Taking the mystery out of CAD

Mention CAD (computer-aided design) software for watchmaking and you’ll likely be greeted with a quizzical look and a furrowed brow, unless that is you’re talking to the people in charge of developing movements and movement modules. Because as obscure as it may be to the ordinary man in the street, not a single person on the industrial side of watchmaking today can get by without such a tool. Compass and slide rule have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Even the artisan-watchmakers who can still manage without a fleet of CNC machines are a dying breed.

"Like a Swiss army knife"

Polysoft was set up in the 1980s to take advantage of the enormous inroads IT was making in the watch industry. Squaring up to the multi-tasking mastodons that were flooding the market, it aimed to provide a solution designed specifically for the watch sector, Switzerland’s third biggest exporter. This would prove less straightforward than imagined, yet the company persevered in the face of adversity and Tell Watch was launched in the early 2000s; the same software solution that AiM Services, which bought Polysoft in 2011, is now marketing, with some convincing arguments. Tell Watch users include Chopard Technologies, Montblanc, Zenith and Hublot: Christophe Lyner, a movement developer at Hublot, has nothing but praise for the application, which he compares to a Swiss army knife in terms of versatility and functionality.

“Our software has the advantage that it can be used as a standalone solution for watch construction or, because it is perfectly compatible with existing products on the market, as a complement to the big enterprise software, which is how Hublot uses it,” explains Eric Pascal, Mobility & Innovation Director at AiM. “It provides high-performance kinematic chain analyses and generates rapid and extremely realistic simulations.” Tell Watch is an evolutive system that integrates the latest developments from AiM’s research department, such as non-linear large deformation spring calculation, as well as developments made by users. Nicolas Déhon, who invented the Constant Escapement for Girard-Perregaux, unveiled in 2013, recently presented the principles behind the Pythagorean scale that is now part of Tell Watch. This business application provides an easy way to find sets of points whose coordinates and the distance between them have a finite number of decimals. This is a frequent occurrence in movement construction, particularly when two gears mesh.

The Acrobat Reader of watchmaking

Not everyone is familiar with this kind of nitty-gritty, and so AiM has gone a step further with Tell View, a new application (released last year) that generates a 3D simulation of the finishing on the movement and exterior parts. This 3D model can be examined through to its core as an interactive exploded view, which the user can dissect at leisure so as to gain a better understanding of its composition and functioning from every angle. Tell View is a great, user-friendly way of presenting information with applications in training, marketing, after-sales and communication departments. “Tell View makes technical data available to everyone, and so we want to take it into every level of the company,” says Eric Pascal. “To give a comparison, it reads 3D animations generated by CAD software in the same way Acrobat Reader reads PDF files.”

Visitors to the Emile Chouriet stand at this year’s Baselworld could see in action the application which AiM developed especially for the occasion. The Geneva Watchmaking School, which already used Tell Watch with its students, also turned to AiM to develop an interactive touchscreen manual of watchmaking concepts for students to consult, which in January won a Digital Award, presented to the most innovative IT projects in French-speaking Switzerland. Computer-aided design is no longer such a mystery.

*EPHJ – EPTM – SMT
14 – 17 June 2016
Palexpo Geneva

AiM Services
Stand R66