LEDAS Blog
Our Autumn Update
Nov 27, 2023Hi there! Let me report to you our recent activities, from late summer to mid-autumn. We have been busy!
It was in August that we launched a new project in the area of digital medicine. It is somewhat different from our usual work in digital healthcare in that it combines software with hardware development. It is the innovative hardware part to which we are paying a lot of attention. Although I cannot reveal the name of the client, I can tell you that we are working on a start-up project initiated by a team already established as successful entrepreneurs in Industry 4.0.
September was the month in which we organized a week-long series of technical meetings in Italy. Together with one of our biggest customers, we discussed their ambitious ...
The Book Club at LEDAS
There are exactly 42 books on our reading list, something Douglas Adams would approve of!
Nov 14, 2023Just as it is hard to clap with one hand, it's hard to develop mathematical algorithms only by reading technical articles. And so despite the fact that we regularly read and write about C++ and CAD (for instance, about constraint solvers and plugins), we have regular book club meetings at our company at which we read fiction and non-fiction.
Perhaps one day we'll make a list of our favorite technical books on designing complex and reliable systems and must-read articles on mathematical algorithms, but for today we'd like to share a list of the books that interest us.
Back in 2018, LEDAS Book Club meetings were held in person, but gradually we've come to realize that it's much more convenient to meet online. As of 2020, ...
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 ...
LEDAS Opens New Office in Israel
Jul 24, 2023The LEDAS Group recently opened a new office in the metropolitan area of Tel Aviv. This location is in the central business district of Israel and will help us to better deal with customers in Israel and globally.
Israel is widely known as one of the world leaders in engineering software through the presence of big development offices of established CAD/CAM/CAE vendors, as well as startups. This makes the country a major hub of the world of engineering software.
We have a long history of working with Israeli companies. Starting in 2004, our very first license of the LGS constraint solver was made with an Israeli company, Proficiency, which today is part of ITI, a Wipro company.
At the other end of the timeline, our most recent agreement was ...
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 ...
International Women's Day at a climbing wall
New interesting experience and a great time
Mar 30, 2023Given this circumstance, we decided to celebrate International Women's Day at the climbing wall. The employees and their families got a new or expanded their existing climbing experience.
Interestingly, it's not as easy as it looks from the outside. However, this applies to almost any activity. After all, it is only when we start doing something that we realize why a colleague just couldn't "simply lift his leg and pull himself up on that ledge," as everyone ...
The field of digital medicine is the top grossing one for LEDAS. In the past 3-5 years, it has grown to represent close to one-third of our income. We have completed more than ten digital medical projects in different areas for the desktop and Web/cloud, and in the coming years we plan to broaden our portfolio in digital health solutions even further.
And so it was that in Jerusalem on 9-10 November, LEDAS took part in MIXiii, the annual Life Science & Health Tech Industries event for Israel. Our interest in MIXiii is explained by a LinkedIn article written by LEDAS founder David Levin we recently posted, “LEDAS covers 5 of 7 areas currently having highest potential in digital medicine: Orthopedics, Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery, Prostheses, Orthoses, and ...
Partial Sun Eclipse 2022 and LEDAS Office
Oct 27, 2022
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 ...
Since 1999, LEDAS has provided software development services to clients in a number of areas of hi-tech engineering, and as a result our team of developers works with a broad set of software tools.
At the very least, we need project management software, a compiler, and an operating system. In fact, we need more software than on that short list, but for now let’s focus on these three categories. They are the most critical for any software developer.
At LEDAS, these three main categories are represented primarily by Jira, Visual Studio, and Windows. Some other programs, such as for version control, text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, are now freely available, so anybody can avoid those licensing costs.
Jira
Jira is often considered a leader in the market for project management ...
Rubik’s 5x5x5 Cube Challenge
Sep 07, 2021The first four times we invited you to take on our game challenges, they all operated at the same level of difficulty for everyone — whether inverting the state of Conway's Life game, inventing ways to split a polymino, solving PLM anagrams, or composing a most beautiful fractal, given constraints.
With today’s challenge, you get to choose the level of difficulty. As the ideal — and the most accurate scale of difficulty known to man — we will use the skill levels from the Doom computer game (illustrated below), which incidentally is now 33 = 3*3*3 = 27 years old.
