Features Vs. Mates

When working in assemblies, you are mostly dealing with adding and assembling mates.  However, by default in SolidWorks, when you expand a part or subassembly in a main assembly, you see the features of the part or the components of the subassembly.  The mates that exist in the main assembly are grouped in a folder at the beneath the file name.  You can then expand this to see the mates that part/subassembly has.

I find this to be kind of a pain because you have to expand 2 plus signs to get access to the information you want (the mates).  You then also have to deal with a longer scroll bar as all the features get shown.  So, when working with assemblies, there is a setting I like to use in SolidWorks to making managing my mates easier.  The setting is called View Mates and Dependencies and is found by right clicking on the top of the tree (the main assembly name) and going to Tree Display.

You can either have the FeatureManager Design tree set to View Features or set to View Mates and Dependencies.  With it set to View Mates and Dependencies, when you expand a part/subassembly, you see the mates and all the features get grouped into a folder.

 

I find this much easier for working with assemblies, so check it out and see if you like it too.  It is a system setting, so if you change it on one assembly, it will change on all assemblies you open.

Leslie Lougheed

Regional Technical Manager

Computer Aided Technology

Importing Tips

I just wanted to throw out a quick heads up to our users.  I have been getting a lot of questions about some of the surfacing tricks that support uses on imported geometry.  I threw a couple of things together in a quick video that I hope will help.  If there are any other video suggestions please let me know.

The videos can be found on the support videos portion of our site.

Thanks,

Keith Schaefer

Huge Fasteners!

Have you ever opened an assembly only to find the fasteners in it are huge?  This happens a lot when working in a multi-user environment and a network toolbox is not in use.  By default, toolbox files are installed locally on your machine with SolidWorks.  There is a default part file for each fastener type (the huge fastener you see).  Each time that you put in a fastener, a configuration gets written to that fastener of the particular size that you chose.  This works great so far!

The problem comes when someone else tries to open the assembly you made on their machine.  They also have a toolbox installed on their machine.  However, they might not have used the same size fasteners that you have yet.  This means that the configuration for the particular sizes in your assembly might not exist on their machines.  So when they go to open the assembly, the assembly opens with the default part file since the correct configuration size does not exist on their machine. This default part file is a huge fastener.    

So, what do we do about this?  The ideal thing to do is to use a network Toolbox.  That way everyone is using one set of files to create fasteners and everyone has access to all sizes that have been used.  What you will want to do is copy the toolbox from the person’s machine that has created the most sizes of fasteners.  Unfortunately, you will inevitably be missing some fastener sizes (we will deal with this in a bit), but there is no way to combine multiple toolboxes into one.  On that person’s machine, go to Tools>Options>Hole Wizard/Toolbox to find the location of the existing toolbox. 

By default, this folder is installed as SolidWorks Data.  Browse to this location in Windows Explorer and copy this entire SolidWorks Data folder to a network location.  

Then you will need to go to each users machine, and point the path in Tools>Options>Hole Wizard/Toolbox to this network SolidWorks Data folder. 

So I mentioned that we will still probably be missing some fastener sizes, since we had to pull just one person’s Toolbox.  There is an easy fix to have SolidWorks create the fastener sizes for us when we open the assemblies. If you open an assembly that uses a fastener size that the Toolbox does not have, you will be prompted to have Toolbox automatically create the missing size. 

Always click yes!  Why wouldn’t we let SolidWorks create the size for us?   

Design Better

Leslie Lougheed

Regional Technical Manager

TO DELETE SELECT AND HIT THE DELETE KEY........................ OR THE ENTER KEY?

While working on some projects a couple of months ago I was changing my registry settings in SolidWorks and trying different things to try and reproduce some issue or issues that one of our customers was experiencing. In my haste to diagnose the problem something interesting happened. When I selected the item inside of SolidWorks and hit the delete key absolutely NOTHING happened. I thought to myself "Wow that's really strange." No matter what I did I could not delete anything with the delete key.

Sketches, features, planes, nuthin. Ughhhhhhhhhhh. 

 

Now, I could right click and get the delete from there, but what a pain. After some time of beating my head up against the wall, table, desk and every other hard surface available, I decided before I deleted my registry or re-installed SolidWorks to fix the "problem," I would look in the customize settings and hit the keyboard shortcuts. They wouldn't do that would they?

