Category: Part

SolidWorks 2010: Mouse Gestures

SolidWorks Corp has been working hard to improve the user experience.  SolidWorks 2010 has examples have several innovative interface additions.  The one addition that is sure to get a lot of attention is Mouse Gestures.

Mouse Gestures is a simple a menu scheme that is controlled by the RMB and a gesture (or short movement) of the mouse.  When the RMB is clicked and held briefly in addition to a very slight movement of the mouse, a wheel menu appears around the cursor location.

Mouse Gesture Menu

Simply continue to hold the RMB down and move the cursor over the desired command.  Without any further action, that command will execute and the menu wheel will disappear.  If the RMB is released before a selection is made, the menu wheel is cancelled without any command executed.

If the traditional RMB is desired instead of the menu wheel, simply give the RMB a quick click (same as it ever was) without a mouse movement.

As with the “S” key shortcut menu scheme, Mouse Gestures menu wheel is customizable and context sensitive.  The user is allowed 4 or 8 gestures with four different menus for each of the major modes: Part, Assembly, Drawing and Sketch.  These are customized under a new tab in the good ol’ Tools>Customize… window.

Here are the eight gesture choices that can be assigned to particular commands:

Gestures

Mouse Gestures is suprizingly easy to use.  It’s intuitive when it is activated intentionally.  However, I have found myself activating it unintentionally once in awhile.  This may result in the surprize command being executed before I even know what hit me.  So, for now and for me, Mouse Gesturing will be limited to View Modify functions.  I certainly won’t be placing the Quit in my menu wheel.  That said, the usual result of the accidental activation is just that the user will see the menu wheel briefly ghost in and out before any command is executed.

Mouse Gestures is a great new tool that looks to be a major time saver for frequently used commands.  I’m looking forward to having a bit of fun playing with Mouse Gestures and customizing its functions until I find just the right combination of commands for each mode.

Plastic failure causes (brief overview)

There are many causes for failure in plastic parts.  These can cause a variety of problems too.  Here are some common root causes:

  • part was originally designed to be made from metal.
  • part may have design flaws due to stress concentrations and creep.
  • chemical interactions; in fact, even when a plastic may not be affected by a chemical under low stress, it may be susceptible in higher stress scenarios (environmental stress cracking or ESC).
  • poor decisions when utilizing material substitution and additives.
  • manufacturing process, or lack of control thereof.

With all of these common causes for the failure of plastic parts, one might wonder how does one maneuver the design and process mine field.  It is important to traverse these issues since a failure in plastic parts can cause lose of valuable time, materials, customers, and can even lead to litigation.  One important tool a company can use to combat and prevent such failure is making sure the engineering education of employees is up to the task for designing plastic parts and/or their molds.  It is also important to seek out experienced processors who have the knowledge base required for successful part making. Of course, even when everything is done right, problems may still arise.  This is where experience in process and design can be the difference between quickly correcting issues or getting stuck without any support.

Source: Fighting Failure in Plastics by Michael Tolinski – Plastics Engineering July/August 2009

SolidWorks 2010 More speed tests (Tune-up III)

So, I set out to make really bad use of Delete Face and Surface-Fill features.  This would be a completely outside the box type of screwing around that might not be expected, just to see if I can maximize the contrast between speed improvements from SolidWorks 2009 to SolidWorks 2010.

The motor-casing model that comes in the Samples folder of SolidWorks 2009 seems to tax SolidWorks a bit as is, all without any fancy features.  In SW 2009, I used the Delete Face feature to remove all of the internal walls in the main casing.  This was followed up with horrible Surface-Fill to patch the hole.  (Please take note of the rather unnecessarily wavy Surface-Fill results.)  After saving and Rebuilding twice, I checked the model’s Statistics.  The image below represents one of the better Rebuild (CTRL-Q) results I was able to achieve in SW 2009.  No surprizes.  Surface-Fill is on top and Delete Face is near the top.

Next, in SolidWorks 2010, I opened that very same file.  After saving in SW 2010 format, I closed the file and reopened it, then checked the Rebuild results there.  Strange….  I didn’t notice much of a difference.  This was starting to look a bit like my previous round of tests on another model (See the previous article in this series).  To check this further, another test needed to be done.

I deleted the Delete Face and Surface-Fill features and recreated them from scratch in within SW 2010.  Three things happened.  First, I was able to more quickly access both the Surface-Fill and Delete Face commands.  Second, SolidWorks made a much more logical choice in how to form the Surface-Fill feature.  Note how smooth it is versus the same feature created in the same fashion within SW 2009 (predictable results when creating features is another area where SW 2010 has improved). Third, look at what happened to the Delete Face Rebuild times!

