SolidWorks Legion

SolidWorks World 2014: Day 4 – Wednesday General Session – Product Definition

General Session

The General Session for Wednesday was as entertaining as ever. Most the details from Wednesday General Session have already been well covered by other blogs and online outlets. I’m going to focus on Bruce Holway’s presentation instead. It is important to me because he’s describing the his group (Product Definition of which I am apart) and past years SolidWorks World Top Ten enhancements list. He states that the vast majority of past year’s Top Ten have been implemented. He covers many of recent examples.

Default to Concentric Mate when two selected faces are cylindrical
Default to Parallel Mate when two selected faces have other geometry that prevent coincident mating
Lock Option for Concentric Mates so that additional mates are not required to stop rotation of a cylindrical part
Slot Mate
Center of Mass reference geometry
Fix Edge Bleed Thru display, where thin walled features sometimes displayed fragments of obscured features
Don’t Delete Child Features, Dangle them Instead when deleting a parent feature
eDrawings for Android

Also mentioned is the fact that we visit hundreds of customers each year at their sites to understand how they are using SolidWorks. This is extremely valuable in determining how we plan to improve our product offerings by giving us first hand experiences from our customers.

This year’s SolidWorks World Top Ten list:

Auto-hide components
Draw a line segment starting from the mid-point
Equal spacing option for linear patterns
Ability to rename a part or sub-assembly in the feature tree
Unlimited undo/redo
Pressing the ESC key should immediately stop the current calculation and return control to the user
Fillets and chamfers should be managed by the same feature
Ability to flip angle dimensions after they have been placed
Hole callout should include all instances on the same face
New Purge command

SolidWorks World 2014 Day 3 – Tuesday

User Community and Beta Highlights from General Session
Tuesday General Sessions tends to focus on the user community. Richard Doyle has become a fixture on the big stage as he gives us the SolidWorks User Group Network updates. This year he announced the following awards.

2013 User Group of the Year is San Diego SolidWorks User Group, awarded to leaders Phil Sluder and Jim Boland
2013 Wayne Tiffany Group Leader of the Year is awarded to Jeff Holliday
2013 Michelle Pillers Community Award is awarded to Deepak Gupta

The SolidWorks Beta program for SolidWorks 2014 is the most successful yet. Here are this year’s winners for the program

Customers:

Bettina Walker, SolidWorks
Yoshihiro Dobashi, Simulation
Masanobu Higashino, EPDM
Muneki Okano, Composer

VARs:

Michael Malov of SolidWorks Russia, SolidWorks
Charley Saint of Hawkridge Systems, EPDM
Andrey Aliamovsky of SolidWorks Russia, Simulation
Ludmila Staroverova of SolidWorks Russia and Scott Woods of Hawkridge Systems, Composer

My Hands-on Presentation
I conducted my first Hands-on Session of this year’s conference on Tuesday evening, covering the topic of drawing views. This is a new presentation at SolidWorks World. Though the presentation is intended for beginners and novice users, by going through all of the view types, even experienced users learned something they have forgotten or missed before. Several attendees showed (by a raise of heads) they learned something new from several of the exercises throughout the presentation. I may expand the presentation to cover additional topics, such as the new Replace Model in SolidWorks 2014.

SolidWorks World 2014: Day 1, Day 2 Monday General Session – Mechanical Conceptual revealed

I'm an employee and also a member of the Bacon Brotherhood SolidWorks World 2014 is going strong. Sunday was a great time to catch up with old friends and meet a lot of new people. Many people are lucky enough to have joined the Bacon Brotherhood, including yours truly. For more details, see Twitter and search #baconbrotherhood.

This year’s SolidWorks World reached the record of 5600+ attendees on Monday! That is a new record, which is especially important since Monday (though technically Day 2) is really the first full day of the conference (often the number goes even higher by Tuesday).

The Monday General session was well reviewed by Brian McElyea of CAD Fanatic. Briefly, the morning was largely dedicated to SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual (SWMC) with a great presentation by Aaron Kelly, VP of User Experience and Product Portfolio Management and Kishore Boyalakuntla, Director of User Experience and Product Portfolio Management. They demonstrated a case where customers and vendors can work collaboratively to quickly develop new mechanical concepts on a common CAD model using social interaction and advanced design software. Brian then notes,

Representatives of four of the lighthouse companies (TriAxial Design and Analysis, Kennedy Hygiene Products Limited, Karl W. Schmidt & Associates, and J.G. WEISSER SÖHNE GmbH & Co. KG) that have been using the product over the last few months were then brought out and gave their thoughts on the software.

“Lighthouse” is a term that refers to real customers who are earlier adopters by invitation. They get a preview of functionality while an application is near completion but before it is made available to everyone. Lighthouse customers use the application in their real world enterprise on actual projects, and provide important feedback for further improvements.

Additional news is SolidWorks Industrial Conceptual was announced with a brief teaser. This generated a lot of excitement.