The default setting should look something like this:

 Mine however had this going on:

  

So this now begs the question? And the answer is yes...........

Todd Werginz

Technical Analyst

Computer Aided Technology

Help with Help files !!

We often tend
to look up help of software for information that either isn’t intuitive or we
are confused about. But more often than not we have to access the software
itself to get to the help menu.  Wouldn’t
it be nice to have help at your beck and call as it should be.

You can have
the help menu show up in Start \ All Programs menu \ SolidWorks 2009 \ Help \

 

To do this

1.     browse to C:\Documents and Settings\” user name on machine ”\Start Menu\Programs\

2.      Right
click and create a new folder called “Help”

3.     In this folder create a shortcut to
the help file (*.chm file) for Solid Works Help. This is usually where the
software is installed. C:\ProgramFiles\SolidWorks\SolidWorks\lang\english\sldworks.chm

4.     Similarly create shortcuts to all the
help files you might want in there.

 Eg COSMOS works  C:\Program
Files\SolidWorks\COSMOSWorks\Help\cworks.chm

 

Now
you can drag and drop the Help menu created in the Program files menu under
SolidWorks folder.

Machine specifications

Many a times users
need to know their machine specifications in a quick and easy manner. If you hit windows button on the keyboard+
Pause key; machines System Properties of coming up.  The other method to bring this up is right
click on My Computer and click on properties. 

Rajat
Trehan

Product
Manager – Design Validation

Computer
Aided Technology Inc.

A Positive Negative?

Negative Dimensions

Did you know that it is now possible to use negative dimensions in a sketch?  If you want to move a feature from one side to the other, you no longer have to delete the dimension, just move the feature to the other side and add the dimension back in.

Double click the dimension of the feature you want to move.

Type in the negative value of the dimension and watch the feature flip to the opposite side.  Also, the dimension will be displayed correctly and not with a minus sign in front of it.  This was a great little enhancement in 2009 that makes our lives a little easier.

 

Flow Simulation to meet your goals!

Computational
Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has helped develop some of the latest aircrafts, help us
work more efficiently by maintaining our environment at a specific temperature,
or help chill beer for superbowl !!!

Floworks
takes a goal based approach to help us make these complex calculations.
Floworks initially considers any steady state flow problem as a time-dependent
problem. The solver module iterates on an internally determined time step to
seek a steady state flow field. Floworks has an algorithm to stop these
calculations once convergence has been achieved.  It is better a user uses his own criteria to
determine where the solution should be stopped. 
User specifies Goals as physical parameters of interest, so their convergence
can be considered as obtaining a steady state solution from engineering
viewpoint.

Specifying
Goals not only prevents possible errors in calculated values of these
parameters, but in most cases allows user to shorten the total solution time.
Users can monitor Goal convergence behavior during calculations. They can then
decide to stop the solver if solution is diverging or if necessary goals have
been achieved. Goal progress bar is a qualitative and quantitative
characteristic of the goal convergence process. For each goal user can choose
to use the goal for convergence control or not. Goals that are not used
convergence control will not influence finishing the calculation. 

Users can
specify the following types of Goals

Global Goal is a parameter calculated within the
entire computational domain.

Point Goal is a parameter calculated at a user
specified point.

Surface Goal is a parameter calculated on a user
specified face of the model.

Volume Goal is a parameter calculated within a
user specified space inside computational domain, either in fluid or solid.

Equation Goal is a mathematical function defined
using specified goals (either Global, Point, Surface, Volume) to monitor key
parameters that Floworks does not calculate by default. They play an important
role in the overall calculation as values important to the engineer. Eg.
Efficiency of fan, co-efficient of drag / lift, Pressure gradients at a
location.

It is
recommended to specify appropriate goal with the specified condition. Eg: If
user specify a pressure opening it makes sense to define a mass flow rate
surface goal at this opening. Floworks allows you to associate a type of
condition (boundary condition, fan, heat source or radiative surface) with
goals, which will be automatically created with the condition if the “create
associated goals” check box is selected in the conditions dialog box.

Rajat Trehan

Product Manager - Design Validation

Computer Aided Technology Inc.