So common — yet so maligned — are presentation tools that engineers joke about them. Some use them so often they refer to themselves as PowerPoint engineers, says Addy First, cofounder of Quarter20. Addy is a UCLA business school graduate who partnered with a project with the other Quarter20 cofounder, Mai Bui, and got obsessed with generating documentation easier — and making it smarter. How smart? Quarter20 is smart enough to detect the screw mentioned in your notes and generate a parts list.
As a product engineer, the last thing you have to do — and the last thing you want to do — is the documentation. But you don’t have a choice. It’s the only way those who have to put your product together and those who use it will know how. But writing is not why you went into engineering. Writing is what journalist, writers, poets, right? But still, your product awaits your attention. Say it is a motor that is to be installed in a chassis. You will need to document what fasteners (1/4-20, perhaps?), how much torque to apply… Sigh. You pull up the PowerPoint.
Addy and Mai have a better way with Quarter20 works. It works like an electronic notepad, but since it is purpose-built by a mechanical engineer (Mai Bui has a MS in mechanical engineering from Stanford) it is made to recognize standard terms and parts and populate a parts list. Terms recognized as parts are shown shaded.
Mai and Addy decided to create their own 3D viewer for use in Quarter20 after finding commercially available 3D viewers on the market were less than intuitive.
“We wanted any engineer to be able to use the viewer right away,” says Addy, “So we made it super-easy to use.”
How It Works
Quarter20 may look and feel as if it is taking screenshots, but that’s their trick. It’s actually working within the CAD application (SolidWorks only at this point) and saving the orientation, viewing distance, point of view, perspective setting… all the 3D viewing parameters needed to reproduce that shot next time it is needed — such as in a design review.
In this way, Quarter20 produces what looks like a screenshot —but since it is looking at the model itself and is not a static image — should the CAD model change, so does the Quarter20 “screenshot.” If you use Quarter20 for your documentation, your documentation will keep up with all the changes made in the model.
Quarter20 is a standalone platform that reads in your CAD data and visualizes it for you. You can push your CAD directly to Quarter20 via a plug-in for SolidWorks, though.
How Much?
Quarter20’s paint is still wet. The startup only officially launched at the end of January.
Quarter20 can be licensed for $75/month, putting its pricing in the same league as Autodesk’s design and make platform, Fusion ($85/month). Quarter20 is at the high end of tech docs software pricing but compares favorably with Document360, which is $99/month.
