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CoID design awards
ColD design awards
46
The Ferranti Automatic Draughting Equipment is one of the six recipients of the 1971 ColD Design Awards for Capital Goods. The award winners were selected from 177 submissions for achieving significant economic and technical advances in conjunction with ease of use and appropriate appearance. To be eligible for an award the equipment must have been designed and produced in Britain and have been in satisfactory use for one year. The Ferranti Automatic Draughting Equipment provides the world's first complete system for automating the production of manufacturing drawings and data by largely transferring the routine work of the draughtsman and the planner to the computer. Three major benefits are claimed: the reduction of the costs of the drawing office by up to half on normal design work or even more on some specialised work; a considerable increase in the speed with which new products can be marketed by cutting the time between the designer's layout drawings and production; and the removal
of the drudgery of drawing and tracing from the draughtsman's job. The draughtsman converts information directly from the designer's layout drawings into digital form on punched tape using the ADE reader, which incorporates an electronic measuring system linked to a graticule, and a teletypewriter and associated logic. The operator feeds in data by moving the graticule over the drawing to record its geometric description. Groups of holes, sections of a printed circuit diagram, etc., can be repeated in any number of positions or rotated simply, and if used regularly can be fed in in toto by merely calling up the relevant sub-routine in the computer program. Text is fed in with the keyboard, again with repetitive information being called up from the computer by means of a short code. Machining instructions can be fed in at the same time, combining the draughtsman's and planner's job in one, and the computer can also be programmed to do all the necessary calculations. The output from the computer can be in many forms. The Microfilm plotter will produce a conventional fully dimensioned production drawing on microfilm with the relevant printed information at a rate of about one file card a minute. When a master is required, for instance for a printed circuit board, it can be produced to an accuracy of 0.0015 in. on the Master plotter, with a repeatability of better than 0"001 in. Control tapes for NC machines, machine loading instructions, and many other outputs are also available from the computer. The flexibility and efficiency of the system is enhanced in a number of ways, ranging from character and vector generators on the plotters to a variety of high level programs which, for instance, enable a two-dimensional drawing to be rotated, scaled up or down or shifted in any direction. The system also caters for applications as varied as cartography and town-planning. Since it was marketed in 1968 more than half a million pounds worth of equipment has been sold, including two installations in Germany and two readers to France for work on the Concorde aircraft programme.
COMPUTER AIDED DESIGN
46
The Ferranti Automatic Draughting Equipment is one of the six recipients of the 1971 ColD Design Awards for Capital Goods. The award winners were selected from 177 submissions for achieving significant economic and technical advances in conjunction with ease of use and appropriate appearance. To be eligible for an award the equipment must have been designed and produced in Britain and have been in satisfactory use for one year. The Ferranti Automatic Draughting Equipment provides the world's first complete system for automating the production of manufacturing drawings and data by largely transferring the routine work of the draughtsman and the planner to the computer. Three major benefits are claimed: the reduction of the costs of the drawing office by up to half on normal design work or even more on some specialised work; a considerable increase in the speed with which new products can be marketed by cutting the time between the designer's layout drawings and production; and the removal
of the drudgery of drawing and tracing from the draughtsman's job. The draughtsman converts information directly from the designer's layout drawings into digital form on punched tape using the ADE reader, which incorporates an electronic measuring system linked to a graticule, and a teletypewriter and associated logic. The operator feeds in data by moving the graticule over the drawing to record its geometric description. Groups of holes, sections of a printed circuit diagram, etc., can be repeated in any number of positions or rotated simply, and if used regularly can be fed in in toto by merely calling up the relevant sub-routine in the computer program. Text is fed in with the keyboard, again with repetitive information being called up from the computer by means of a short code. Machining instructions can be fed in at the same time, combining the draughtsman's and planner's job in one, and the computer can also be programmed to do all the necessary calculations. The output from the computer can be in many forms. The Microfilm plotter will produce a conventional fully dimensioned production drawing on microfilm with the relevant printed information at a rate of about one file card a minute. When a master is required, for instance for a printed circuit board, it can be produced to an accuracy of 0.0015 in. on the Master plotter, with a repeatability of better than 0"001 in. Control tapes for NC machines, machine loading instructions, and many other outputs are also available from the computer. The flexibility and efficiency of the system is enhanced in a number of ways, ranging from character and vector generators on the plotters to a variety of high level programs which, for instance, enable a two-dimensional drawing to be rotated, scaled up or down or shifted in any direction. The system also caters for applications as varied as cartography and town-planning. Since it was marketed in 1968 more than half a million pounds worth of equipment has been sold, including two installations in Germany and two readers to France for work on the Concorde aircraft programme.
COMPUTER AIDED DESIGN