Celebrating 10-Years with DriveWorks
2011 is the ten-year anniversary of DriveWorks, the specialist developer of design automation software. Al Dean talks to CEO Glen Smith and vice president Maria Sarkar about the last decade and where they are taking the company in future. Writing about design technology for the last fifteen years has brought me into contact with a [...]
Made in 3D: The 3D Printing Challenge
Dassault Systèmes is proud to present the Made in 3D Challenge, a 3D print ready design contest opened to the global designer community! The Made in 3D Challenge invites designers to submit their best 3D models in one of three categories: Mechanical Design Architectural Ergonomic Function The challenge is open to all 170 design, architectural [...]
SolidWorks 2012 Beta Coming Soon
The SolidWorks Beta team has been hard at work and is very excited to announce that the 2012 Beta program will be launched at the end of June 2011. This year’s Beta program has many new user driven changes. Here are just a few of the enhancements: Redesigned Beta website with improved navigation and accessibility [...]
Revving Up 3D Design Programs
Tuesday, May 31, 2011 by Jesse Roitenberg of Stratasys A little friendly competition can go a long way – especially when it comes to getting kids excited about gaining some real-life engineering experience. David Manning, professor at Utah Valley University’s Engineering Graphics & Design Technology, has found great success engaging his students with an annual [...]
3D Printer Maker Stratasys Named to Fast Company’s Top 10 List
Company is recognized for its work with 200-MPG Hybrid car – Urbee MINNEAPOLIS, Apr 14, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Stratasys (NASDAQ: SSYS), maker of additive manufacturing machines for prototyping and producing plastic parts, was named to Fast Company magazine’s recently published Transportation Top 10 list, alongside Boeing, GE, IBM, Daimler, Nissan, and others. The [...]
Imaginary Materials
Originally published in 2009 In the world of FEA, sometimes the answer has to be “Right” – and sometimes it has to be “Right Now”. This month’s topic is about getting answers Right Now. Every example I’m going to cover here is a cheat of some kind. Purists, Beware! In each of these examples, the [...]
Doll-House Techniques
Originally published in 2009 I’ve written prior articles about the power of Envelope Parts in an assembly. And about ways to leverage the ability to build multiple solid Bodies in a part file. But now lets talk about a way that you can combine these two ideas, to work “Outside-In”. That is, to build detailed [...]
Life-long Mates
Originally published in 2007 Mates are the “glue” that hold your assemblies together. One of the great strengths of Solidworks assemblies is that mates are independent objects which can be applied at any time, in any order. This makes assembly design easy for the CAD novice. It also means that a wide variety of mating [...]
Synchronizing the Toolbox Library
Originally published in 2006 Have you ever tried to open a coworker’s assembly, only to find that all of the fasteners in his assembly have defaulted to some huge size? Have you ever taken work home over the weekend, and found that when you open an assembly on your home computer, some of the fasteners [...]
Taking the Magic Out of the Hole Wizard
Originally published in 2006 The Hole Wizard is probably the most popular “Macro Feature” inside SolidWorks. It eliminates a lot of the drudgery of sizing and locating holes: First, by incorporating a library of standards (a la Machinery’s Handbook), and second, by positioning mutliple holes using a Sketch Driven Pattern. However, there are two subtle [...]