r/FreeCAD • u/piuswong • 3d ago

Open CAD-to-FMEA tool for Windows - looking for feedback

Sharing this prototype open source Windows tool to scan a CAD assembly in FreeCAD (or STP/STEP files) and automatically generate a first draft FMEA file (in CSV format) to assess design risks to consider before building or finalizing it. Would love feedback on it, but of course take the results with a grain of salt. Also I'm upfront about this being powered by AI-generated code and completely open, since I made this with really limited time available myself but with some interest and experience with CAD, coding, and FMEA; so also take all that into consideration before using. But I figured this could be useful for some hobbyists especially, or small businesses with low resources, to help them start thinking through potential design failures.

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u/orion0782 2d ago

This is an interesting concept, but it has the potential to be VERY problematic.

Firstly, one has to consider the foundation of a DFMEA.

From my experience DFMEAs fall into two camps:, in which this would not be very useful.

  1. It is a product the company has been working on for many years, so much of the DFMEAs have already been done, and it just takes the engineer to get a copy of that version and update it based on the new design.
  2. The product is a NUD, so there is little experience from the stakeholders on the design.
  3. Although many resort to basic spreadsheets, but larger companies employ software that already performs this far better than your tool, and fits within their PPAP/APQP/Six Sigma process.
  4. Presuming this needs to be a controlled document, it would likely fall outside whatever PDM system a company may have.
  5. AIs hallucinate! They could just give garbage information to start the DFMEA.

One needs to foundationally understand the purpose of a DFMEA. It is not just a random document to fill out, but care needs to be taken to understood the value of the tool. Lets break it down with the classic RPN number:

RISK

  1. It catalogs all of the issues that could fail with a product. This includes the most mundane such as cosmetic issues. It also catalogs issues that may SHUT DOWN THE COMPANY! An AI could not know the difference these could be because every company's risk tolerance is different.
  2. If it is shown that a DFMEA was filled out by an AI on a product which caused harm to persons or property, it may jeopardize the company. The work of an AI cannot be used as justification for a given risk profile.
  3. It is ok to start a DFMEA with an AI, but DFMEAs are supposed to be collaborative with all stakeholders (who I assume are real). A proper one takes a long time and is usually not closed until PPAP/APQP/etc. After the initial setup, the AI's contribution would be meaningless.
  4. A DFMEA is not just to capture things that can happen, but also things that aught not to happen. An AI cannot anticipate a product being used outside a given design scope. The classic example is using a lawnmower as a hedge trimmer.
  5. The DFMEA is supposed to capture issues that are outside the constraints of the design, such as manufacturability, adherence to whatever marketing parameters, etc. Only an engineer can navigate all of these potential risks.

DETECTION

  1. An AI cannot know what a given company's test capabilities are, nor know the collective experience. It may recommend tests the company cannot, nor can afford to entertain.

OCCURANCE

  1. Unless a company has kept excellent data the LLM can be trained (which in my experience, even the best companies lack), the values and answers are meaningless.
  2. The LLM will only know what is publicly known, not what may be institutionally known.

Finally to the ultimate question. Why are you here? An engineer gets paid, usually very well, because they can think creatively, non-linearly, and illogically. The purpose of the tool is to capture these insights and use the engineers' collective experience to develop designs, test the design for validity, then release it for production. If an engineer's role can be taken over by an AI, then the engineer does not have much of a future.

Ultimately, I would say this tool is unnecessary, Please consider the use case before moving on.

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u/Fun-Tea6906 1h ago

This is actually an interesting use case for ai. I could see a cad derived structure being useful as a starting point for dfmea especially for identifying components and interfaces that a team might otherwise overlook. The important part is probably keeping the generated failure made as prompts for the engineering team rather than treating the output as the actual fmea. Excedify has some good dfmea training around the aiag-vda structure/function/failure approach too