SOLIDWORKS Page 4

Do you find yourself creating essentially the same product repeatedly? Have you attempted to “automate” your sales, engineering or manufacturing process to save time and resources? If you've ever dreamt of letting customers configure their own products online, enabling your sales team to generate instantaneous quotes and drawings or even having SOLIDWORKS create all of your manufacturing data automatically at the push of a button – DriveWorks might be the product for you.

As an experienced SOLIDWORKS user, I know sometimes there are frustrating situations throughout my design process. I have found myself making up excuses or justifications when including explode lines to my explored view; have been unable to mate two sets of holes that are not perfectly concentric and have questioned why my assemblies are slow. If like me, you’ve found yourself in any of these situations, then this blog article is for you. I will share with you some of my favorite features from SOLIDWORKS 2018 onward that have helped increase my productivity. These features will allow you to retire your clever workarounds for workflows you might use daily or during specific phases of your projects.

An electrical connector is an electro-mechanical interface device between different electrical circuits. There are thousands of connector types but predominantly they consist of plugs which contain a male pin connection and a jack which has a female socket connection. Connectors can be displayed in different ways in pin-out and schemes, as whole connectors on a single drawing or split across multiple drawings as individual pins. In this blog article, we will discuss how to insert and configure electrical connectors in SOLIDWORKS Electrical.

As the workplace transitions to a remote setting naturally, or out of necessity, being connected with your team is more important than ever. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform offers a great solution for not only the CAD users on your team, but everyone that contributes to the project during its lifecycle. The platform allows global teams to collaborate on projects together seamlessly from any device connected to the internet, thereby eliminating the need for dedicated physical workstations and location dependence in most cases. Being able to leverage skills and knowledge, regardless of where they are and what time zone they are in, gives your project the resource potential of a true 24-hour global workforce.

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.

SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation makes solving complex fluid dynamics problems easy. Even though setting up a model may take only a matter of minutes, sometimes we run into scenarios that require a significant amount of computation time. For example, some problems deal with processes that develop at different rates and if the difference in the rate at which these processes develop is significant, the CPU time or solve time might be dominated by the slower process. In this article, we look at how to use the Flow Freezing capability in SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation to complete these time-intensive computations.

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.

When upgrading SOLIDWORKS and PDM applications to a new version, your existing files remain at the version in which they were created. If they remain this way, it will create delays when opening and reading these files since they will be undergoing conversions when opening. This can be seen as slow system performance, but luckily this doesn't have to remain an issue. In this article, we look at three ways in which you can upgrade your files to their latest version in SOLIDWORKS.

As we've been exploring how to build a better electrical parts library in SOLIDWORKS Electrical, we've looked at set up of libraries, classification and how to import external or custom data. Having all your project-specific or company-specific data in one place helps you speed up your design process and also makes it easier to have access to all your part details. But how do you stay in control of who views or edits your libraries? How can you keep them organized? In part three of this series, we walk through the steps to relocate data within libraries, delete certain data and manage access permissions.

SOLIDWORKS Electrical comes with a huge default library of common parts right out of the box, which is very helpful in getting started right away. However, there could come a time where you will need to expand this library with more parts that better fit your project needs. Fortunately, there are different import options that allow you to easily add data to your SOLIDWORKS Electrical libraries. In this article, we will go over how to download, import and manually enter new part data.

SOLIDWORKS Electrical uses libraries to keep data in a centralized area for access during the design process. It will assist with keeping data organized and aids designers when searching for a specific piece of data. One of the great things about this software is that SOLIDWORKS has a database of over half a million manufacturing parts for you to use when designing so you can shrink development time by reusing many common circuits and symbols without having to add them from scratch each time. In part one of this new series, we go over how to set up your libraries and classifications to hold all this data.