Hey there,
It’s Robin from CFD Engine & as the subject says, I’m sharing a couple of product ideas this week.
Two little things I’m thinking of building, but before I do anything, I thought I’d float them past you to get some feedback.
So, what am I thinking?
What’s the idea?
I’m not short on ideas (I even have the occasional good one) but for this project, let me introduce you to my super-effective idea filter™ – a Venn diagram of “things I would use, things YOU might use & things I could actually build”
More fully, I’m looking for things that I could build, that are genuinely useful, a joy to use & make CFD a little easier for a bunch of folks.
I’m not looking for big ideas – no markets will be disrupted by this product – I’m intentionally thinking small.
But, if it could generate some revenue, that would be a welcome bonus 🙌
The plan is to prototype a couple of ideas, share those prototypes with you, let you play with them, get your feedback & iterate from there.
These are the first two ideas that I’m planning to mock up…
A terminal-based OpenFOAM helper
OpenFOAMers are in the terminal a lot. So for this one, I’m imagining a command-line app that lets you browse & search a collection of CFD cheatsheets in your terminal.
Detailed, nicely formatted, working offline & running natively on Windows, Mac & Linux.
A handy way to look up things like…
- “how do I export an isosurface?”
- “how do I plot residuals?”
- “how do I monitor mass-flow rate?”
- “how do I add a
cellZonetosnappyHexMeshDict?” - “how do I plot layer coverage?”
- “how do I change a patch’s type?”
All ready to be copy-paste’d into your dictionaries, without leaving the command line.
Kind of like tldr-pages, Cheat or Navi but for the forgetful OpenFOAMer.
In the long-term, this would probably get blown away by something AI-based, but I think it could be useful for a while.
A simple CFD project dashboard
The idea here is to create a simple way to record & display key metrics about your simulations without the need to maintain a database or upload your data.
It would be based on simple text files that live alongside your CFD files, it would work offline, run on Windows, Mac & Linux & would (probably) be CFD-code agnostic.
It might be terminal-based, but I’ve got an idea for something a little prettier than that.
I imagine it occupying a space between a simple run-list.txt and an Excel sheet – but therein lies the issue. You probably already have a solution for this “problem” & you’re not looking for something else 🤔
How good would it need to be to get your attention?
Thoughts?
I know that’s not a lot to go on, but what do you reckon? Would either of these tools fit into your CFD workflow? Would you use them? Do they even make sense?
Or am I on the wrong track? What other opportunities should I be exploring?
Remember, these are supposed to be useful little things that are relatively easy to build – no solvers, boundary conditions, schemes or turbulence models allowed here 😜
I’d love to know what you think – drop me a note – this would be an excellent time to share your thoughts 🫣
Until next week, stay safe,