Why Doom, and Why Now?
When we first planned this Rubik’s cube challenge at the beginning of August, the stars aligned in a remarkable way. Judge for yourself:
LEDAS’ Intellectual Games Club Flourishes Online
Jul 01, 2021“Our life is but a game,” sang Herman during the opera The Queen of Spades. Which game exactly? That one everyone should decide for himself.
We at LEDAS love playing games, as is probably the case with most developers around the world. Sometimes we prefer video games; other times, board games that provide the extra special kind of social enjoyment that allows us to develop good relations with teammates and colleagues.
We have a collection of board games in our coffee room and so during that “before pandemic” era we sometimes stayed late in the office playing them.
People have always been curious, searching for answers to many questions. Discovering an answer is emotionally comparable to scoring a goal during a football World Cup finale. Over the decades, mass media ...
LEDAS Fractal Contest
Jun 09, 2021“Good! He did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician.”
— Hilbert's response upon hearing that one of his students had dropped out to study poetry.
(wiki)
Do you love mathematics as much as we do? Over the years, we’ve developed five constraint solvers and a lot of other software that’s mathematically sophisticated, and through that we have gained some understanding in this area of expertise.
So, today we want to talk about the seemingly impossible: things that you can understand but also seem like just a fantasy. Yes, right now! The beauty of mathematics is that there really are a lot of remarkable sides to it that everyone can enjoy.
For example, can you imagine a ...
LEDAS' Birthday on Mathematician's Day
Apr 01, 2021Today is April 1 and we are 22 years old! We are proud of our history, but we could not imagine that a whole year of remote work would become a part of it. Fortunately, we are starting to return to the office step by step. Today we will celebrate our birthday with a small group of employees who have already been vaccinated.
However, we hope that we will meet together and continue celebrating in June on the seashore. In fact, this is not a sea, but a reservoir next to the dam. It is so large that at some points the opposite shore is not visible, that is why we call it the Ob Sea. By the way, at the beginning of April the Ob Sea is still ...
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 ...
LEDAS Anagrams: Seawater Folds
Mar 01, 2021One aspect of intelligence is the ability to quickly run through a range of options. It is not that people must get through alternatives faster than a computer, but that they move systematically and purposefully from one option (when found to be wrong) to another option, finding the better direction in which to move. We are talking here about the ability to adjust the brain to the specifics of a task, about the rapid training of one’s own neural network.
Today we invite you to come up with anagrams that are meaningful to you and that involve our primary topic of interest, CAD/CAE/CAM/PLM/BIM. When we program computers to work with anagrams, they go through words in a dictionary incredibly quickly, trying the various permutations and analyzing the ...
Meet isicad, the Bigger Brother to Our LEDAS Blog
Dec 30, 2020Some 16 years ago, LEDAS founded isicad.ru, which since has become the leading Russian-language Web portal covering engineering software. Over the years, it has published about 10,000 articles on topics like CAD, CAM, CAE, PLM, BIM, generative design, cloud technology, additive manufacturing, and digital twins.
The portal reports on developments in both the Russian and global markets. It offers readers news articles, interviews on technological advances, trends in innovation, financial results, and described the business development of significant companies. As well, isicad.ru placed promotional materials on the portal, including the home page, for nearly all of the major players in the Russian market – Ansys, Autodesk, ASCON, Dassault Systemes, Hexagon, PTC, Siemens Digital Software, Top Systems, and more.
LEDAS' long-running, actively-maintained isicad.ru portal, along with the CAD conferences held ...
From LEDAS: The Polyomino Contest!
Dec 03, 2020You may have encountered polyominoes at some point in your life, because they are used in puzzles popular for more than 100 years, including ones like Tetris.
A polyomino is a plane geometric figure formed by joining one or more equal squares, edge to edge. The name was devised by Solomon Golomb in 1953 in a now-classic textbook, and then popularized by Martin Gardner in 1960; see the “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American.
Today we’ll play with our updated LEDAS logo, which we released a year ago. As you can see, it consists of four pentominoes. A pentomino is a polyomino of order 5, i.e. 5 equal-sized squares connected edge-to-edge.
Splitting the LEDAS Logo Into Polyominos
Our question today is this: what is the number ...