The SolidWorks Blog

View and Annotate SolidWorks Files Anywhere with eDrawings Viewer

Imagine this scenario: you’re working from home and a team member asks to you to review their product designed in SolidWorks. You do not have access to your work computer, which has SolidWorks, but you need to provide feedback quickly to keep the design process moving. How do you view the file?

Thankfully, SolidWorks has a FREE solution to help you out. The eDrawings Viewer allows you to open eDrawings files, get dimensions, and collaborate with others by using the mark-up capability. This means you can annotate the design on the spot and share your thoughts with your team without worrying about working remotely.

The eDrawings Viewer is easy to download – you can find it on the SolidWorks homepage under the Products tab. Just click on Free CAD Tools: the second item on the page is the eDrawings Viewer. To download, just click “Download eDrawings Viewer FREE” and, presto, you’re done!

To see if the program installed correctly, check out some cool designs from our customers Donn McKinney and Teversham Engineering.

The Final Frontier: How Copenhagen Suborbitals Took Off with SolidWorks

It’s no mistake that a New York Times headline from last September read "Space Tourism is Here". While the human race has already reached the final frontier, the majority of people have probably never ventured into space, let alone traveled beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. With the recent upspring of private companies focused on building crafts for human space flight and new developments in technologies and composite materials, SolidWorks has been able to lend a hand towards helping companies like Copenhagen Suborbitals.

Designing an open-source manned space rocket and capsule for suborbital space flight, Copenhagen Suborbitals believes that the sky is the limit, quite literally. Eager to share his story, Kristian von Bengtson, founder of Copenhagen Suborbitals, blogs regularly for Wired magazine. Some of you SolidWorks fans may even notice that his models and simulations are pulled from our software.

Using SolidWorks Professional, SolidWorks Premium, and SolidWorks Flow Simulation, Copenhagen Suborbitals has built the capsule geometry, exported the drawings for laser cutting, and conducted FEM analysis of structures to see if they meet flight requirements. SolidWorks, combined with sketching capabilities, is one of the most important tools in the early research and development phase and the production phases of von Bengtson’s project.

Copenhagen Suborbitals has used eDrawings to share new designs and get ideas from others. To see the latest capsule design, you can download it here: Download Copenhagen Suborbitals capsule in eDrawings. Feel free to offer your own suggestions, if you would like via the eDrawings file.

New on Born to Design: Design That Matters uses SolidWorks to help save newborns with jaundice

The team at Design That Matters brings innovative solutions to underprivileged communities in developing countries. Using SolidWorks to develop their Firefly phototherapy machine, they found a way to bring affordable jaundice treatment to newborns in developing countries.

You can see the complete video on the Born to Design website.

Donn McKinney’s U.S.S. Missouri Propelling Forward with eDrawings

Since 2011, when we first featured Donn McKinney’s U.S.S Missouri project, our friend Donn has further progressed in his work. To give some background to those of you who are unfamiliar with Donn’s project, Donn, a fan of World War II-era US battleships, is currently building a fully operational virtual replica of the U.S.S. Missouri in collaboration with the U.S. Navy. Using the replica, he plans to examine the boat’s functionality.

To show us some of his work, Donn converted his models into eDrawings files. And here’s the best part: you can view them too! Click here for a full download: Download Donn McKinneys Models in eDrawings. If you don’t have eDrawings already, you will need to download it to view his spectacular model from all 360 degrees.

Donn was very eager to convert his models into eDrawings files because they’re much easier to share and are generally smaller than SolidWorks files. In fact, using eDrawings for iOS, you can share models with customers, friends, or family using your iPhone or iPad. With eDrawings' new augmented reality feature, Donn can even see how the replica would look in his house!

Donn has realized numerous possibilities with the eDrawings software propelling his efforts forward. Do you have any stories about how you have used eDrawings?

Now available: eDrawings for iOS with Augmented Reality

We've all been there. Your manager or customer has been looking at 3D images of your latest product design for months on your computer.  But when the first prototype is put on the table in front of them, they say something like "Are you sure that's the right size, because it looked smaller on the computer screen."  And since you're on the verge of releasing the design to tooling, you mentally scramble to figure out a way to avoid redoing several weeks worth of work.

How does this happen?  You've been sharing the design with them the entire time.  So how could they perceive it so differently?

When you think about it, whether you're designing a watch or a motorcycle, everything ends up being the same size on your computer screen.  We zoom-to-fit to maximize our work space, and there is usually no visual reference on the screen to help us correctly perceive size.  So we're not certain of a product's actual size until we have a physical model that we can compare to other objects in the real world.

Wouldn't it be great if you could take your design and put a virtual model of it on the table right next to you in the room?  That way you could then look at it next to real products, slide and spin it around on the table, and get a complete sense of the product's true size, scale, and proportions.  And what if you could do this at any time in the design process, and as often as you like?

Well, now you can do just that!  We have enhanced eDrawings for iOS to now include Augmented Reality (AR).  I will let the two videos below do most of the talking, but here are a few noteworthy points:

• AR is available in both the Standard and Professional versions of eDrawings for iPad and iPhone
• It lets everyone on the design team see your product at full scale so its true size is obvious to everyone. Customers who have previewed this have told us that this will be a great sales tool when promoting their own products to their customers
• You can use Configurations to load an entire product line in eDrawings, and then use AR to place any specific product variation on the table in front of your customer

I came across a real Holmatro spreader in the Partner Pavilion at SolidWorks World 2013 in Orlando. It turns out we are using that product as one of our eDrawings sample files.

eDrawings for iOS with Augmented Reality is now available in the Apple App Store.  If you previously purchased eDrawings for your iOS device, just update it in iTunes to get this new capability.

eDrawings Standard

eDrawings Professional

 

For Teknion, It’s Easy Being Green with SolidWorks

As business models and office spaces evolve to meet the expectations of the 21^st century, more companies are embracing green, open spaces and collaborative environments. Many offices are designed with sustainability in mind, such as the Dassault Systemes Boston Office which uses Teknion Furniture, a SolidWorks customer. Teknion Furniture prides itself on a variety of office systems which encourage customers’ employees to collaborate, innovate, and communicate in a continually evolving business landscape.

