manipulating customer data

Last week I received a bracket from a customer similar to the one shown in the picture below.  They were asking us to figure out what the net weight of the part would be on a component like this, sounds simple enough right?  I thought so until I realized that the model was designed out of .048” thick material and they were looking for results from and .052” thick material.  It can’t ever just be an easy fix can it?

Well, actually it can.  I utilized a tool that I rarely touch called Move Face.  You can access it by going to Insert > Face > Move.  Once you are in the command the first option you are going to want to select is how you want to move the face.  You can offset, translate, or rotate.  In my case all I needed to do is offset it .004” to get my desired thickness.  After you select that option, you will want to select which faces you want to alter.  I selected all of the “outside faces” so that everything was going to move in 1 direction compared to the part.  After this is completed all you need to do is specify how much you want to move the selected faces and which direction you want to move them.  VOILA, done!  My imported customer part was now at .052” thick instead of .048”. 

But let’s add another twist, what if instead of making my stock thicker I wanted to rotate the top tab up by 20°.  Easy as well.  For this however, you will want to turn on your temporary axis so that you can select one of them to rotate around.  Now you will want to select only the faces that you wish to rotate and then tell SolidWorks to rotate around the axis of your choosing.  In my case, I would probably want to rotate around the axis of the radii between the vertical and horizontal legs of this part.

This is just a quick way for you to manipulate data that has no feature history.  I hope this gives you an idea of how you can use this sometimes overlooked functionality.

reference triad view manipulation shortcuts

I wanted to take a quick moment and either inform you or remind you of some view manipulation tricks using the reference triad.  So here it is (straight from the SolidWorks help files), short and too the point.

• Select an axis = See the view normal to the screen.
• Select an axis that is normal to the screen = Change the view direction 180 degrees.
• Shift + select = Rotate 90 degrees about the axis.
• Ctrl + Shift + select = Rotate 90 degrees in the opposite direction.
• Alt + select = Rotate about the axis by the Arrow keys increment specified in Tools > Options > System Options > View.
• Ctrl + Alt + select = Rotate in the opposite direction.

If you would rather not even see the reference triad you can turn it off by going to Tools > Options > Display/Selection > uncheck “Display reference triad”.

By keeping some of these quick little shortcuts in the back of your mind you can save yourself a good amount of time during your design process.

open only what you need “quickly”

How many of you have run into the situation that you need to QUICKLY open a large assembly with multiple configurations?  I ran into this last week and it reminded me of some useful options during the Open process inside SolidWorks.

The picture below shows that standard Open dialog window that appears.  When you single click a file in the window you will notice some options that appear towards the bottom of the window.  The situation that I was in last week is that I wanted to open a specific configuration so that I could export it to a STEP file.  In the configurations dropdown, I selected the configuration I wanted to open.  Then you have other options like whether or not to open the file in lightweight or in large assembly mode (if the file selected is an assembly) and also whether or not you want to load hidden components.  By selecting or unselecting these options will determine how quickly your assembly will open.

Another option that is available in the window is called Quick view / Selective open.  This will open up a “snapshot” of your assembly and then you can manually select which components you want to open or load into memory.  This option does not take into effect which configuration you select from the dropdown however.

I hope this helps!

quick hits: solidworks updates, changes, and screencasts

Over the past couple of days SolidWorks Corporation has made quite a bit of noise that I wanted to make all of you aware of.  So here it is.

SolidWorks 2010 SP3.1 Available

Today SolidWorks released SolidWorks 2010 SP3.1 to all of the active subscription customers.  According to the technical bulletin released the difference between SP3.0 and SP3.1 is administrative and if you already have SP3.0 installed there is no need to update to SP3.1.  I have SolidWorks 2010 SP3.0 installed already but I decided to update to SP3.1 anyways and it looks as if it is about a 66MB install.