For a preview of Tuesday, see Michael Lord’s photoblog.

Drawings and Detailing are getting a lot of attention this year @ SolidWorks World 2014

What’s New in SolidWorks Drawings in Recent Years by Nikhil Kulkarni – This presentation focuses on showing recent tools/enhancements added to SolidWorks in the area of drawings and DXF/DWG.

The United States Government Loves Model-based Definition by Rich Eckenrode – This presentation is on the NIST project, PMI conformance testing models. He will describe the use of SOLIDWORKS in this PMI validation project. He will also touch on SolidWorks ability to compete in the space MBD and review some of the interesting facts with regard to using MBD in SolidWorks.

Drawing Templates: How and Why! by Jeremiah Griffith – Learn how to create functional and automated drawing templates to reduce redundant information entry. Make SOLIDWORKS work for you, and ease your life by using the tools provided!

First Article Reports and Inspection Documentation with SolidWorks by Mathieu Fourcade – Experience how easy it can be to create inspection documentation for first article or quality assurance purposes using SolidWorks. Dramatically reduce the time required to create inspection documentation and eliminate errors inherent to the manual “ballooning” of engineering drawings as well as in the creation of inspection reports.

3D MBD (Model-based Design) and MBE (Model-based Enterprise) State of the Union by Christopher Garcia and Paul Perreault – Learn how Anark has been helping the DoD and several manufacturing companies for over four years to lead the way into a 3D model-based enterprise. The initiative eliminates the need for 2D drawings in favor of 3D PDF and 3D HTML technical data packages. This session will review this progress.

Making Custom Symbols by Nikhil Kulkarni – See how to make custom symbols in SolidWorks.

Pages: 123

SolidWorks World 2014 Floor Plan is up!

In recent years, a floor plan tool for the SolidWorks World has been available online ahead of the conference. This tool seems to be getting more useful every year.

This year’s floor plan as a full map of each floor of the conference, including conference rooms and the Partner Pavilion.

The Partner Pavilion map layouts exhibitor locations with a flyout that includes a company profile.

Smartphone and laptop strategy for SolidWorks World 2014

Since the release of the Ericsson R380 in 2000, the Smartphone has become ubiquitous. In 2008, laptops started becoming more common than desktop computers. Tablets have also become commonplace since the release of the Apple iPad in 2010. Keeping these power hungry mobile and portable devices feed (charged) presents a unique challenge in the 21st Century. Keeping connected to the Internet also presents challenges. There is a lot going on at SolidWorks World. It is a big event with thousands of tech savvy attendees with tons of devices, competing with resources to keep them feed and connected. Granted, keeping a smartphone charged is pretty dang cheap. However, finding an electrical outlet is the issue at hand.

Power

If you are using your smartphone to keep your schedule (like I do), you’ll be accessing it more often than you might on a normal day. In addition, you’ll likely be text messaging and using other social media communication more frequently, too. Normally, your smartphone’s battery charge may last a day or two without any worries. No day at SolidWorks World is normal. Even on the most battery efficient devices, you are likely to need power to recharge at some point during the day.

Have a spare battery or extended-life remote battery on hand, whether you are using a laptop, smartphone, tablet, or any combination thereof. Wherever you happen to find yourself, be sure to scope out power outlets. This applies while you are at the conference, and more so also after hours while you are out and about and when your device is most likely to be low on power.

During the day, if you have a smartphone and a laptop, you can charge your phone from the laptop via the normal USB connection. Finally, the most obvious thing of all, don’t forget any of the charging cables.

If you are plugged into a random outlet or loaning your charger temporarily to another attendee, don’t forget your charging cable by leaving it behind! You will likely never see it again, for various reasons. This particularly applies to breakout session speakers who may get distracted at the end of their presentation by people rushing up to the podium to introduce themselves and ask further questions. Am I speaking from personal experience? Maybe.

Staying Connected

Staying connected is the whole reason we carry around smartphones and tablets. That means you always need an awareness of WiFi hotspots. Those of us with smartphones may not be tethered. However, don’t rely on cellphone carrier signal for data connections while in a conference room. Even smartphones on a free data plan may need to switch over to WiFi to access the Internet at some point to Facebook, Foursquare or Flickr. SolidWorks provides many WiFi hotspots throughout the conference. One of the main locations will be near the Partner Pavilion.

All this means that you’ll need to scope out the locations of these hotspots a head of time so you aren’t left without data connection at an inconvenient moment. Hotspots should be shown on the conference map. Keep in mind that there will be many other people accessing WiFi at the same time, so please avoid downloading big files or streaming videos. I always recommend hitting the hotspots for specific connectivity needs, then quickly moving on.

Good luck and I hope to see you at SolidWorks World 2014!

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The author of this article is an employee of Dassault Systemes. However, the material of this article is not representative of Dassault Systemes, nor is it reviewed by them. Please see the FTC notice in the right side bar of this webpage for further details.