Automate your Designs with SOLIDWORKS

[Music] hey everybody I'm Tim move with Hockridge systems and today I'm proud to present to you automating your designs using SolidWorks and with us today is Dane and Danes one of our senior application engineers out of the Edmonton office he has a Bachelor of Science and mechanical engineering from the University of Alberta and is one of the most fun and knowledgeable engineers you meet I had the opportunity to spend a few weeks with him last year during our conferences as we traveled across the country it was really fun to watch how he connects common design tasks to simplified methods using SolidWorks now when he's not training new users on the best way to accomplish their goals he's doing that all online today but hopefully we can get back to the classroom soon he spends this time don't developing content like you'll see today we also post a lot of that stuff on our blog and YouTube channel as well as performing software demonstrations so I'm really happy to present to you date ah Tim you missed the UH the cue for my clap track there my mistake I'll give that up for the end all right all right I need to hear the round of applause I need the audience feedback gets me going hopefully they'll take advantage of that question pain and fun presentation oh yeah in all seriousness thanks to him such a nice intro Tim's a pretty awesome guy too I talked him up but we don't really have time for that for the sake of time let's let's get this show on the road here I'm going to just turn off my webcam here but Tim and I will pop pop in and out every now and then just so you make sure you're not watching a video and that there are actually humans present and we can have some nice social interaction time I'd like to just start off by thanking you guys for choosing to attend my webinar today so in this session we're going to talk about different ways that you can use SolidWorks to automate your design process so we're going to start simple with automating just the creation of features using library features and then we're going to finish off with fully automating unique configurations based off rules design criteria and a user input form using drive works Express we'll also look at how equations global variables and even Excel can be used to drive and configure your designs so automation is a great technique to help streamline your workflows it can speed up design time reduce rework and standardize common features and parts so library feature parts are a way to automate the creation of features in your parts or assemblies if you find yourself recreating the same features time and time again then making them a design library feature will be the first step in automating your designs you will be able to drag and drop the repetitive features into new models which will save you time and the redundancy of remodeling so these on the screen right now are the necessary steps for creating a design library feature step one you have to create a source part step two you need to understand the locating external references then you have to select your desired features and then use the save as command and change the file type and then you organize your dimensions inside of a new folder structure so today I'm going to create a logo that I'm going to automatically drag into new parts and it's gonna cut that logo into all of my new designs so the very first step is to create a source part this part will not be used in any of your models but will be used to define the library features and will be the file to edit and manipulate if you need to make any changes so it can be as simple or as complex as you want so for our example it's just going to be this simple block here with our Hockridge logo cut into it so it is only two features but you can get this as complex as you need so since the feature I want to automate is the cut let's take a look at the sketch it has three external references the very first reference is the plane that this sketch is on the point that incident with the origin right here so kind of what I'm using to locate the center of it that is also an external reference so my sketch is referencing the origin which is external to the sketch the sketch is on a plane which is external to the sketch and then finally my third reference is this bottom edge that I give a parallel relation to to help orient so the coincident relation locates it and this parallel relation will help orient it so of course this is I'm going to need some sort of hard edge to reference I'm not going to be able to use this specific design library feature part if I have a curved edge so then I'd have to make a configured one and that is definitely doable as well so if you don't know exactly what external references you have in your sketch where they are there's a tool for that and we can display the external relations by using the filter in the display delete relations tool so that little icon that popped up on the top right that's the display delete relations it lives on the sketch tab of your command manager and what it'll do is it'll pull up in the property manager on the left side all of your relations and there's a nice little filter where you can filter it for external relations and I can see that this sketch does in fact have two external relations the parallel relation and the coincident relation and as I use this sketch inside of a new feature I have to attach those relations to something else so once I'm satisfied with the feature we need to save the part as a library feature part so the trick is that we need to communicate with SolidWorks what features are going to be imported and which features are just for reference so we establish this by selecting the features we want to drag and drop into other models and then we hit the save as button so this is the most crucial step that most people miss so you need to pre-select in your feature tree what features you want to be drag-and-drop and then you hit that save as button then all we have to do is change the file type and choose a location that's easily accessible so you can see I'm saving minds at the design library and I change the file type to the SLD LFP for a SolidWorks library feature part so after you save as a library feature part some changes happen inside of your feature tree the icon of the part file has changed and there are a few new folders at the top we have this references locating dimensions and internal dimensions folders so the reference folder displays all the external references