Teknion Furniture at the Dassault Systemes Boston Office.

Teknion aims to design furniture of the future, by expanding product lines and implementing sustainable manufacturing practices. To address these challenges, Teknion upgraded to SolidWorks Professional, SolidWorks Enterprise PDM, and SolidWorks Sustainability from its previous AutoCAD 2D design tools. The company was attracted to SolidWorks because of the software’s ease of use, design configuration, and enhanced visualization. With SolidWorks, Teknion spends less time and resources on making physical prototypes, allowing Teknion to focus more on innovating new products to optimize business environments. By implementing SolidWorks, Teknion has quadrupled its number of product lines and reduced development time by 50 percent.

Using SolidWorks Sustainability, Teknion can evaluate the environmental impact of their design decisions. The software enables the furniture company to examine factors including carbon burden, energy consumption, air emission and liquid discharges associated with a particular design. By providing greater insights into the product design, SolidWorks Sustainability allows Teknion to give side-by-side comparisons of material choices to show customers the environmental implications of using glass versus acrylic for elements in their furniture. Generating photorealistic images which display environmental information,  SolidWorks Photoview 360 helps the Teknion sales team win orders.

SolidWorks solutions helps Teknion design products more efficiently, manage global design data more effectively, and examine the environmental ramifications of its products. To learn more about how Teknion paves the way to a greener future using products like SolidWorks Sustainability, read the case study.

New in SolidWorks 2013: Previous Release Interoperability

One of the items on the SolidWorks World Top-Ten list is always the ability to open SolidWorks files in older versions of the software. Starting with SolidWorks 2013, you will have that ability. This can help you

• Reduce production delays and ease the transition to the latest release
• Collaborate and view designs with different SolidWorks versions
• Work more easily with outside customers, consultants, and manufacturers

Once it is released in the near future, you will be able to open SolidWorks 2013 parts and assemblies using SolidWorks 2012 Service Pack 5. From SolidWorks 2012 on, you you will be able to open a future version file in Service Pack 5 of the previous release. For example, in SolidWorks 2013 Service Pack 5 you will be able to open SolidWorks 2014 files.

Interoperability is only supported between consecutive releases. For example, you cannot open a SolidWorks 2014 file in SolidWorks 2012 Service Pack 5. Future version files appear in read-only mode when opened in the previous release. However, once you upgrade to the next version of SolidWorks, all the FeatureManager design tree data is available.

SolidWorks 2013 files have reduced functionality in SolidWorks 2012 Service Pack 5. SolidWorks 2013 files will not have most FeatureManager design tree data when opened in SolidWorks 2012 Service Pack 5. Any actions that require FeatureManager design tree data cannot be performed with a SolidWorks 2013 document open in SolidWorks 2012 Service Pack 5.

The following table summarizes what you can and cannot do in SolidWorks 2012 Service Pack 5. You can learn more about the new features in SolidWorks 2013 on our website.

SolidWorks World 2012 - Day 3 General Session Video #sww12

SolidWorks World 2012 - Day 3 General Session Update #sww12

Today is the last day of SolidWorks World 2012, and it's been great so far. Everyone had a great time at last night's block party. Today kicked off with Mark Schneider announcing the winners of this year's Model Mania contest. Congratulations to Neil Custard of SolidWorksTips.com for winning the user division, and to Mike Spens of GoEngineer for winning the reseller division.

That led straight into What's New for SolidWorks 2013. This year the team came up with a sort of "Back to the Future" theme, featuring SolidWorks founder Jon Hirschtick. Some of the enhancements that got the most enthusiastic response were previous release interoperability, variable pattern instances and the ability to insert multiple parts. Be on the lookout for these when SolidWorks 2013 goes into beta later this summer.

We then announced this year's top-ten list, which was brought to us by students from Assabet Valley Technical High School, and reads like this:

1. Start using more CPU cores

2. Mass properties should include the option to automatically put a point at the center of gravity

3. Don't delete your children, dangle them instead

4. Address "shaded with edges bleed through" issue

5. Reduce the bounding box of drawing views to visible components only

6. Ability to control a plane's front & back side orientation

7. Dimensions should stay where you place them

8. Escape key should immediately return control of the interface

9. Add "lock rotation" option to cylindrical mates

10. Add a "thread creation wizard"

Marie Planchard then introduced us to French customer Aldebaran Robotics, which is doing some amazing work, including using robots for therapeutic purposes. They talked about the evolution of Aldebaran Robotics, the SolidWorks skill sets of the company’s designers and how founder Bruno Maisonnier forged his professional path through technology and education.

Bruno also detailed how robotics can perform therapy for the disabled in a way that humans can’t. The secret is the way that robots interact and respond to patient needs and communication—a true illustration of the influence of technology.

And before closing out the day, Bertrand Sicot returned to announce the date and location of next year's SolidWorks World, which will be in Orlando, Florida from January 20 – 23, 2013.

That's it for this year. Thanks for following along, and check back in later for the video.

SolidWorks World 2012 - Day 2 General Session Video #sww12

As promised, here's footage from today's session.