Objet 30 Orthodesk

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Rick Holets in 3D Printing, MCAD Tech Blog, News

Digital orthodontics is rapidly becoming the standard production tool for orthodontic clinics and laboratories. Offering the ability to cut production times, increase efficiency, accuracy and digitally store orthodontic models, the benefits of digital production are clear.

Orthodesk 30

For orthodontic lab owners and managers, mid-size or small-size, choosing the right technologies to deliver the best return on investment is not always straightforward. With the introduction of the Objet 30 Orthodesk, Stratasys printers are leading the way in enabling orthodontic labs to reap the maximum benefits from the digital orthodontics era.

Easy Integration into Orthodontic Labs

By combining oral scanning, impression scanning or stone model scanning – with CAD/CAM design and 3D printing, orthodontic labs and clinics can accurately and rapidly produce a range of orthodontic appliances. With a 3D Printing System doing the detailed work, orthodontic labs can eliminate the bottleneck of manual modeling and allow the business to expand and stay ahead of the competition.

Screenshot

Streamline and Improve

Eliminate human error and do the job much faster on a 3D Printing System. By combining the digital design of orthodontic appliances with 3D printing, you can eliminate the need for physical impressions that can be inconvenient for orthodontists and patients alike.

Mold

Increase Productivity

Significantly reduce model/part fabrication times and double output per technician. The 3D Printing System gets to work producing exactly what you see on screen, without deviations or faults– and it does it in much faster time, using far less skilled labor. With an Orthodesk 3D Printing System you can efficiently scale up production and handle new orders with ease. There is no need to invest in teams of expensive skilled technicians or worry about the time and cost of training them.

Mold 2

The Objet 30 Orthodesk can fabricate unique:

Stone models

Orthodontic appliances

Surgical guides

Delivery and positioning trays

Clear aligners and retainers

Click here to see how the Orthodesk is already making a difference in orthodontic practices!

3D Printing, Objet, Stratasys

Solidworks 2013 System Requirements

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Rick Holets in Hardware and System, MCAD Tech Blog, SolidWorks Topics

We get a lot of support inquiries dealing with what kind of PC is the best to run Solidworks. Here are a few tips from the MCAD tech staff on selecting your next Solidworks system.

Operating System

• Windows 7 Professional x64 – recommended and preferred.
• Windows 8 Professional x 64 – supported.
• Vista Business x64 SP2 – supported but not preferred.
• XP x64 – Not supported.
• 32 bit Windows – not recommended.

RAM

• 64 bit: 8 GB, or more – recommended for large assembly work and Simulation.
• 32 bit – 4 GB – not recommended.

Video Card

• A SolidWorks certified OpenGL workstation card with 2GB of RAM – recommended.
• A SolidWorks certified OpenGL workstation card with 1GB of RAM – minimum requirement.
• Visit http://www.solidworks.com/sw/videocardtesting.html for a list of certified cards and drivers.
• Nvidia Quadro or ATI FirePro.
• Intel integrated graphics and gaming cards (Nvidia GeForce and ATI Radeon) are not certified and not recommended.
• Quadro NVS are not recommended; they are 2D only cards.
• While a certified video card is important SolidWorks is a CPU bound application, you’ll see more performance gains from a faster CPU.

CPU

• Current generation Intel or AMD processor – as fast as you can afford.
• The Intel i7 Sandy Bridge series are the fastest CPU’s today.
• SolidWorks will take advantage of multi core and multi CPU architectures. Typically these processors give about a 10-15% increase in performance.
• All SolidWorks Simulation products take advantage multi core and multi CPU architectures.
• SolidWorks will only take advantage of two cores on a quad core CPU.

Hard Drive

• 7200 RPM SATA minimum.
• RAID 0 configuration if drive speed is critical.
• SSD (solid state drive) if speed is critical.

Laptops

• Very few laptops that have the certified graphics cards for SolidWorks:
o Dell Precision mobile workstations.
o HP EliteBook mobile workstations.
o Lenovo Thinkpad W series.

Benchmarks

• SolidWorks has created a benchmark to gauge system performance.
• http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/benchmarks.htm.
• See what other SolidWorks users have for hardware and their performance to make a better informed decision.
• http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/shareyourscore.htm.

NOTE – Though these recommendations are a good starting point for specing out a Solidworks machine, it is always a good idea to conduct your own hardware/software tests before purchasing any workstation, computer hardware, or video card for SolidWorks.

