Last issue I promised I’d cover 2D drawings in Fusion 360 and I’ll be back to that next week but I had to mention this news from Sir James Dyson. He’s launching his latest vacuum cleaner and this three minute video came up in my YouTube feed.
It was always one of the most inspiring stories to hear how James Dyson made his billions by inventing a superior product and solving all the entrenched problems and challenges in bringing it to a saturated market. There are plenty of longer documentaries going over that history and here’s an example. I showed it to my classroom students each year and I wish I was getting a cut for the vacuum cleaners which those students declared they’d buy after watching that doco.
Let me list and emphasise a few of the points Sir James makes as he tells about his latest.
- He starts with a mention of his Hullavington technology campus, he’s standing in it, and says that it’s one of the places where some of his six thousand engineers and scientists work. You can see engineering computer workstations covering a large floor area in the background.
- The camera cuts to shots of engineers on workstations running CAD and CAE simulations, – and programming robots.
- James outlines the scope of Dyson’s products, cleaning your home, the air in your home, the dust on anything in your home, there’s an electric car and a medical ventilator they whipped up during the pandemic.
- The camera cuts to shots of robots, clean rooms with tiny automated assembly lines under microscopes, more simulation colour plots, and quite significantly, between all these images of the fourth Industrial Revolution, there are closeups of pen and paper sketchbooks of drawings and design ideas being prepared for the computers. (I’ll refer back to this in coming weeks as we talk about the place of 2D sketches and drawings in the most up-to-date design workflows).
- Next James is on wth the show and tell, he brandishes his new product and goes on about micron and sub-micron particulates.
- He picks up a state-of-the-art electric motor in order to contrast it with his own design, a much smaller motor running on a tenth of the electricity. James is clearly an engineer and he is hands-on with everything. He lets you know that this is the 5th generation of their design.
- That new 5th gen. Hyperdymium motor is made in an advanced manufacturing centre in Singapore which is almost completely automated. We’re looking at a global supply chain.
- He holds up a piezo electric micro sensor, which he claims to have developed in-house, for detecting dust particles in the nano-range.
Finally Sir James ends by cheerily saying good-bye, he’s off to have a cup of tea.