| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
The 20th release of SolidWorks is here. New functionality will make your designs go more smoothly with less work and powerful new tools give you insight on how design changes impact profitability.
Now, you can focus on the aspects of design that drives your business.
|
|||||
Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp. (DS SolidWorks) unveiled the SolidWorks® 2011 product line, delivering new ways to speed product design, deepen collaboration, and strengthen designers’ engagement with manufacturing.
The new SolidWorks 2011 family of products includes hundreds of improvements requested by customers who use SolidWorks every day to design new products, validate their performance, communicate with partners, manage design data, and minimize a product’s impact on the environment.
"In addition to refinements throughout, SolidWorks 2011’s new CAD and PDM capabilities will enable our engineering groups to intelligently tackle new challenges in the design of our products and production systems," said Janine D. Essex, global product line manager for the SolidWorks application at Robert Bosch LLC, a leading global technology and services company. “We’re expecting measurable, improved, and enhanced productivity throughout our customer base.”
“There are big changes,” said Robert Teele, lead mechanical designer for Nuvera Fuel Cells, a clean energy products company in Billerica, Mass. “Our production and marketing departments, for example, are eager to use the new walk-through animation capability to explore our equipment designs and our custom on-site installations with customers.”
For more information about the SolidWorks 2011 product family, including video demonstrations, please visit SolidWorks 2011 website or contact a reseller.
One of the best ways to get involved in the SolidWorks community is through the SolidWorks Forums.
Ask questions, help others and make use of the masses of helpful info posted by other uses and SolidWorks employees.
Visit https://forum.solidworks.com
Register if you aren't already signed up for a Customer Portal account. If you already have a Customer Portal account then simply just login.
On the right you will see some links to help get you started. follow these for videos that help you get the most out of you SolidWorks Forums experience.
Other ways to get involved
If you have ever wished SolidWorks had a particular feature or you want to help shape the development of future releases, here are a few options for you:
Suggest new functionality you would like to see in SolidWorks products.
The Early Visibility (EV) program provides you with an opportunity to review and test a Service Pack before general release.
Each release of SolidWorks is preceded by a beta program. Participating in beta programs gives you the opportunity to test the new release, identify any critical issues, and submit bugs for correction before the SP0 release. The 2011 beta program has changed a bit from previous years. There are more special competitions, more prizes to be awarded, and you'll have a chance to raise your visibility within the SolidWorks community. Our 2011 beta programs will be released in early July, 2010. Please log in to the Customer Portal to sign up today!
At SolidWorks, we constantly focus on the design of our products. With every release, we consider hundreds – if not thousands – of decisions that affect your experience. The SolidWorks User Research program helps us design products that fit your needs, and gives you the opportunity to help shape product concepts early on.
Visit the SolidWorks website for more details: http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/get_involved.htmJuly sees the start of the SolidWorks 2011 Beta! Don’t forget to sign up for notifications by adding Beta News to your Customer Centre profile.
With the Beta coming very soon it has made me think of the last release and which new functionality or tools I used and got the most out of.
From my previous posts you will see I am a fan of the mouse gestures… I think these had the biggest impact on me as I soon found myself using these in a natural way, I really missed them when I was using 3DVIA Composer and even started wishing that PowerPoint and Excel had support for them too. Here are a few tips to get the most out of Mouse Gestures:
Another tool that I have used quite a lot is the Assembly Visualisation tool. If you need to sort and view your assemblies by any property such as Mass or Material then Assembly Visualisation is the tool for you.
Image (A) On the Evaluate tab you will see the Assembly Visualisation tool
Image (B) Assembly tree is sorted by Mass and colour coded to help understand the impact of mass in the design.
The assembly tree, although sorted differently is still available to interact with to open or edit any of the components.
The colours bar is editable, you can also filter the tree and graphics area to hone in on important areas of the design.
Image (C) Here the tree has been filtered by dragging the top rollback bar to show only the bought in components.
The Assembly tree and properties can also be saved out as text, Excel or in PDF format!
Now is a great time to take a look again at the 2010 What’s New PDF (found under the help menu) and refresh on some of the tools added last year while we look forward to a great 2011 Beta!
…I don’t think I mentioned that there are some great prizes this year for the best Beta testers!! Look out for notifications in July!
As of SolidWorks 2010 the heads up toolbar can be completely customised to locate any tool that you wish to place on it. I have recently seen a couple of additions that I thought were very useful.
I always forget that you can right click on the double chevron at the top of the feature manager to change display states so I like to have the display states fly out on the toolbar.
The selection filter is also good to have on there… quick access to selection of certain types of entities without having to bring up the toolbar every time.
Creating planes and curves is always a common task… having these fly outs on the heads up bar means you don't have to go back to the features tab all the time, it also helps keep the “S” key shortcut bar cleaner.
Just right click on the heads up bar and choose “customize”. Pick the “commands” tab and simply drag and drop the commands onto the toolbar.