needed to locate the design library feature so we can see in there we at the placement plane the edge needs to be parallel to and the sketch point the locating dimensions are fur dimensions two entities external to the feature and are used for positioning the sketch in this example there are no locating dimensions because the position is defined by the external references and not the dimensions so in the property manager after dragging and dropping there will be a section to manipulate locating dimensions so internal dimensions are first sizing the sketch and also have their own section in the property manager of the design library feature so there's also a little L added to all the features that are included in the drag-and-drop operability of the design library features this helps to clarify what features are going to be added and which will be in fact left behind so since only the cut extrude has the L when I drag this into another part only the cut extrude will happen so let's see this in action inside of SolidWorks so here we go I have modelled myself this part and anytime I'm making content here at Hockridge I have to in fact put my little Hockridge logo on there and brand it so no one steals my amazing ideas so that's what I want to do I do it a lot so I don't want to have to model that hock every time that's a fairly complex sketch so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into my design library and right here I have my Hawk logo and I'm going to drag it and since it's a sketch that I'm bringing over it has to drop on to a plane so I'm gonna drag it and I'm just gonna drop it onto this plane to here now we can see on the left hand side if I had different configurations I could choose the configuration so my configuration could change the size if I didn't want to use my size dimensions or maybe different ones for connecting to a curved edge instead of a linear edge it would have different references but for now I only made one this one usually works for me every time so I have to connect my first references so I can see edge one is a reference needed and I get the nice little preview of that source part so I need some sort of edge to get the bottom parallel with I'll click on that and then I need a locating point so I'm just gonna grab my origin and just like that my features come through so if it's really complex SolidWorks color codes them as well so everything yellow is being added everything that's not yellow is already existed inside of the part if I had locating dimensions instead of these references I could come in here and manipulate them and if I had some internal size dimensions for the sketch itself those would be located right here and I could edit and manipulate those at will so just like that coming in and I added that pretty complex sketch fairly easily hey Dean yeah I'm sorry to interrupt but I gotta tell you I just learned something I didn't know that you could do that the way you drag and drop that under the plane by having the plane shown there and then passing your cursor over the plane it picked up that inference that's pretty cool anything to save a step hey I like anything to save a step I love it thank you nice great great great point Tim yeah cuz sometimes I do these little subtle habits and forget why I do them and right there awesome thanks Tim love it so adds a little additional bonus it's not actually in the agenda I'm gonna talk about smart components so with smart components you can add assembly feature actions to your part files this will allow the part file to add assembly features like cutting a specific tolerance or adding necessary hardware so in this example on the screen here you can see that the bushing is used to bore its own hole that comes with the necessary tolerancing this can really speed up the design process because you look up the tolerance once set it in the part file then every time you use the part you don't need to look it up again and you don't need to make that cut feature so one-click doing a ton of manual operation so that the first time there's a little more setup but afterwards it it saves tons of time the more you use it so these are the steps on the screen here for creating smart components so you generally create smart components from components that you use frequently that require the addition of associated components and features when you make a component smart you associate the other components and features with the smart component inside of a defining assembly when you insert the smart component into another assembly you can choose whether or not to insert the Associated components and features so the very first step just like our design library is to create this defining assembly then you make sure that it has all the included parts and features within that assembly so once you're in that defining assembly you choose a component that you want to make smart and then inside of the property manager you can select the components and features you would like to bring with the smart component after that your components ready to test in a new assembly so the example that I'm gonna show you guys here I've chosen to make this joist bracket a smart component and that's gonna automatically add the hardware and for the hardware so what you see on the screen right now is my defining assembly that this smart components going to be created in so I like to keep my assemblies as simple as possible so that it's easy to open if Ed atang is needed and it's not used anywhere else so accidental edits don't happen I use the whole series tool in smart fasteners to add the hardware in the holes so these features are available in SolidWorks Professional and above but they're not necessary for the creation of smart components it just made my life easier in this defining assembly Dames speaking of keeping your life easier that looks like it's gonna be hard to wrench oh yeah I know I thought my job as an engineer is to make Manufacturing's life miserable my duties you work but yeah so you're not the first one to point that out to me Tim so the thing is is that it's way easier to make the change at SolidWorks and it wasn't PowerPoint so it is actually fixed in SolidWorks because it was just changing one dimension but in PowerPoint I had to redo the screenshot relink them and read size and look just didn't want to deal with all the formatting that came along with it however I guess if I used composer to make this then that would have some automatic updating as well but insights always