Surface-Fill time reduced from 5.13s to 3.16s.  Delete Face time reduced from 0.63s to 0.09s!  It may be that the Surface-Fill time is more a factor of the simpler form than improvements in the underlying code.  However, since the software did make a more logical choice in the formation of the Surface-Fill, this still kinda counts.  Either way, the big news is the time savings on Delete Face!

Who really cares?!

OK,  OK, now the question from many comes up, “I’ve never use Delete Face; who cares about it!?”  In fact, in my test here, the difference in Rebuild times is entirely traced back to the Surface-Fill and Delete Face features.  No other Rebuild improvements are witnessed in any of the more common features.  So where does this leave individuals whose focus is on machine or sheet metal parts, where Delete Face would generally be very bad practice?  Well, as mentioned in the previous article, other areas have also been improved.

Improvements to multibody parts and related commands, Weldment cutlist updates, and equation performance have been reported by SolidWorks Corp.  Other areas may have also been improved, but I have yet to get confirmation of those.  The funny thing is that performance improvements aren’t really covered in the SolidWorks 2010 What’s New file!

In the What’s New file, I only found information about selecting a large number of entities within a sketch to create blocks as being “much faster”, and that Copy and Paste within Sketch mode is faster.  Nothing else readily comes up!  So, why does it seem that SolidWorks Corp is letting one of the more significant improvements in SolidWorks 2010 go under-reported (practically by word of mouth)?  I only found out about these improvements because the faster times for Delete Face was briefly demonstrated at the recent Blogger Event at SolidWorks HQ in Concord, MA.

The cynical side of me might say they’ve made no big announcement because they don’t want to make a big deal about how slow SolidWorks has been in the past.  However, the devil’s advocate might say that they’ve made so many improvements, they may not have a collected list of those items even now (as the case may actually be), and certainly didn’t have that list when the What’s New file was released.  Either way, it is almost fun trying to find the speed improvements, like an Easter Egg hunt (pun intended…and if you understand why that is a pun, you are truly a geek).

SolidWorks 2010 Usability: Hole Wizard improvement

The SolidWork Corp team has made usability one of the key themes for SolidWorks 2010.  One of the areas that has frustrated almost every user since the beginning is that the user is required to select a surface before entering the Hole Wizard command in order to place their holes on a 2D sketch.  Hole Wizard would automatically assign a 3D sketch when no surface was preselected.  Having holes unnecessarily placed in a 3D sketch can create certain issues, such as difficulty with hole callouts on a drawing.

This is no longer so!  With SolidWorks 2010, there is no default sketch assignment to hole placement when starting the Hole Wizard command.  The user selects their surface within Hole Wizard when they are ready.  If they select a flat surface, Hole Wizard automatically assigns a 2D sketch.  If they select a non-flat surface, Hole Wizard automatically assigns a 3D sketch.  The user also has the option to manually select the 3D sketch option.

Before this improvement, Hole Wizard surface selection has been one of those areas that traps almost every user when they first start out.  (You can always identify a rookie simply by the fact that a 3D sketch unnecessarily appeared in their Hole Wizard feature on a part, such as a flat plate.)

Not only is this a welcome usability improvement that reduces frustration and inconsistent modelling, it is also one that will save many little bits of time for most users.  It will also improve the SolidWorks learning curve ever so slightly.

SolidWorks 2010 Runs Faster? Maybe! (Tune-up II)

On Monday, I announced that SolidWorks 2010 has had a tune-up.  The code in certain areas of the software had been getting a little long in the tooth, and long in the rebuild times too.  For SolidWorks 2010, the team at SolidWorks Corp set out to clean up some of the more inefficient code that’s been dragging SolidWorks down.  I’m not yet sure how successful they were in this endeavor.

Some of the areas have affected in this clean up (not a complete list):

  • the Knit Surface algorithm, which not only includes the Surface-Knit feature, but also all other features and commands that utilize the algorithm;
  • Multibody parts and related commands, mostly noticeable on a large number of solid/surface bodies;
  • Weldment cutlist update (body comparison)
  • Equation performance;
  • Delete Face feature.

Unassuming 2009 example modelI set out to see just how much improvement one might expect from a simple example of Delete Face.  (Reminder: I’m using SolidWorks 2010 Beta 2.)  I found a rather basic model example available in SolidWorks 2009.  Within SolidWorks 2009, I used Delete Face to delete one random surface.  The options I used were Delete and Fill/Tangent Fill.  It’s a self repairing deletion that would normally be used on something a bit more complex than a flat surface.

