Customer Success Story

Dennis Burns --
Real-Time Essentials, Inc.

Dennis Burns has been an electronics designer for over 30 years including stints with Texas Instruments, Honeywell and Sauer-Danfoss where his experience with 3D solid modeling included high-end systems such as SDRC and Unigraphics. Dennis has been overseeing control systems designs throughout his career and decided to start his own company, Real-Time Essentials, Inc., last year in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Real Time Essentials designs Controller Area Network (CAN) interfaces for automotive production networks. This interface allows a laptop or PDA to plug into a CAN network, an important capability when someone travels to visit a remote facility, for instance. CAN networks were originally developed by Bosch and used for inter-module communication in Mercedes and BMW production vehicles. They are now used in the development of virtually every electronically controlled diesel engine, as well as all over the world in many industrial automation and control applications.

Dennis had been nurturing ideas and sketching out a plan for patent disclosures for his products, and knew he was going to need a capable 3D mechanical design application to get the job done. For Real-Time Essentials' design and development process it was obvious that Unigraphics and other 3D solid modelers he was familiar with were not a good fit either financially or functionally. The bottom line was that he needed a CAD system that was powerful, yet within his startup budget, and the majority of parametric 3D solid modelers were out of his price range. He began to do some research and found Alibre Design. For what he needed, it quickly became clear that Alibre Design was close to SDRC in functionality but affordable -- less than one-tenth the cost.

"I wish I knew about Alibre Design sooner, it would have been the perfect tool for my design ideas, particularly in the early stages when I was making a lot of changes and evaluating a variety of different configurations. I was playing around with things like Visio and I didn't have the money for a license of Unigraphics. We were using anything that was reasonably priced to create our designs, mainly simple 2D drawing packages, and they just couldn't do what I wanted them to do. I needed a true 3D solid modeler that would allow me to create separate component parts and then properly assemble them into a finished product. At one point in time I was working on a rotary position sensor. In 2D the design process was less than ideal to say the least. When I found Alibre Design, I knew it was what I was looking for and I've been productive with it ever since."

"Recently, I used Alibre Design for the design of an electronic enclosure. I chose an off-the-shelf molded enclosure, created a solid model of it, added my modifications, and used the assembly features to put all the components together -- I then created a full set of assembly and part drawings. This allowed me to accurately dimension the circuit board details, including size, mounting holes and connector locations, I was able to precisely check clearances."

"One really neat thing -- it really saved a lot of time -- was that I was able to go directly to the Molex website, download 3D solids of the connectors I needed in IGES format and import those into Alibre Design. I did not have to spend time creating standard parts that are readily available on the Internet because Alibre Design can handle the importing without a hitch."

"Just recently I turned all my designs over to a contract manufacturer and I had to give him a stack of drawings: drawings of the separate parts with various details, assembly drawings, a top-level drawing showing the unit getting put into a box with bubble-pack. I had to make sure the manufacturer I was working with had a full set of documentation -- if I had not had Alibre Design it would have been an enormous task. I don't know how I would have done it. I have to say that I am really glad I gave Alibre Design a try. It has been invaluable to the current success of my business."