talked 20/20 but yeah getting a wrench in that nook there with a yeah not not fun but I love to have those comments with manufacturing though just I get lonely sometimes in design world so I like it when they call me even if it is just to yell at me and tell me I did a bad job so that was the smart assembly so to create an actual smart component you have to go to your dropdown menu hit tools and then there is a make smart component and again you do that when you were inside the defining assembly so once you're in the property manager the first step is to pick the component that will be the smart component in our case it's gonna be this bracket part which is blue in the graphics area the next selection box contains all of the components that will be added to the assembly once the smart component is activated in this window I selected all of the bolts nuts and washers this is key because it will save me from having to add this hardware to every joist connection that I have and in big structural steel assemblies our multi-body weldment parts there's gonna be a lot of those joists in there so again just little ways to keep saving time and it always adds up so the last and final step is to define any features you want to add to the smart component this can include material removal created from a cut extrude revolved cut or the whole wizard tool we can see during this selection stage all the components are hidden revealing the holes underneath in this example we're going to grab that cut extrude feature that was used to generate this hole so now that I've shown you kind of the steps to create the smart components let's see it in action inside of SolidWorks I'm just waiting for everyone's screen to catch up to mind Oh someone's got bad internet I'm there we're good cool so this is my assembly so I'm in the assembly environment and I pulled in this weldment part and again this would generally be much larger but I'm just keeping it simple here and I'm gonna use my insert components and I'm gonna insert that smart component so it is in fact this bracket here so I'm going to come in and I'm going to make this into place and usually it takes three mates to mate something nice little select other in here to grab that back face and my control select method for mating is my favorite way I find it the fastest so this is in the position that I want it to be so now I need to activate the smart component so you can do that by clicking on the part itself and we can see this nice little lightning bolt icon in there is telling me that in fact this is a smart component when you click on the part you get this little insert smart feature button that appears but I took too long to click on it so let's go and click on it and then it's going to activate the smart feature and it's gonna say I'm gonna add some cut extrudes and this huge list of components in there all the hardware it's like all I need from you Dame is just ok where's the back face where's that not gonna press up against and I'll come in here click on the back face and I'm getting my little ghosted preview looking pretty good hit my check mark and there we go I have all of that hardware at it for me it is organized with that smart feature so each one of the brackets will have the hardware kind of folded inside of it but they are all available for your Bill of Materials whichever way you'd like to describe that so a nice quick way to add features and hardware for again redundant tasks we're gain that that is an awesome technique you know I remember when that was added the SolidWorks a few years ago and and I don't see as many people using it as as maybe we ought to be recommend taking a look at that tool it's just an awesome way to insert components features and additional parts all in all in one shot yeah I I totally agree any time I'm kind of scoping out people's workflows is one of the first things I work for and most people that I show it to love it like holy I spend so much time just putting in the hard we're doing these redundant tasks when SolidWorks sighs the built-in tools to automate them and people just are unaware of them yeah super good point so that kind of concludes our section on library features with the little added bonus of smart components we're now going to get into equations and global variables so for this section I wanted to show a design that was entirely derived from equations in global variables my first instinct was to do pipe schedules because the wall thickness and diameter are all functions of the schedule but then I remembered the routing package and decided not to reinvent the wheel because SolidWorks premium already comes with all of that pre-configured for you so I was stumped I was sitting there I was thinking and then I noticed this picture of da Vinci's Vitruvian Man hanging in my office so if you're not familiar with this sketch of da Vinci's it's a drawing based on the correlations of ideal human body proportions these proportions are all expressed mathematically which will be easily translated into SolidWorks so let's take a look at how I can use equations and global variables in SolidWorks to build the Vitruvian Man of pretty much any height so I'm in the SolidWorks environment now and what I did is I took that JPEG that I stole off the internet or I could have taken a photo of my wall but this one is nicer it's got the built-in dimensions and it already reminded me of SolidWorks because I unfortunately cannot read the latin up here which tells you all these proportions and correlations so someone translated it for me so this is the image I chose to import so if you're not familiar you can insert images into a SolidWorks sketch so I'm still in my 3d SolidWorks environment it's as if I just took a piece of paper and I plopped it down on this nice little sketch plane so to start off this design I just wanted to build in all of the relations and all these relative proportions so I did that in here just with some construction geometry so all these hard black boundaries are sketch entities and then I used my smart dimension tool to throw in some dimensions and then related the dimensions to each other using equations so this vitruvian man all of these proportions are based upon the height so what I decided to do is make a global variable for the height and then relate everything else to the global variable so you can see from the middle finger to the wrist over here that's one-tenth the height from the knee to the hip that's about a quarter of the height and so on and so