Hardware, solidworks

Introducing SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual, a new way to jumpstart your design process

Posted on February 27, 2013 by MCAD in Cad Software, Hardware and System, MCAD Tech Blog, SolidWorks Applications

As trustees of your SolidWorks investment, we believe it’s our job to help you solve the real engineering challenges that you face every day, and those can’t always be solved with an enhancement request. It’s our job to think about the tools and capabilities you will need five, ten, even fifteen years down the road to keep you competitive. We owe that to you.

To make that happen, our plan is to leverage the strength and capabilities of the Dassault Systèmes 3DExperience Platform and build a new experience that is as intuitive and easy to use as the SolidWorks tools you use today. Today, I want to share the first example of this new approach, which we are calling SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual.

SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual is a tool for conceptual mechanical design that is complementary to the products you use today. It allows you to capture ideas digitally, quickly create 3D concept models, get feedback from internal and external stakeholders, and easily manage multiple concepts before committing engineering time to build.

Why Conceptual?

31% of project time is spent on conceptual mechanical design
3 out of 4 engineers are engaged in conceptual mechanical design
On average there are six conceptual and four design iterations in a typical project
There can be more than three internal and two external stakeholder groups involved in the concept phase

Today, SolidWorks is the best solution for detail design, but it limits your creativity for this key conceptual step. SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual fills in these gaps and allows you to:

Capture ideas digitally
Manage multiple concepts
Collaborate and communicate

Instinctive Design

Evolving a concept is where SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual really begins to speed the design time. Most systems force you to think about product structure in order to capture ideas. Our single modeling environment is about ease of use, creativity, and ease of change – with amazing flexibility. Capturing concepts digitally is quick and easy with familiar tools and concepts so the focus is on ideas — not on the software.

SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual

SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual merges the benefits of history, parametrics, and direct editing into a single interface. As a concept evolves, you can make any change necessary to a design while respecting the design intent you previously created. The Single Modeling Environment allows you to evolve from layout sketches to 3D geometry, to separate parts and assemblies, without taking product structure into consideration.

SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual lets you evolve your design’s organizational structure as you evolve the idea and have a better understanding of where the design will go. This eliminates wasted time because you never have to start over or drastically rework designs to make an underlying change.

SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual

In our single modeling environment, as we evolve our product structure into assemblies we have familiar tools and intelligence that improves with use as components learn how they were used previously. You can also automatically apply previous intent to new designs. And SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual always saves the design, as well as various iterations, so it’s very easy to get back to a previous idea and develop it further.

As we get to more of a 3D concept, we can use motion simulation to better understand the real world interaction of parts and identify key concerns early on, before getting to detail design.

SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual

Social Innovation

When you feel that sufficient concepts have been captured, then it’s key to be able to engage stakeholders (both internal to the organization as well as with customers and vendors) to get feedback on the best path forward.

SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual has social innovation capabilities built into its foundation. At any point, the designer can engage stakeholders by posting concepts to their private communities. Stakeholders are notified that there is a concept to review and can provide feedback using simple and familiar Web concepts. The world is becoming more social every day, and at SolidWorks we believe in collective intelligence. SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual truly brings these capabilities to concept design. This type of participation will allow you to better engage with your customers and differentiate yourself from the competition. After stakeholders are done, the designer is automatically notified and can continue to evolve the concept with this feedback.

Connected

SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual is always connected to the design database and to other users. This gives us the ability to secure your data, prevent data loss from any crashes, and automatically save iterations of each concept.

You are also connected to other users both working on your project and also in the wider SolidWorks community. You can participate in live chats with other users to get feedback on a question or a design challenge. Users are always working together on the same design so that there is no time wasted, or confusion as to what is the latest version. When a team member makes a change, all users are updated in real time with the latest version so the concepts will always progress forward.

SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual

Being connected provides access anywhere at any time to your concepts. SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual even allows users to take designs on the go for design reviews, or even for sales and marketing using mobile applications.

We are very excited about the progress we have made with SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual. This product will be a great complement to companies using SolidWorks today. We believe the product delivers on a new approach to conceptual design by incorporating the flexibility of a single modeling environment, social innovation, and the benefits of being connected online.