/Justin
Empire Cycles Uses SolidWorks to Develop New Lower-Cost Method for Producing High-Performance Mountain Bikes
A maverick U.K. cycle company used SolidWorks® CAD software to create a mountain bike that defies conventional design techniques and didn’t need endless prototyping to get to market.
SolidWorks helped two-year-old Empire Cycles incorporate automotive and aerospace manufacturing techniques into its high-performance Empire AP-1WR mountain bike.
At £3,065 for the frame only, the AP-1 is for serious riders who want to get down the mountain fast and smoothly, and who also like futuristic, unconventional styling.
It is made from three large cast components in a design that requires no welding or riveting, much like a vehicle or aircraft suspension. No welding and riveting make the AP-1 faster and cheaper to produce because Empire does not have to purchase and ship parts to attach to the frame. The cast components also make the AP-1 stronger and able to resist powerful shocks despite its relatively light weight. With the frame subject to no distortion or thermal shock from riveting and welding, testing the design was simpler because there were fewer spots where it could fail.
Empire Cycles co-founder Chris Williams said SolidWorks helped him overcome production challenges that led Empire’s first foundry to declare the design impossible to produce.
“One foundry told us that it was impossible to cast the swing arm – which is a hollow, rigid shell – at the four millimeters we wanted,” Williams said. “That turned out to be false. We moved to another foundry and explained what we were trying to achieve. They weren’t able to understand what I wanted them to do with the swing arm’s inner surface, so I did it myself in SolidWorks to show them. I could create cutters in SolidWorks that let me design very complex shapes and do many iterations quickly without wrecking the overall design.”
When the foundry was able to produce the cast parts – the swing arm, frame and seat post – Empire built a production model of the bike and gave it to a test rider “and he basically tried to destroy it,” Williams said. He performed preliminary analysis with SolidWorks Simulation Xpress, modified the 3D models and sent them to a specialist for more detailed analysis. This replaced the conventional prototyping process, where companies might create dozens of prototypes before going to production.
“It was a very risky strategy but it worked because SolidWorks enabled us to see everything we needed to see,” Williams said. “We could analyze the weight, see how everything fit together, and SolidWorks was brilliant for manipulating the assembly so we had a true idea for how everything would work in the physical world.”
Go to www.empire-cycles.com for more information.
SolidWorks 2010 introduced some great new functionality to the area of Virtual parts and assemblies.
First of all lets go back to basics:
What are virtual parts and assemblies?
Virtual components are especially useful in top-down design. During the conceptual design process, when you frequently experiment with and make changes to the assembly structure and components, using virtual components has several advantages over the bottom-up design method:
So what’s new in virtual parts and assemblies in SolidWorks 2010?
Lets take a look at an example:
Today I am in the lucky position of watching one of our resellers run through the new features in SolidWorks products for 2010.
A room full of customers who seem to have a great relation ship with the reseller and who also seem very eager to see what the day brings!!
If you haven’t been to one of these customer events then make sure you check out Launch Events and get signed up.
One of the tools that seemed to raise great interest is the new Configuration Publisher. This tool allows you to build up the logic of your configurations in an easy drag and drop interface… what’s great about this method is that you don’t have to manually add all the configurations before people can use them!.
If another user wants a configuration of this design they just pick the configuration based on real information like size, what features are needed, what type of part you want or what material etc… no longer do you need to remember the exact part number for the wanted design!!!
SolidWorks will then build that configuration on demand!
Sharing configurations of designs doesn’t stop there. Whilst using the Configuration Publisher you can also see a 3D Content Central preview… Here you can see the “online” view of your design. There is also a Publish to 3D Content Central button too.
This will take you to www.3Dcontentcentral.com just sign up as a free supplier and you can very quickly share your designs with thousands of registered users…
Recently I heard of an independent survey that stated that around 80% of CAD users will look to buy the component that they have downloaded and used in their assembly… so putting your models online could boost your sales!!
If you are a current subscription customer you can get the latest version of SolidWorks right now on the customer portal.
If you have ever seen me present SolidWorks you will know that I have my favourite features and tools… (worrying I know!) well 2010 has many new features I really like but there can only be one favourite… What is it… Mouse Gestures!!!
If you hold the right mouse button down and move it in a direction you will see a disc appear. This disc can contain icons to activate SW commands.
Right Mouse Gestures: My Tip!
Speed up your designing… Make a quick movement in one of 4 or 8 directions to activate commands. These commands can be chosen by you as the “disc” is fully configurable. Just right click on a toolbar and select customise. Then head over to the Mouse Gestures tab and start setting up your disc.
I have found that the most natural tools are viewing tools as you have the S Key for all your features.
Below is my set up for the Assembly, Part, Sketch and Drawing environment
My tip would be to keep the icons and positions quite consistent through the different environments as this make it easier to remember… after a little while it starts to feel really natural and you will soon be wondering how you lived without it :)
Remember that Normal To will now view Normal to the closest standard view so you don’t need to waste space on you disc for Front, Left, Top etc.
Watch the videos and see the functionality up close
Recent Comments