Current Situation and Pain Point: Currently, manufacturing engineers spend significant time manually designing custom tooling through trial and error. This process is time-consuming, prone to errors, and often requires multiple iterations to account for all manufacturing constraints. Without automated tooling design capabilities, production teams face:
- Extended development cycles for new tooling
- Production delays waiting for tooling solutions
- Inconsistent consideration of manufacturing constraints
- Higher costs from iterative physical prototyping
Proposed Solution: Integrate manufacturing-specific tooling generation capabilities into Zoo that would:
- Reference Geometry Integration
- Import existing part CAD files as baseline geometry
- Define spatial relationships between parts and tooling
- Support standard manufacturing CAD formats (STEP, IGES, etc.)
- Manufacturing Constraint Definition
- GUI interface for inputting:
- Dimensional tolerances
- Access/clearance requirements
- Process-specific parameters
- Material constraints
- Visual validation of constraint definitions
- Automated Tooling Generation
- Algorithm-driven creation of tooling geometry that satisfies all defined constraints
- Real-time visualization of generated solutions
- Export capabilities in manufacturing-ready formats
Benefits to the Community: This feature would benefit the broader Zoo community by:
- Enabling rapid development of production tooling
- Reducing manufacturing downtime
- Standardizing constraint consideration
- Supporting both small-scale and enterprise manufacturing users
- Creating a foundation for future manufacturing automation features
Implementation Scope: While ambitious, this feature builds on Zoo’s existing geometric manipulation capabilities. The core functionality could be implemented in phases:
- Basic geometry import and constraint definition
- Simple tooling generation with basic constraints
- Advanced constraint handling and optimization
- Integration with manufacturing validation tools
I’ve focused on specific functionality rather than implementation details to leave room for technical considerations. Would appreciate the community’s thoughts on priority and scope.