In May of this year, we will be working with select customers to validate these principles of conceptual design in their production environments. Once we are confident in the benefits these customers are seeing we expect to make SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual available to all users in the Fall of 2013.

Original Blog Post >>

Enterprise PDM Dispatch Addin

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Rick Holets in MCAD Tech Blog, SolidWorks Features

What is the Dispatch Add-in?

The Enterprise PDM Dispatch Add-in lets you automate tasks and Processes in EPDM. This is particularly useful if you want to perform an action at multiple, consistent occurrences (such as updating a data card variable with a value after a Workflow state Change), or if you want to perform something a number of files (Like selecting multiple files, and renaming them according to some naming schema). We’ll take a look at how to install the Dispatch Add-in to your EPDM systems and create an example task

Adding Dispatch

Dispatch add-in comes with Enterprise PDM, but is not installed by default.
This Add-in can be added by from the Enterprise PDM Administration tool. Right click on your vault and then select Import.

In the folder: \Default Data select the file Dispatch.caf (you may need to change the file type to be “All Files”) and click Open.

Click “OK”.

This will install Dispatch dll file for both 64 bit and 32 bit systems. To verify this:
• Expand the Add-ins menu in the Enterprise PDM Administration tool and
• Double click on Dispatch
• Click on Files in the Dispatch properties window

Administrate actions

Now that you have Dispatch installed, you will want to create an action. If you still have the properties dialog box open, you can select “Administrate Actions…” from the bottom left corner of the dialog box. Otherwise, you can right click on Dispatch, and select “Administrate Actions.

To create a new action, click on the “Add” button.

This will bring up the dialog box for creating your actions. This dialog box can be broken up into 3 areas.

The first area, at the top contains the basic information about the action. This is where you name it and give it a description. The task we’re creating here is going to rename a file.

The next area is where we define when this action will run. You can have this be a user selected menu command, or have it automatically run when certain conditions are met (a specific workflow state, a file is checked out, etc). In this example, we’ve chosen to have it be from a Menu command.

The third and final section is contains the action or process that you want to perform. This is where you define what you want to perform, you can define variables, actions conditions and other things to help you specify your action.

To walk through this example, Here is what we want our action to do:
• For Multiple selected document
• Rename the file by putting the characters “S-“ in front of it

When created in the action dialog box this is what it looks like:
• Create a variable for the characters that we want to prepend.

• Create a “For all Documents” Clause (so that it performs this action on all selected documents with a start and an end).

• In between the clause, insert a rename command as follows:

• The end result should look similar to this:

Using Dispatch Action

Now that you have created your action, you can test it. Select a group of files in your vault. Right click, and select your newly created action.

If your display doesn’t update automatically, you have have to hit refresh (F5 in windows), but your files have now been renamed:

Click Here to read more articles on EPDM.

Author: Clay Mosher

Enterprise PDM, EPDM

Using a Custom Sheet Format

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Rick Holets in MCAD Tech Blog, SolidWorks Features, SolidWorks Topics

Do you want your SolidWorks drawings to have a main title block on the first sheet, and a smaller title block on all additional sheets? This can easily be done in SolidWorks.

Figure 1: A multiple sheet drawing with a smaller sheet format on sheet 2.

Sheets, Formats, and Templates

To help explain the process, we will start off reviewing some basic info about drawing sheets, sheet formats, and drawing templates. The sheet format has information about the drawing and contains the title block, drawing border, and other descriptive annotations. The drawing sheet is the “paper space” that can contain the actual drawing views and dimensions. Together, these make up the SolidWorks drawing file. Each sheet, or page, of a SolidWorks drawing file can have its own sheet format.

Figure 2: The Sheet Format contains the title block and drawing border.

When you start a brand new drawing, you select your desired drawing template. Once open, this file is just an empty drawing file and will appear identical to what the template looked like when it was created. Starting or opening a drawing like this does not force SolidWorks to load, or even refresh, the drawing Sheet Format. This is important behavior that is often over looked. SolidWorks will only try to retrieve, and load, the Sheet Format file if you add a new sheet to a drawing. This also explains why you are able to open existing drawings, even ones created by different companies, without being required to have access to their actual sheet format file. In this same scenario, if you try to add a 2nd sheet and SolidWorks cannot locate the sheet format file it will give you a pretty direct warning message.