forth so if you're unfamiliar with global variables and equations I'm going to show you kind of multiple ways on how you can create them so first off when you're in the modify box of your smart dimension tool all you have to do is hit the equal sign and what that does is brings you into equation mode so it's really similar to a cell inside of Excel you can type in characters or if you hit the equals bug button it turns into functions so I can come in here and I can grab my global variable of height and I'm gonna say okay this is going to be 1/6 the height so I'm going to divide it by 6 and I'm going to hit my check mark and there we go so now this little Barbra tree line I made is 1/6 the height so when I change the height this line will change everything will stay within proportions so another way that you can do that is to come in and actually use the equations window so if I right click my equations here I can manage them and I'm just gonna pull everything to the right so we can see it use my screen here and I can see all of my global variable so I defined a global variable of height and then I have all of my dimensions defining a global variable and then I like this window because I can put comments in here so when I come back to it I know what each one of these dimensions are so lots of people love to rename their dimensions so instead of it being d2 it could say distance between whatever but I just left it all there in the comments for some easier syntax on the left hand side there so you can even add equations in this window here so your first column is like the left hand side of your equation so I'm gonna click in there and I'm going to choose my dimension so this dimension is going to equal and I'm gonna come in here put my global variable and say okay divided by 7 so that will be 1/7 and then I hit my green checkmark I have automatically rebuild on so the rebuild closed my sketch well let's come in here and let's open that up again and we can see this has that Sigma value so you can define a rate in the graphics area you can define it in that table format whatever makes the most intuitive sense to you whatever you find is going to be the fastest so this kind of construction geometry here is going to lay out all of my proportions and then I made this nice little sketch over top which I can then start building my surfaces upon so these are going to be my overall sizes and I will use this geometry here to build my surfaces but we're just gonna live in sketch land right now so I can prove the point of portion all design or equations things like that not not really a surfacing exercise maybe for the next webinar so what I want to do is I want to see if I am of a true vien man if I'm proportionate enough so I'm going to make a new configuration of this sketch or if this whole part file so I'm going to add a configuration this configuration is going to be 6 foot 3 inches because that is how tall I am so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go back into my equation manager here and I'm going to change my global variable but now since I have configurations I can choose to change it for all configurations or specific configurations and this is a nice way to populate different versions of your part either as you need them or as we'll see later we can use Excel to automatically propagate them so I'm going to say ok just for this configuration I have my six foot three inch configuration active I'm going to say this is six feet plus three inches and I love how SolidWorks can do math rate inside all of these windows makes life so easy so I did that and we can see my vitruvian man kind of layout sketch here grew and it still looks proportionate so I was coming in here and I was like okay let's test some of these these measurements here so the first one I did was from my middle finger to my elbow and I measured that out and I was like oh okay it's supposed to be 18 and 3/4 I got 20 inches oh my gosh everyone always tells me I'm so gangly and long and flail ease so this is kind of supporting that conclusion but then I did some some more of these quarter height ones so from the chest to my top of the head and and I got this the same number there I got 20 so I am proportionate I'm just not Renaissance Italian proportionate so I'll chalk that up to my Scandinavian genes they're being nice and tall and and slender but the whole point of this exercise is to show you that you can change your global variable and if you build your dimensions relative to that global variable or even relative to each other then you can create different versions of your part by changing one number so if you have some design standards that are really setting the scale of your part or setting the relations and proportions of your part equations and global variables are a great way to capture that so then as you make design changes all of those rules and proportions will update accordingly so our next section is gonna kind of go hand in hand with this but it's going to be using design tables to automate and configure your designs so design tables use Microsoft Excel to create and control configurations of a SolidWorks part or assembly with a design table you can manipulate your dimensions color custom properties material and the suppression state of features you can also use the full power of Excel to derive these changes so you can use functions you can use logical statements and my favorite tools the fill tool which is that little black box in the corner of a cell that lets you continue an equation down or a numerical series so that's really good if you have configurations that need to be within a range of something you can use the fill tool and automatically populate them very very quickly so inside of the design table which is kind of a little example here on the screen the rows so left to right that represents your configurations and columns up to down are the parameter to be manipulated inside of that configuration so the column headers have a specific syntax that needs to be followed in order to communicate effectively with SolidWorks for custom properties or SolidWorks properties a dollar sign needs to be in front of it and of course spelling counts so that's what gets me all the time and I try and manually populate my design tables I usually spell stuff wrong but spoiler alert there's a nice trick where that doesn't matter so custom properties need the dollar sign for dimensions you have to put the dimensions name the @ sign and then the sketch that that