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Every year, there is excitement and anticipation within the engineering and designing community as SOLIDWORKS releases new enhancements and features for the software. At TriMech, we have made it a tradition to put together a list to highlight our top favorite enhancements. With all the excitement it's sometimes easy to forget about previous updates that continue to make our lives easier and allow us to get the job done quicker. I wanted to take a trip down memory lane and refresh the updates from SOLIDWORKS 2017 and later that still impact our design experience as we use SOLIDWORKS. While there are a lot out there, I am going to highlight some of my favorites for you here.

Whenever a holiday comes around, I like to get creative in SOLIDWORKS as you can see from a previous article I created for Halloween a few years ago. For Independence Day, I wanted to raise the flag in SOLIDWORKS! This provided a great opportunity for me to create a rendering and show you the differences between PhotoView360, SOLIDWORKS Visualize Standard and Visualize Professional.

Dark or light? No, we’re not talking coffee here. We’re talking about the SOLIDWORKS UI. For years now, there’s been the option to change the color of the interface as well as the icons. This functionality was introduced to SOLIDWORKS 2016. Before we talk about a light or dark interface let’s first talk about the icons.

Routing is an add-in to SOLIDWORKS Premium that allows engineers and designers to create routed systems easily and automatically. Through Routing, you can generate wire, harness, cable and conduit designs and drawings to take advantage of cut lists and complete bills of materials (BOMs) and speed up their manufacturing process.

TriMech is fortunate to work with clients from Maine to Florida and out to Arkansas, offering a range of engineering solutions. This week's client story showcases how TriMech's Project Engineering Group helped the Ben Bronz Academy with their keyboard devices.

SOLIDWORKS is updated every year to provide users with the best experience and tools. Revision table support was introduced in SOLIDWORKS PDM with the release of SOLIDWORKS 2018. In this blog article, we look at how to use integrated revision tables and how to take advantage of this feature as you manage data across your company.

SOLIDWORKS Toolbox is a library of fasteners and supplier standard components, fully integrated into SOLIDWORKS Professional and Premium. It provides easy access to your frequently used parts and the ability to customize to your companies standards. 

Our world is a highly nonlinear and dynamic 3D domain. To develop products that are of high quality and robust to survive the real-world conditions, it is important to test the product’s behavior and performance prior to manufacturing. Simultaneously, there is the need to accelerate product innovation and cut down the time to market. This is where simulation technology for virtual testing can help you remain ahead of your competition.

Like a lot of people right now, I’ve been working from home and wearing home-made face masks to help slow the spread of COVID-19 whenever I go out on essential errands. I thought it would be interesting to use a tool like SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation to see the difference these kinds of masks can make. Contrary to what you may think, it is surprisingly easy to set up these types of simulations. I hope this article will help remove some of that intimidation and encourage you to experiment as well.

Over the years, TriMech has developed many exclusive courses designed to meet the needs of our clients. Some of these courses extend well beyond CAD training and give our clients the tools they need to be more competitive, efficient and capable engineers. These courses, just like all our other training courses, can be taught in person or with a live in-person instructor via TriMech’s digital training platform. Here are just a few of exclusive courses that TriMech is currently delivering.

Did you know that 3D scanning has been around since Egyptian times? Okay, maybe not so much in the way we think of 3D scanning today, but they developed the early concepts of reverse engineering by creating 3D plaster-cast replicas. Fast forward to today’s scanners, which use laser and structured light technology that can capture highly accurate scans that range from very small, intricate objects to much larger objects in a fraction of the time! It’s easy to appreciate how far this technology has come over the years and the many different industries that 3D scanning is helping revolutionize. In this article, we’re going to cover some of the ways you can get your 3D scanning data into a 3D CAD environment where you can interact, manipulate and make the most of it.

With every release of SOLIDWORKS, we see the addition of hundreds of new features and enhancements – both big and small. It’s not always the incredible new feature or tool that makes the most significant impact on our daily design experience; sometimes it’s the little improvements that have the biggest impact. SOLIDWORKS 2020 has enhanced the surfacing capabilities, and although it’s a small improvement – it’s one of my personal favorites.