Figure 3: SolidWorks cannot find the Sheet Format file when adding a new sheet to the drawing.

Procedure

Now that we have covered the background topics, here are the steps for accomplishing this.

Setup the initial sheet format for the drawing front page and do a File- “Save Sheet Format”. Do this twice naming it something that represents both pages. In my example, I have these two identical sheet formats named “B- Landscape-MCAD First Sheet” and “B- Landscape-MCAD Additional Sheet”.

Figure 4: you can Save Sheet Format from the File pull-down menu.

Open up a new drawing file and change the sheet1 properties to point to the desired Sheet Format that is to be used for the additional sheets. You can do this with the “Browse” button.

Figure 5: the sheet properties allows you to browse to desired Sheet Formats.

After this property is set, we want to save the drawing template to over write the previous one. This is done in the File- Save As- dialogue box and changing the file type to ‘drawing template’.
Next, open the Sheet Format that is supposed to be used for the additional sheets. At this point, it will still resemble what the first sheet looked like. Edit this Sheet Format to make it look as desired for the additional sheets. Do a File- Save Sheet Format to use this to overwrite the sheet format file that is used on the additional sheets.
Now test by starting a new drawing using the drawing template we saved earlier, and then adding a 2nd sheet.
The new drawing opens up with the ‘sheet 1’ title block because that is what it looked like when it was last saved. The additional sheets look different than the first because it only tries to ‘reload’ the sheet format when a new sheet is added.

Want to learn more about Solidworks Drawings? Browse available training classes in your area.

Author: Greg Buter

solidworks

EPDM – What is a “Private File” vs. a “Local File”

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Rick Holets in MCAD Tech Blog, SolidWorks Features, SolidWorks Topics

One of the areas of confusion for EPDM users is the difference between “Private Files” and “Local Files” in the user’s local view. EPDM locally caches any files a user is working on, that is when a user checks out or views a file it is copied from the archive server to the user’s local hard drive. This is done automatically so as to be transparent to the end user and to ensure optimal performance while working with the files. Let’s first review what the files “Version” information is telling us when we highlight a file in our local view.

The Version tab can tell us a lot about the file you have selected in Explorer. First we can see a warning icon for this file. This warning tells us that the file we have in our local cache (local version) is older than the “latest version” in the vault. We can also see that we have version 2 locally and version 3 is the latest in the archive server. The current state of the file is also listed along with the category the file was assigned and the workflow that the file is in.

When a file is first added to the local view, it is automatically copied up to the archive server as version “1”. The first save of a file is a “Private File”, this simply means that no other users can see the file in the vault with the exception of the administrator. Let’s look at the version information for a “Private File”.

You can see that the version information for our “New File.docx” indicates that the local copy is the same as the one on the archive server (1/1). In addition, the local state, category and workflow are blank. Anytime the local state is blank the file has never been checked in and is a “Private File”. It is when a file is checked in that these pieces of information are populated on the version tab. While the file is private, the user can continue to edit the file until they are ready to check it in at which time any user that has permissions will see the file in their local view.

A “Local File” is one that is not part of the vault and can be identified by the icon which appears grayed out. In addition, a local file is listed as in the state column in Explorer. A file or even a folder can become local if Enterprise PDM has not detected the file extension as a valid file type when saving it from an application, or if the files or folders were added during an offline session. In addition, local files could be remnants from a rename or move operation by another user. Let’s review the version information for a local file.

The version information for a local file is all blank as seen above. In addition to the file icon being grayed out, the state column clearly shows the file as a local file. In this example, the file was moved to another folder by another user. Since this user had viewed the file previously a local read only file remains. This file is no longer part of the vault and can be deleted since the file in the vault resides in the new folder location.

If files were created during an off-line session or were not added automatically by Enterprise PDM when the file was created, the user can simply right click on the file and select “Add To File Vault”. This will add the file to the archive server and create version 1.

Most of the time local files are simply remnants of move or rename operations or even files that the user no longer has permissions to see in the vault but used to. Since these files can be confusing to users, there are 2 options in the user settings that control if these files are displayed and to clean up the user’s local cache. In the administration client, you can select the user or group settings by right clicking on the user or group and select “Settings”. In the Explorer” section you can see the option under “File types to show”, you can set the option to “Show only files that are part of the vault”. This will prevent the user from seeing the local files. In addition, since most local files are remnants, you can clean up the local files but selecting the option to “Automatically delete local read-only files that are not part of the vault”. It is important to note that if a file is created by the user during an off-line session as described above, the file is not read only and will not be deleted by the Local file clean-up setting.

