Two little product ideas

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 cellZone to snappyHexMeshDict?”
• “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,