So as is becoming standard on Friday’s I will cover a couple of the other assembly changes that you will see in this year’s release of SolidWorks.  Every year there are updates/changes that you will see that are minor in regards to the actual change and who might use them but still are very important to those who do use these features on an every day basis.  I personally feel that the changes you will see below are nice changes but I really only use 1 of them on a regular basis.  However, they are all important so I will cover them here.

Component References

In 2010 you will be able to assign a different component reference for each instance of a component in an assembly.  This can be extremely useful electrical harnesses or circuit board assemblies.  When we visited Boston in August this new feature received a few ooh’s and ahh’s from the bloggers that use these type of tools.

Another cool part about this is that you can also turn the component references on as a column in your BOM for your drawing as shown below.  Also you can select component reference for your balloon value on your assemblies.

Display States

Now when you are editing an assembly you will be able to specify which display state to use in the assembly.  Before it automatically used the display state that was current when the document was last saved.  In order to override this in 2010 you need to do the following.

• In the Display Pane RMB click a component > click Component Display State, Your Display State Name > in the Component Properties box under the Referenced Display State select the display state you wish to use.

SpeedPak

You will now be able to create a SpeedPak configuration for an assembly that has a “SpeedPak’d” subassembly active in it.