To read the technical bulletin follow this link: SolidWorks Technical Alerts & News

SolidWorks Portal Login Changes

On Sunday, May 16, 2010, SolidWorks will be making some changes that will affect how you login to the various SolidWorks sites (Customer Portal, Forums, etc.).  One email address and password will get you into anything that you are entitled to.  You no longer will have to manage multiple logins in order to get on the different SolidWorks sites.

To read the technical bulletin, which includes some key benefits of this new system, follow this link: SolidWorks Technical Alerts & News

7 Tips for Windows 7

After the very popular Microsoft Excel tips for SolidWorks Users screencast that Darren Henry did late year came out, I heard a ton of positive feedback.  Well SolidWorks has released a 2nd screencast for you that is just as good.  This time, Jeremy Regnerus walks us through some tips for all of you users who have made the move to Window 7 already.  There is a ton of great information in this screencast and they even included a Windows 7 hotkey cheat sheet in PDF format for you to download and hang up in your office.

To see this awesome screencast follow this link:  7 Tips for Windows 7

So there you have it, a quick hit roundup of what has happened in the world of SolidWorks since yesterday morning.

solidworks 2d editor…what you need to know

Last week the official production release of SolidWorks 2010 SP3.0 went live in the SolidWorks Customer Portal.  With this update there is a major enhancement that was made to the dimension palette which received some serious attention here during a previous post on that tool.  I will do an upcoming post on this soon.  Another big change to the SP3.0 release was a name change to one of the SolidWorks products.

The product formerly known as DWGeditor is now called SolidWorks 2D Editor.  This name change stems from a lengthy court battle between Dassault Systemes SolidWorks and Autodesk over the use of the DWG.  You can see more about what that was about here if you are interested.  Anyways, there are some things that you need to know when making the jump to SP3.0 as far as the SolidWorks 2D offering is concerned.

When you do the standard update process using the SolidWorks Installation Manager you usually can start it, walk away, and be all set when you return.  However, with the name change to the product there are a few additional things that you will need to do in order to make sure that all of your programs are up to date.  Here is what you will need to know in order to stay up to date.

1.  DWGeditor is now named SolidWorks 2D Editor (pretty similar icons, huh?)

    is now    

2.  You will notice in the  picture below  that there is no mention of DWGeditor or SolidWorks 2D Editor during the update process.  Proceed with the standard update process as normal.

3.  Once the update has finished you will see at least 2 different SolidWorks programs listed in your control panel.  Click any of them and select uninstall.

4.  Once you have launched the uninstall process, you will get a screen similar to the one shown below.  UNCHECK all of the components OTHER than the DWGeditor 2010 item.  Click “Remove Items” in the lower right hand corner to proceed with uninstalling DWGeditor.

5.  Once you have completed uninstalling DWGeditor, log into the SolidWorks Customer Portal and on the Downloads page download and install SolidWorks 2D Editor which is listed beneath the SolidWorks main releases.

6.  You should be all set once the installation process has been completed.  You can find SolidWorks 2D Editor in the exact same location that you would have found DWGeditor.

There you have it, hopefully all you need to know for this name change.  There is nothing in the program that was visibly obvious to me that changed other than the name.

I am not sure how this product will be handled in the future either.  I would hope that beginning with SolidWorks 2011 you will find this product in the standard SWIM install program so that you do not need to keep looking in the SolidWorks Customer Portal for possible updates.

Happy 2D editing everyone!

making the switch to windows 7

Over the past 1 month or so I have been extremely busy switching over our CAD / CAM department to Windows 7 64bit.  I have personally been running Windows 7 64bit on my work laptop since late last year and absolutely love it.  I wanted to hold off switching over our engineering department for a little while but after sitting through Greg Jankowski’s CAD Administrators Boot Camp at SWW10 I decided to push the switch to management.

Why?