Average rebuild times (s):

  • SW 2009 w/o Delete Face:  .360
  • SW 2009 w/ Delete Face:  1.330
  • SW 2009, just Delete Face: .937
  • SW 2010 w/o Delete Face:  .390
  • SW 2010 w/ Delete Face:  1.210
  • SW 2010, just Delete Face: .823

The Delete Face feature does indeed have improved rebuild times, but with the options I choose, it’s not by much.  Then, I discovered something weird.  In SW 2009, I reloaded the model and found the Delete Face average time was 1.60 (for a total of 2.00)!  After suppressing the Delete Face feature and rebuilding a few more times, the total average rebuild time was again 1.33.  What the heck?  So, I tried this out in SW 2010.  First rebuild was a whooping 3.17 seconds for just the Delete Face feature! After rebuilding more, it settled down to average 1.31 (totalling about 1.86)! Only after the same suppression, unsuppression trick did the times return to what is shown in the table above.

This leads me to question: are there are different algorithms being used based on how SolidWorks becomes aware of a feature?  It is very strange behavior witnessed in both SW 2009 and 2010, though 2010 still does show some minor improvement for my overly simple test.  I’m going to dig further into this for upcoming articles.

SpacePilot PRO 3D Mouse: New Software Updates

3Dconnexion recently announced another free software update for the new SpacePilot PRO 3D mouse.  The most visible portions of this upgrade include new functions called Model Properties Applet and Intelligent Function Key Notification.  Both of these new functions add functionality to the SpacePilot PRO’s LCD.  If there ever was a device feature that needs added functionality, it is the LCD on the SpacePilot PRO.

Model Properties Applet

This new applet enables engineers to quickly view supposed key model information on the SpacePilot PRO’s LCD.  The claim from 3DConnexion is that this somehow increases productivity and makes things easier for workgroups to collaborate. I’m not sure how this applet makes collaboration easier.  The applet just displays fundamental document information on the LCD.  It doesn’t transmit this data or pull information from my PDM.

For a drawing, the function is very basic, indeed.  The applet tells me that I am looking at a drawing (go figure), and shows the computer network name of the drawing’s author, file size, file creation date, file last saved date, and the computer network name of the last person to save the file.  There is nothing particularly “key” or “vital” about any this information.  The applet would be far more useful if it allowed the user to modify the information on the display.  For example, for me key information from a drawing would be a list of particular custom property names and their values, and the name of the model in the dominant pre-defined view (the view from which the part custom property values are derived).

Slightly more useful information is available for models, including mass, volume, material and density.  This same information is displayed for assemblies, though I’m not sure why.  Wouldn’t it be more useful to show me the total number of parts in the assembly, or an estimate on how many seconds would be required for a force rebuild (CTRL-Q)?  My suggestion to 3DConnexion is to completely dump the file information and add these kind of data for all document types.

Intelligent Function Key Notification

This is a fancy name for the fact that the LCD now displays a quick pop-up window which shows the user which button command they activated.  It does this regardless to the applet that is running on the LCD.  This way, the user will always have visual confirmation as to which command they just executed.  This is a moderately useful function for someone who has just finish mapping their programmable buttons and needs queues to help reinforce the memorization of that mapping.  If the user has already memorized their button mapping, this function provides little benefit. For now, I like this function, but I can easily imagine that I will ignore it eventually.

“S” Shortcut key

One bonus for SolidWorks users is that 3DConnexion recently added support for the “S” shortcut key.  It can now be added to the programmable buttons directly without having to create a device macro.  This function was secretly added to the previous software upgrade for the SpacePilot PRO, but 3DConnexion is now bragging about it.  They also stated that this “S” shortcut key support has been added for SpaceExplorer and SpacePilot Speed Keys. My only criticism here is that any key and key-combination should already be supported by the software for these devices.  My 1990’s programmable keyboard supports any key combination in its “PF” keys.  Why are these not fully supported by 3DConnexion’s 21ST Century product offerings?

Installation

Having just recently updated my SpacePilot PRO drivers and software with this new announced version, I can say that installation was easier this time around.  In the past, installation has been a bit of a pain.  One problem plaguing the SpacePilot PRO is that its software and drivers need to be the last item installed on your computer.  This means that if any supported application is installed after the SpacePilot PRO software, the SpacePilot PRO software needs to be reinstalled afterwards.  Crazy, huh?  Anyway, this upgrade was pretty painless this time, and I didn’t even lose my programmable key mappings, unlike previous upgrades and re-installs.   New 3DConnexion 3D mice shipped in September 2009 will have the new version of the software and drivers included.  Otherwise, for Windows, download them from this location here.