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SolidWorks World 2012 Top Ten Voting is in full swing!

The annual vote for the top ten requested enhancements for SolidWorks World 2012 is in full swing right now. The format for this year’s Top Ten changed from previous years. Last year, some ideas didn’t get noticed if they were submitted late in the process. As a result, they received fewer votes, not because they weren’t desired, but because they didn’t have as long as other ideas to gather votes.

For SolidWorks World 2012, the system is more fair. All ideas where submitted prior to voting. On January 3, 2012, voting was opened. So far, the response has been great, with some surprizes. If you haven’t done so since the 3rd and you have an active subscription, check out this year’s Top Ten list, and place your thumbs-up or thumps-down for new functions that you’d like to see added to SolidWorks. It doesn’t take too long to go through the list, so I would actually encourage anyone to vote on as many items as is practical.

SolidWorks World 2012 just a month away

Breakout Sessions

SolidWorks World 2012 is only a month away! It’s already shaping up to be a great convention! The breakout sessions schedule is filled with great topics. These are a small sample of what is on the schedule as of January 1, 2012 (schedule is subject to change):

IAW ASME Y14.5 – Use It Only if You Know It by Rustin Webster, to provide “fundamental rules for creating drawings with IAW ASME 14.5M standards.”
Advanced Sheet Metal Techniques by Jeff Parker, to teach “advanced techniques to create complicated, functional sheetmetal parts and, explore what types of parts can be flattened.”
EPDM – Enabling Data Exchange Between SolidWorks and SAP/ERP by Kyle Kraudy, to demonstrate a solution for “data exchange between SolidWorks Enterprise PDM and SAP.”
Advanced Weldment Techniques – In Large Scale Live Theater by Ange Horst, to “discover how a live theater production takes shape through SolidWorks.”
Utilizing Mold Tools and Other Techniques for Better Mold Design by Andy Hall, to “learn how to use the automated mold tools for your molded parts”
Better, Faster Sketching by Tyler Beck, to “learn a common sense approach to proper sketching and troubleshooting.”

Session catagories

The general topics covered by Breakout and Hands-on sessions include a wide variety of areas.

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Ontario SolidWorks User Group meeting, mid Dec 2011

Some would say that travelling to Ontario in December is foolish. It is wet, snowy and very cold. Well, call me a fool. I visited Toronto to present at the December meeting of the Ontario SolidWorks User Group. It was cold, but not much different from Massachusetts. It was a little rainy, again no difference from where I live. No snow! This time of year should’ve been nothing but snow everywhere. Then again, Massachusetts also had not snow at that time. Maybe I’m not so foolish afterall.

I presented on Advanced SolidWorks Customization Techniques. This is a preview version of what I will be presenting at SolidWorks World 2012. This is a presentation similar to one given a few years before at a SWUGN Technical Summit, now updated for SolidWorks 2012.

Several discoveries were learned on this trip. I discovered the locals believe that Toronto has the “worst traffic in North America”. That’s an arguable yet still valid assessment. Rain, no matter how slight, makes the traffic unbearable. And, even with reduced crowds due to rain, a SolidWorks Employee can draw people from miles (er, kilometers) around to a SolidWorks User Group meeting. Oh, and one more thing.

This is Canadian Slice Pizza: bacon, pepporini, mushroom, and of course, cheeze. It’s apparently normal to serve it on a corrugated paperboard as a stand-in for a plate.

Yes, it’s called “Canadian” in Canada. Quite tasty, and it is a combination of toppings that I’m not quite so unfamilar with. Thank you to Chris White for organizing this event and to everyone who attended!

New inspection symbols added to SolidWorks 2012 symbol library

An unofficial standard has crept into the Drafting field for mechanical drawings. In an effort to leverage drawings for functions other than defining the specifications for product, many companies are placing Quality Inspection (also known by other names such as Incoming Inspection) instructions on their drawings. One common method to identify inspection dimensions is to place a “race track” symbol around them. This is essentially a border with rounded ends.

When I last checked, neither ASME or ISO standards currently support the race track inspection symbol. This means use of the symbol technically has no meaning unless the drawing has the definition somehow included within it. This can either be in the form of a reference to a company’s drafting standard or a note within each drawing’s general notes.

If a company chooses to define the symbol in the general notes, they are left with an interesting problem. How do they describe the symbol so that they can define it. Although the race track may be easily placed on a dimension in most CAD applications, it is not so easily placed in annotation notes. They could use a verbose method.

The problem with this? It doesn’t necessarily get the message across. What’s a race track border? Maybe they could say “…DENOTED BY ROUNDED OUTLINE” or “…DENOTED BY OVAL.” The general problem is the same with any of these options. The description doesn’t fully communicate what is being defined.

SolidWorks does have a few methods to include a faked symbol in general notes (such as a border around empty spaces, or a sketch block placed under the note). Now, here’s something you won’t see in the SolidWorks 2012 What’s New document. With SolidWorks 2012, there is a new heading in Symbol Library called Inspection Symbols. Depending on company preferences, there are two new symbols that may be included with an annotation note.

Also included in the Inspection Symbol library is a new symbol that may be used for non-dimensional inspection points.

New in SolidWorks 2012: Unit of Measure

A common request from users has been to provide a quicker method to change a document’s unit of measure. Previously, the only out-of-the-box method was through the Document Properties window, which involves a whole series of clicks and mouse movement. In SolidWorks 2012, units of measure can now be changed via a pop up menu in the status bar (bottom right of the SolidWorks window).

Of course, more refined control is still available in the Document Properties. This area is now easy to access as one of the options in the unit of measure pop up menu.

(If your status bar is hidden, you can display it going to View pulldown menu>Status Bar (near the bottom of the list)