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Archive for February 8th, 2009

Of course, I’ve been taking a few pictures, although perhaps not as many as I would’ve liked. Here are a few of them for you.

This is pretty much where my day started, at the registration table, which turned out to be a mistake, because I was actually supposed to go to the press room for registration, so it took a little while just to sort things out and get my press badge and CSWP flag attached to it.

 

This is the goodies table, where attendees received some a conference notebook and program, a nifty t-shirt and a handy bag, courtesy of DS SolidWorks.

 

A few familiar faces and some new ones too.  It actually felt kind of nice when people suddenly stopped next to me and said “Hey, Gabi, nice to meet you!”  There’s something really neat about finally getting to meet in person with those people you’ve been talking to online for a while.

 

 

A view of the Swan, where most of the hands-on sessions and round tables were taking place today, as well as the CSWP tests.

 

A view of the Dolphin, where I’m staying, and where most of the training sessions will take place tomorrow and for the rest of the event.

 

I got a tiny peek at one of the hands-on sessions that was taking place today at Parrot 1. It looks interesting, but most of this stuff wasn’t announced in the agenda and was by invitation only.

 

Next are some pictures I took during the reception at the Partners Pavilion. There was so much to see! I took some pictures and stopped by a few of the booths to investigate a bit further, but I reckon I really have to write a whole new post just to tell you about each of the products I saw demoed tonight with more detail.  And I plan to make a few more trips to the Partners Pavilion before the event is over, anyway.

3DConnexion’s booth.  Creators of the SpacePilot that so many people praise, including yours truly.

 

The ever so cool laser arm which is very similar to a 3D scanner, but with a few advantages.

 

Verisurf offers something kind of similar, but they don’t do reverse engineering with it; it is used for measurement.

Correction: I guess I was too tired to do my homework properly, but truth is that Verisurf does have a complete set of tools for reverse engineering too, not only for model inspection, as I had mentioned first when I wrote this article. Sorry for the confusion! You can check them out at: www.verisurf.com

 

This is a really neat 3D printer from 3D Systems capable of printing high quality pieces and even assemblies, fully moveable and with all parts properly placed, in one single print. They showed me the educational model that produces pieces of somewhat lesser quality, but is also more affordable and more than adequate for educational purposes.

 

This impressive vehicle was engineered using SolidWorks and COSMOS.

 

More products developed using SolidWorks.

 

 

 

 

 

This racer was built by a team of students from the University of Florida using SolidWorks.

 

This is part of a project for the restoration of the F4U-4 Corsair, which is being reversed engineered, modeled, detailed, and manufactured through the use of SolidWorks.

 

These guys from Xpresso have a really neat product for voice recognition in SolidWorks. I saw it demoed with mates and it was simply amazing.

 

This one is one of my favorite ones! An interactive touch screen that allows you to manipulate SolidWorks components with a few gestures of your hands and fingers. This is extremely new, almost experimental, but we had the fortune of playing with it for a bit. I hope to write a bit more about it in the future, as more information becomes available.

 

 

 

 

So, after a short break I headed over to the meeting room Toucan 1 for the Weldments focus group meeting, hosted by Jay Patterson, SolidWorks Product Specialist for DS SolidWorks. Once again, this was an extremely small group, but luckily graced with the presence of Randy Ooms, from Granco Clark, who really knows what he’s talking about when it comes to SolidWorks and Weldments. Randy is also one of this year’s speakers; together with Nicholas Benner, he’ll be presenting about SolidWorks Network Implementation on Wednesday at 1:30 pm.

I must confess that I was feeling a bit out of place, because the guys that were there have not only been using SolidWorks for quite a few years, but are also very well entrenched in the industry. However, I’m grateful that they allowed me to be there and learn from them.

First thing that surprised me was to hear how some of the functionality provided by SolidWorks sometimes goes unused, because it really doesn’t cater to their needs. The weldment bead feature is an example of this. Most of them don’t really use it, unless it’s absolutely necessary, like in case it needs to be included in an analysis of the model. The limitations of the bead feature were also discussed, as well as ideas to improve it and make it actually useful.  Weldment profiles are another good example of this. In fact, Randy mentioned that in his company they have practically thrown away the profiles supplied by SolidWorks  for aluminum and steel structural members and substituted them with their own, simplified, custom profiles, because this way it’s easier for them to obtain the information they need  (and nothing else they don’t need) about the size of the profile by looking at the name of the sketch, while in the profiles provided by SolidWorks all sketches are called sketch1 by default and don’t provide much information at a glance. On this same topic, it was also mentioned the need for a way to obtain information on those weldment profiles that may not be accessible to the user, perhaps in the shape of a flyover little window that provides that info, even if we can’t really open the profile to examine it.

The desire for enhancements for gussets and end caps was also addressed, more in particular, the need for automatic properties to be generated, so the user doesn’t have to go and apply dimensions to them manually in order to make them parametric, and, in the case of end caps, it was also discussed whether it’s useful or even desirable by some users to allow the length of a tube to be shortened when applying an end cap, like it’s currently done in SolidWorks 2009.

One of the attendees spent quite some time explaining about the trouble he’s got when modeling something as a huge multibodies weldments part that he then would need to break down into several parts, each with their own BOM and detailing. That’s when Jay mentioned how weldments in the past used to be more assembly oriented, as opposed as the way it is nowadays, and posed the question to the group on whether it would be useful or not to somehow orient it to be more about assemblies again, instead of multibodies parts. Personally, I have no idea how this weldments functionality used to be in the past and the multibody approach is all I’ve known, so I can’t tell if this would be a good idea or not. 

As an added bonus, we learned a bit about using library features to flatten the ends of a tube. It was a good meeting, but it would’ve been even better if more people had shown up. After all, that’s the purpose of these meetings, to get the feedback from the users of the product, and hopefully, a few ideas for enhancements and new functionality that is really needed.