Listen! It’s Not Your Mom’s or Dad’s Machine Shop Anymore. The 3DEXPERIENCE Manufacturing and Design podcast series takes students, educators and professionals through the latest in technology. Hosted by my colleagues, John Milbery and Michael Buchli, this month features two innovative manufacturing education programs at the community college and high school level.
Last month, Amazon invited its legions of customers to shop the future with the launch of a 3D Printing Store. Although the products range from quirky conversation pieces (personalized figures, phone accessories) to odd gimmicks (bird masks and a 3D-Rex dinosaur), the store’s existence validates a mainstream public interest in 3D printing. Sure the store might feel like the 3D printing Stone Age, but if you believe history repeats itself then designers will eventually strike gold. Beyond proving
1. Uncovering a childhood memory at the thrift store! I love thrift stores. There’s something magical about walking into one of these places and uncovering a treasure or seeing something from your childhood resurface.
SOLIDWORKS contains a lot of features, but most users only use a small selection of them. In this tech blog I want to reveal a feature, which is relatively unknown to many users, but yet very powerful: Delete Face. It is a feature which I use often on day to day basis to solve some customer issues. Where to find it?
Yannick Lammen, a mechanical engineer, and Jan Drennel, an undergraduate student, at the University of Stuttgart in Germany talk to SOLIDWORKS about their work for the SOFIA project. https://blog-assets.solidworks.com/uploads/sites/3/5C41E9F285834C383AEA7A6C8942FC94.mp4 Also find link to video here. SOFIA. the Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy, is a 2.5 meter in diameter telescope mounted in the fuselage of a modified 747SP aircraft. The University of Stuttgart chose SOLIDWORKS
Intel Security Issue: Does it Affect SOLIDWORKS? Readers of this blog are tech savvy and are most likely already aware of the Intel Security fault commonly known as “Meltdown” and “Spectre.” This is not specific to SOLIDWORKS, this fault can affect all PCs equipped with specific models of Intel® chips. The SOLIDWORKS Development team, Technical Support, and Quality Assurance departments have all begun tests to evaluate the impact on SOLIDWORKS customers.
Fettuccine Pasta Bridge Richard first came up with the idea of constructing a bridge using fettuccine pasta, while pushing a shopping cart alongside his wife, Carmy, at a supermarket. As Carla stopped in the aisle stacked with a variety of pastas, Richard carefully observed the different types of pastas, appreciating the uniformity inside of the packaging. He recalls thinking, “To try and make something like that would be very difficult to say the least. I could not wait to get SOLIDWORKS up and
“Simple things seem to derive the most pleasure from everyone” – Corporal Willy Corporal Willy with a Epilog 120 Watt Laser The very first time we tried doing a 3D carving, we took just two pieces of scrap wood and glued them together. I looked for two pieces that were not cracked or had any knots or other irregular surface features to them. However, as the machine finished the carving, a knot showed up right at the end of the Wolf’s nose. Rob made this one on a laser machine for a friend’s
September is here and it’s back to the grind for college students. A new batch of engineering majors are gearing up for the toughest four (or more) years of their lives. There are dozens of subjects an engineering major can focus on, and the tragedy of majoring in any engineering field is that in spite of all the classes, studying, allnighters, and existential dread, college can only prepare you for so much. The best way to gain experience as an engineer is in the field.
There seems to be a fair amount of confusion about the best computer CPUs for SOLIDWORKS performance. Over the past several months, I’ve seen blogs, forum posts, and presentations that skirt around the subject, with nebulous statements, and in some cases outright incorrect information. So, I thought I’d set the record straight. What IS the Best CPU for SOLIDWORKS?
The Evolution of Online Shopping It wasn’t long ago that the idea of purchasing products online was a scary, if not completely foreign concept to most of us. If you planned on making any type of specialty purchase, it started with checking the yellow pages or asking a friendly neighbor for a recommendation for a local shop, and then heading out for a scavenger hunt to attempt to become a more knowledgeable consumer. What used to be near impossible for the consumer to acquire GOOD information and
This year’s SAE AERO Design West competition took place in the heart of the USA, nestled right in Fort Worth Texas. Students from all around the world and from different walks of life, filled the hotel lobby with propellers, DC motors, and aerodynamic fuselages, as they marched their planes in and out of the judges’ arena. Day 1 of the event was all about technical qualifications. A warm Texas morning welcomed the teams to the Thunderbird Field that hosted the Day 2’s agenda: Flight.
FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) 2017 is here! Shared by SOLIDWORKS mentor, Earl Hasz January 7, 2017 marked the kickoff of the exciting design and build competition season. SOLIDWORKS is a FRC Crown Sponsor. To all teams that apply for sponsorship at www.solidworks.com/FIRST, SOLIDWORKS will provide the SOLIDWORKS Robotics Suite of software tools.
In the early days of the Internet, circa 1993, the nascent world wide web was facing a huge problem – how to find what you were looking for. The distributed architecture of the web meant that the information you were looking for could be residing on a computer in Berkeley or on a server in Switzerland, and there was no simple way for you to find it. Enter the search engine
Those who attended SOLIDWORKS World may recall our mission to help the SOLIDWORKS community move beyond creating products and into the realm of designing experiences. Thanks to trends like big data and the Internet of Things, products can be so much more than customizable than ever before. It’s no longer about catering to an entire user base; product design is evolving to build products that users can adapt their own specific needs.
Science fiction has wet our appetites with visions of what will be served for dinner in the decades to come. These culinary prognostications range from the realistic, food packets and moon sandwiches in 2001: A Space Odyssey or food pills in the Jetson’s; and the ridiculous, Demolition Man’s prediction that every restaurant will become Taco Bell, thanks to a franchise war; to the frightening, two words: Soylent Green (it’s people)!
I get asked frequently about hardware in regards to SOLIDWORKS. Sometimes it’s people getting ready to buy their first license and asking about, “What would a good computer be for me to run it on?” Sometimes it’s a big engineering department head asking,“What should we look at for hardware upgrades this year?” You get the idea.
Who said CAD software couldn’t surprise you? Elite hi-fi manufacturers Bowers and Wilkins needed a simple way to add product imagery and illustrations to its user guides. Then it realised that SOLIDWORKS Composer makes it a cinch. Result?
Using SolidWorks PDM is a great tool to control your revisions and versions, manage your files, etc. However, when it doesn’t work it can become very frustrating. Don’t worry, most issues are usually IT related, which can easily be resolved by following these troubleshooting steps. The most common and generic error when working with PDM is “Cannot access the item in the database” or “Could not find the Server”.
As more and more software is deployed on the cloud, many might question how secure these cloud-based applications really are compared with traditional on-premise software. To some, “the cloud” sounds like data is magically jettisoned to some nebulous place in the atmosphere—and all that data is now floating out there (securely, somehow) in the sky. In actuality, the biggest difference in cloud computing is the physical location of servers. You still control access to all your data.
Did you just upgrade your SOLIDWORKS PDM and are you finding now all your files are taking a considerable amount of time to open and save? We know why and we have the solution, although you have upgraded the software version, all of your SOLIDWORKS files are still sitting in an older version. Working with older version files can be quite frustrating as they can lead to longer open and rebuild times, this is because they have to check the version of all referenced documents and upgrade them. But
