Personal homepage of Maciek Szymanski Welcome to my personal homepage. It's currently in very beta stage, but I hope I'll find more time to work on it. However ther is really a lot of things I'd like to find time to work on... You can contact me by e-mail: ms@sdf-eu.org. This page is hosted on sdf-eu.org public accsess Unix server. I'd like to thank people running this excelent service.

I am independent aviation engineer specializing in cabin systems and ergonomy design. I am graduate of the Faculty of Power and Aerospace Enginiering at Politechnika Warszawska (they like to call them Warsaw University of Technology in English to sound more like MIT ;-) ).

Despite my specialization on ergonmy I used to work on preliminary design of complete aircrafts (in stage of conceptual desgin) for PZL Okecie (now part of EADS) and other smaller companies including Stemme AG. Those work included preparation of general layout, outer geometry and visualisation of the designed aircraft. This is the kind of work I most like.

I've also done some more detail work, like design of metal wing structure for SportJet. You can find CAD rendering of the wing internals here and here.

Computers

In my work I have to deal a lot with computers. After experiences with PC's running DOS and Windows and Macintoshes running MacOS (classic) I started to use RISC machines running various flavours of UNIX. With first keycklicks on HP9000/700 series workstation running HP-UX I've found that an unix workstation is a computer for me. Even if I could use PC for the same work I feel much more comfortable with a classic unix system. I find it to be a partner to work with than a box to run specific program. Currently I'm using HP Visualize C240 at work and Sun SPARCstation 20 at home.

My SPARCstation 20 named Antygona. Even if it's a bit outdated now (SS-20 are out of production since 1997) it's still nice computer to work with. It's very well designed (and has really excellent mechanical quality) and perform well for dayly use (like web browsing, e-mail, image and video processing etc.). Inside this small pizza-box case you will find four processors: two main SuperSPARC CPU's, an AMD 5x86 for PC emulation with SunPC accelerator and graphics proceseor of integrated SX framebuffer. There is also SCA hard disk, CD-ROM, 2.88Mb floppy drive and SunVideo realtime video compression board. Antygona is powered by Solaris 2.6 with OpenWindows. Thanks to the SunPC software and accelerator it's also capable to run PC software along with Solaris with no performance drop. On the left side you can see Bull Postscript laser printer.

CAD and more...

Most of my work I've done using Ungraphics from EDS, ranging form version 9 up to NX2 (former 20). In many cases (and especialy my personal projects) I also use MicroCadam Cornerstone, which is almost completly forgoten, but excelent CAD program designed for Lockheed back in 70's and free to use (even for comercial purposes) in DOS version (it also perfectly works under SunPC). The code of Cadam was used by Dassault to develop well known CATIA CAD system. I've some experience with CATIA v4 and find many similarities between those programs.

For preliminary design visualisation I'm using Blender - an excellent free 3D modeller, with very good rendering capabilities. After geting used to Blender's GUI it's very fast to use, and very different from typical CAD program. Modeling in blender is more like clay modeling it's not very precise but give very good "feel" of modeled shape and allows to quickly visualize your ideas in 3D.

This is rendering of preliminary styling of ZZ13 custom build sport car based on Skoda engine. After making layout in Microcadam the 3D model was build in Blender using layout views as reference. Complete modeling and rendering took about two evenings.

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