color chooser. So you go to Google. Through a Google search you find a retailer who has at least gone through the trouble of  scanning  the installation instructions and putting them online …which is close to, but better than nothing in most cases.

In this, the information age ……not even an old-school set of AutoCAD 2D plans & elevations on most sites….jeeesh!

So there’s no Model……now what?

The Designer/Engineer has several choices:

  • Continue to waste time on what will likely turn out to be a wild goose chase
  • Look for a competitor that does have models of their products
  • Model the thing yourself with whatever info you can get

The second choice is by far the most palatable. If someone else makes a comparable item, and provides a model, go with them…… but unfortunately, the last choice will be the only option in many instances.  
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Introducing the Open Design Project’s New Eco Home Design Section!

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The ODP now uses the Multi-Site feature of WordPress to integrate multiple, separate blogs into one larger whole, and the first off-shoot, the Eco Home blog is now up & running. 

The new  format will allow people with disparate  design goals and styles to meet under a single roof, and hopefully share solutions to design problems. The main thrust will be wood related trades as they relate to ecologically sound home construction, outfitting, and maintenance … no different than it has been, just easier (I hope)  to accomplish.

I will also be splitting off  Woodworking into its own section sometime in the near future, and hope to have the integrated forum up & running shortly….which is one of my projects for today.

So if the site is a bit off-kilter in the coming days, it’s just me in the background screwing things up ;)  —but in the long-run, all will be well.

Look for my post on quickie reverse  engineering later today (if at all possible), its a fairly quick way to get models made when the manufacturer of a given item has no models (and usually not even 2D CAD drawings) available …and all you have to work with is a lame image with dimensions on it.  Until then, have a great day!

[Update: I dumped the multi site crap from wordpress as it totally sucked. there is a new site for home design, but it ia on an entirely different domain. Use this: The Craftsman Cottage]