BenderCad is the specialized CAD system for wire bending industry. Here is it’s official site.

Some of its main features are:

• Supports full wire modelling workflow and features:
  • Initial model construction based on geometry information or XYZr / LRAr specifications.
  • Import: XYZr, LRAr, STEP, IGES.
  • Measurements.
  • Editing tools, including sophisticated snappings implementation.
  • Presentation tools.
  • Export: XYZr, LRAr, STEP, IGES.
  • Drawings creation.
• Provides easy but powerful tools and commands specially designed for wire models creation and modification:
  • Much easier to use and requires significantly less learning than conventional CAD packages.
  • Order-of-magnitude faster construction times: typically less than an hour even for complex models, as opposed to a day or more in conventional CAD packages.

Major issues to resolve during system development were:

1. Ensure model consistency and expected system behavior under all possible editing scenarios. For example, as model representation is shown in XYZr, LRAr formats and visually, and for the user’s convenience it’s allowed to change model by editing any of its representations, be it XYZr, LRAr or “visual” one using special editing tools, it’s necessary to make sure all representations remain valid and in sync with each other.
2. As the system was complex but required time-to-market was quite short, it was required to reuse and integrate a lot of third-party libraries, but without tying too much to any particular library so that they can be replaced if needed.
3. To achieve better user experience, allow greater system flexibility with regards to future developments and simplify tools implementation it was decided that tools UI has to be uniform and be as independent as possible from the tools implementation, and that required non-trivial implementation of “core” UI framework and its interaction with tools implementation.
4. To make model creation process as easy as possible, sophisticated snappings implementation was required that allows multiple snappings to be combined and prioritized.
5. For better model editing experience it was decided that Undo / Redo functionality should be possible to apply selectively, if that makes sense for particular operations sequence.

All these issues were successfully resolved in the implemented system.

Some screenshots follow.

Wire model creation (note simultaneous snappings on length and angle):

Wire model creation using arcs:

Measurements:

Translation preview before operation is applied:

Drawing generation:

BenderCad is (C) Copyright 2007 - 2010 by Automated Industrial Machinery, Inc. All rights reserved. BenderCad is the registered trademark of Automated Industrial Machinery, Inc.