Both of these settings can be very helpful since local files can be confusing and clutter up the users local view. If you have any questions on these settings or local files, please review the administration guide found under the help menu in the Enterprise PDM administration client.

Click Here to read more EPDM articles.

Author: Leif Johnson

SolidWorks 2013 Top 10 Enhancements Requests

Posted on January 29, 2013 by MCAD in SolidWorks Applications, SolidWorks Features, SolidWorks Topics

SolidWorks 2014

SolidWorks 2013 Top 10 Enhancement Requests announced at SolidWorks World 2013. These requests will be implemented in the next version of SolidWorks; SolidWorks 2014. Here’s the list of what we can expect this fall with the release of SolidWorks 2014:

1. Make rebuild time faster
2. Ability to save SolidWorks files in previous versions – Backward Compatibility
3. Slot mate
4. Cylindrical mates need an option to lock rotation
5. Provide a version of eDrawings mobile app for Android devices
6. OPtion for Equal spacing on linear patterns
7. Default concentric mate on axis to Cylindrical surface
8. External thread wizard for all thread types
9. Draw a line segment starting from the midpoint
10. Create auxiliary line for dimensioning angles

How to Deactivate SolidWorks

Posted on January 17, 2013 by Rick Holets in SolidWorks Features, SolidWorks Topics

Every few years, it comes time to turn your trusty old computer out to pasture in favor of a sleek new laptop or workstation. Here’s what you need to know when it comes to deactivating SolidWorks on your old computer.

Transfer Licenses

Open SolidWorks on the old machine. In the top menu bar, go to “Help”->”Transfer Licenses”.

Select the product(s) that you would like to deactivate and input your email address.

Click “Next”. The activation manager goes online to deactivate the selected Solidworks products.

Once SolidWorks has been deactivated, you can uninstall Solidworks from the machine. If your computer does not have internet access, select the “Manually via e-mail” option for offline deactivation. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the process.

Activate New Machine

The steps to activate a SolidWorks installation are similar to deactivation. Go to “Help”->”Activate Licenses”. Select the desired products to activate and click “Next”.

Showing Current Licenses

If you ever would like to view what SolidWorks products are currently active on a machine, go to “Help”->”Show Licenses”. The activated products will be shown, along with their subscription service expiration dates.

Getting Help

Sometimes it is impossible to access SolidWorks to perform these steps, such as when a hard drive fails or the entire machine was carted off before the license was deactivated. Don’t worry! If a situation such as this arises, please contact your SolidWorks Value Added Reseller (VAR) for technical support.

Click Here to learn more about SolidWorks technical support at MCAD.

Author: Rick Holets

solidworks

SolidWorks Functions Useful for Simulation

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Rick Holets in MCAD Tech Blog, SolidWorks Topics

SolidWorks functionality can be used to make life easier when working with Simulations. The following functions can help speed things along for you:

Simulation-specific configurations
Interference detection check for simulation-ready geometry
Split lines for boundary condition application

Configurations

Most analysis projects require you to edit the geometry in some way before setting up the simulation. If you set up a new configuration for the analysis, you can make changes to the geometry without affecting the original design. This allows for several “what-if?” scenarios.

Notice in the two screen shots below how the “Default” configuration contains all the assembly components whereas the assembly is simplified by suppressing some of the components in the “For analysis” configuration. This simplification is done because in the analysis, virtual connectors will be used to replace the pins, and the bar stock being gripped by the pliers can be represented by a fixed boundary condition on the faces of the plier jaws.

Interference Detection

Overlapping and interfering parts typically don’t mesh very well. In fact, the only time this condition should exist is when simulating a shrink fit between parts (requiring a special contact condition). In addition to checking for overlap, the interference detection tool has an option that can be used to also find coincident faces in the assembly. This is important for the purpose of knowing where the global default contact condition will apply. In the image below, two coincident areas are highlighted.

Split Lines

Use this function to split faces into areas appropriate for load or restraint application. It’s also conducive to defining areas where local mesh controls are to be applied for more efficient meshing. For loads and restraints, it’s possible to create split lines “on the fly” via the “Split” tab in their respective property managers.