When I returned from my trip to Anaheim in February I had the following mix of operating systems that I was managing:

• (3) Windows XP 32bit
• (1) Windows XP 64bit
• (1) Windows Vista 64bit
• (1) Windows 7 64bit

By having this variety it makes it more difficult to diagnose possible crashes with software and also very hard to test the software to make sure it is in good enough condition to deploy to the masses.  Also, Greg mentioned during his presentation that Windows 7 has become the gold standard in operating systems because of its management of system resources which is especially important in an engineering environment.  All of you know that Windows XP 32bit was a really good operating system, but it still is 32bit.  Windows XP 64bit was an afterthought and therefore the operating system was probably worse the Windows Vista 64bit, and well, we all know about Windows Vista 64bit.

So that leaves Windows 7 in the 64bit platform as the “chosen” OS.  As of right now the OS’s in our CAD / CAM departments are as follows:

• (1) Windows XP 32bit running SolidWorks 2010
• (1) Windows XP 32bit running Esprit 2010
• (1) Windows 7 32bit running Esprit 2010
• (3) Windows 7 64bit running SolidWorks 2010
• (1) Windows 7 64bit running SolidWorks 2010 and CAMWorks 2009

Currently we are financially planning on upgrading the Windows XP 32bit machine running SolidWorks within the upcoming year.  As for the Windows XP 32bit machine running Esprit there are no plans on switching that over but I eventually see this happening as well in order to maintain a consistant OS platform throughout.

The Setup

As a whole, I have not made many changes to the default OS settings that come out of the box but there are some things that you should be aware of when making the switch to Windows 7.  I have already covered these in previous blog posts but here are the relinks to those articles.

• Compatibility Mode
• ReadyBoost
• Run as Administrator
• Taskbar
• User Account Control

The majority of these things were available in Windows Vista already but seem to work more how they should in Windows 7.  So have you made the switch yet?  If not, what are you waiting for?  Feel free to drop a comment and let me know why you are still waiting or what your thoughts are of Windows 7 in a CAD environment.

Note:  SolidWorks will continue to support Windows XP until THE END of its 2011 release which is 1 year after Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP.

user account control – windows vista & 7

Over the past few weeks I have been fighting to get macros to work on my Windows 7 64bit machine.  The thing that had me baffled was that everything worked a few months back when I began writing the macro and when I resumed my work on it, all of the sudden it would not run for me.  After browsing the forums and the web I decided to contact my VAR about this issue.

The thing that I could not understand was that I could get the macro to run on a Windows XP 32bit machine and I also sent it to a user in our area that was running the exact same setup as me (Windows 7 64bit, SolidWorks 2010 SP2.1) and he could run it as well.  So what was causing this weird behavior?  User Account Control!

So what is User Account Control?  Here is Wikipedia’s description:

User Account Control (UAC) is a technology and security infrastructure introduced with Microsoft‘s Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 operating system. It aims to improve the security of Microsoft Windows by limiting application software to standard user privileges until an administrator authorizes an increase or elevation. In this way, only applications trusted by the user may receive administrative privileges, and malware should be kept from compromising the operating system. In other words, a user account may have administrator privileges assigned to it, but applications that the user runs do not inherit those privileges unless they are approved beforehand or the user explicitly authorizes it.

To reduce the possibility of lower-privilege applications communicating with higher-privilege ones, another new technology, User Interface Privilege Isolation is used in conjunction with User Account Control to isolate these processes from each other.  One prominent use of this is Internet Explorer 7‘s "Protected Mode".

So how did I fix the problem I was having?  I simply turned off UAC, rebooted my system, and the macro ran perfectly.  Then I slowly moved my UAC settings back to where they were previously and the macro continued to run.  I am now back to the original UAC settings and everything is working as expected.  You can find the UAC setting by going to Control Panel > User Accounts:

And then select “Change User Account Controls settings” which is right under the “Change your picture” option.  Then slide the bar to your desired security level.

So if you are experiencing “odd” behavior with SolidWorks in Windows Vista or Windows 7 you might want to change these settings and see if it fixes your problems.