Today was the final day of SolidWorks World 2009. I guess the fun can’t last forever! I had a wonderful time, met a lot of interesting people, saw amazing technologies that I hadn’t even dreamt of, and learned a lot. I know I will never forget it and I’m really grateful to all the wonderful friends from SolidWorks for allowing me to be here in the first place.

The day started early as usual, with the General Session.  Fielder Hiss, Director of Product Management for DS SolidWorks, greeted everyone and announced Don Richardson, Director of Global Innovation and PLM Industry Strategy for Microsoft. Microsoft is another one of the biggest platinum sponsors of this and other events, and a very important partner and supporter.

Right after this, Fielder Hiss introduced the next guest as one of SolidWorks clients from San Francisco, and imagine our surprise when we saw Mike North and Joe Grant, co-hosts of Prototype This!  One of them came pulling the other in one of their crazy contraptions. 

They talked to us a bit about what they do in the show and how they use SolidWorks in the design of their prototypes. They showed us a few examples of their favorite prototypes. This one here, I believe, is the first one they made for the show, but it never saw the light of day. It was supposed to be something like a robot that scans around for dog… errr… deposits, to pick them up. Like a pooper-scooper… Hey, I need one of those!  I think they called it the Scoop Bot.

Another one of their prototypes was this massive thing you see here. It was supposed to be a backyard waterslide simulator, that would provide with the experience of the water park, but without the size, but due to the size of the materials available to build it, the design grew bigger than expected, and they ended up having to build it inside a huge warehouse instead of a backyard and needed a whole team of extra welders to finish it.

This one is their six by six car.

Inspired on this little buglet thing that you see here.

This one in particular was a real challenge for them and it didn’t quite do what their producers were expecting it to do, so it was considered a failure by the producers. However, as Mike and Joe pointed out, it is all part of the design and engineering process. Prototypes aren’t supposed to be perfect and work the first time, all the time. This is also a learning experience.

By the way, have you noticed that one of them has a broken arm? Well, this is how he broke it.

But wait, there’s more! Keep reading and I’ll tell you all about it in the second part of this saga…