SolidWorks Tech Tip: Hole Patterns Without the Hassle
So one of our recent Essentials training classes finished early because all the students had a lot of CAD experience and were quick learners, and I asked the class what else they’d like to learn beyond the curriculum. One of the questions that came up was “When I make a lot of vent holes in [...]
SolidWorks Tech Tip: Color Assigned to Features
Here’s a common problem that is hard to diagnose, and easy to solve, both for the same reason: It involves a setting in TOOLS > OPTIONS that is so infrequently used, and so little-known, that one tends to invoke it only by accident. Here’s the problem: You have several colors assigned to a part file, [...]
Dassault Systèmes Announces North American HQ
Dassault Systèmes North American Headquarters Are Now Located in Waltham, MA It’s official, the DS North American headquarters are now located at the award-winning 27 acre campus in Waltham, MA . The campus showcases sustainable innovation, lifelike 3D experiences and of course, it’s LEED-certified. The campus brings together employees who had previously been split between [...]
SolidWorks EPDM Admin Tech Tip: Undo Checkout
Hopefully your users will remember to check in their documents regularly, and particularly when they will be out of the office. What happens when this is not the case and someone else needs to work on them? Enterprise PDM protects documents from update if they are checked out by another user. Here I’m logged in [...]
SolidWorks EPDM User Tech Tip: Remember to check your documents in!
Enterprise PDM provides a secure vault for your documents and the check-out / check-in process prevents more than one user from making updates at the same time. Until you check your changes back in, other users are unable to see them and they don’t have the ability to apply other changes. Since one of the key benefits of Enterprise PDM is multi-user collaboration, documents that are unnecessarily checked out can introduce bottlenecks.
SNL License Order – Doling out a License
What is license ordering? It is the order in which a particular user will pull the various levels of SolidWorks (Pro, Premium, Simulation Pro/Premium) as the user adds-in the different components. For example, if a user adds-in Toolbox Browser, he could pull either a SolidWorks Professional or SolidWorks Premium license. The license flavor is dictated by the [...]
Turkey with All the Fixin’s (A Simulation Tech Tip… or 4 or 5)
Almost without fail, in every single Simulation class I teach, someone asks me, “What’s the difference between Fixed and Immoveable?” They’re asking about two options in the Fixture dialog (often referred to as boundary conditions or restraints). It occurred to me this week: Who better to explain fixins than a Thanksgiving Turkey! So, I fired [...]
SolidWorks Tech Tip: The Most Addictive Functionality in SolidWorks… Mouse Gestures
When I first heard about Mouse Gestures, I immediately thought of an innapropriate hand gesture from that loveable Disney character… But it turns out, Mouse Gestures are about this: Introduced in SolidWorks 2010, when you hold down your Right Mouse Button and drag, a magical ring of commands appears! When your cursor passes over one [...]
SolidWorks 2012 Uninstall Changes
It’s like a robot vacuuming your house, it’s that easy now. New in 2012 is the advanced options. It does the tedious clean up you had to conduct previously. As usual the uninstall process begins from the control panel (Programs and Features > Right Mouse Click > Uninstall) which kicks off the process as usual [...]
The Motorcycle Gyrocam Project
*Special Note: The motorcycle rider in the video is Dana Seero!* I enjoy motorcycle riding and try to attend several track days each season. With the availability of many small, light camcorders on the market, it’s now pretty easy to record your sessions for playback and training. However, since they are attached to the bike [...]