dimensions in and then if you're in an assembly the part of that dimensions in and the feature and it sounds kind of complicated but fortunately there's a trick to automate the creation of the columns you want if SolidWorks detects a difference of a parameter between any of the configurations it can automatically create it for you inside the design table so honestly that's how I make all my design tables so in the example I'm going to demonstrate that workflow so in this example that I'm going to show you I'm gonna copy some existing data from Excel into my design table to generate a configured weldment profile for most stock lumber so SolidWorks weldments comes with a vast library for metal structural members but it also works well for carpentry and structural woodworking so these the steps are gonna create I'm gonna make my new sketch for the weldment profile I'm gonna configure some sketch dimensions just so then there's a difference and then I'm gonna create my design table and I'm doing it in that order so the design table will automatically propagate then I'm just gonna copy some data from another table paste it in rebuild it and voila everything should be the way that I want it so on my screen now is SolidWorks and this is my weldment profile so you might be looking at it being like wool there's a lot of sketch points in there but I love to have the flexibility to put the center line or the sweep line of my welds and profiles wherever I need it to be especially in woodworking when you're changing sizes you usually need some quarter marks half marks just so then the edges line up flush because of course you have to point SolidWorks to the center point not the edge boundary so what I'm going to do is configure some of my dimensions so I'm going to do that by coming in here and I'm going to configure so I'm going to right click on the dimension configure the dimension it'll pull up my configuration table add the other dimension I want in there and I'm going to come in here and just make this temporary configuration and I don't really care about the values I just want to change them so then SolidWorks can detect a difference between them so that's good I'll hit apply now I have two configurations that are slightly different I have my new temp configuration and my original default configuration and they're slightly different so now I can come in here and I can insert my table which is going to be a design table now this is key I'm gonna make sure that I'm gonna let SolidWorks Auto created if I have the blank radio button selected then I'm gonna have to type in all that syntax and the procedure that I did previously is going to be irrelevant so I'm gonna auto create and I want new parameters new configurations so I want to make sure all of that is checked on I will hit my check box and there we go SolidWorks has pulled up Excel for me doing that that's an awesome workflow I appreciate you showing it in this way because I think this is the easiest way to build these is to like you said configure it first and let SolidWorks build the table for you totally yeah it saves me because I am a terrible speller so I either spelt the dimension name wrong or when I'm putting it into Excel I'm gonna spell it wrong so that has caused me so much grief that this is the way that I do it every time now so yeah and then and then you don't forget anything either so on the left hand side this is the design table populated by SolidWorks on the right hand side this is just some information that I downloaded from the internet for converting the Imperial size to the actual metric size so the first thing I want to do is I'm going to grab these imperial sizes for the lumber for the name of the configuration so the very first side is the name I'm gonna paste that in there I'm going to put the description is the same thing color I don't really care about and then I'm going to come over here and grab these metric values here and then I'm going to paste them in across so these dimensions up here are going to be written to these values for these specific configurations on the side so this parts always weird all you have to do is just close that table and then SolidWorks will come up and it will say okay Dane this design table has generated the following configurations and I'm like yes that's exactly what I want it I'll hit my checkmark and now I have a whole bunch of configurations so I can double click and I can test and there we go I got my 1 by 3 my 1 by 4 2 by 4 that's the most common that's the one everyone always says you got some four by sixes if you're building a deck or something but all the common ones in there and of course I can just go into that table add more or just configure those again and use my configuration table so to add on to this example I'm going to use the design table to write a custom property so I want this custom property to be the area of the cross section so since you cannot do functions in the property manager but I can in Excel using a design table is the ideal workflow for this task so back into my SolidWorks here so what I mean by that is I'm gonna come up here to my file properties and I want to do a configuration specific property and I'm gonna call this metric area and then normally you know you could come in here and you could say like equals and you try and get the dimension to pop up and you put the dimension in there and then I'm like yeah 140 times this dimension and then it doesn't solve it just puts in the exact symbols I'm putting in there so for now I'm just gonna put a placeholder value and I'm doing this so then my design table will automatically propagate that column for me again so I'm just going to put it in arbitrarily is a hundred and then I'm going to do the math inside of Excel so I can access my tables here in my configuration manager and I'm gonna right-click the design table and I'm going to edit it in a new window and then SolidWorks will flag me it's like hey there's some differences here do you want this temp configuration in there do you want part number I don't want that but I do want the metric area to come up so I'm going to select this parameter and I'm going to add that specific column you so now in here in Excel I can see that column has been added gonna make it a little bit bigger and then I can put in some functions I can say okay this is going to equal that value times the link times the width and then I can use the fill box right here and I can get it to calculate everything very quickly for me so that looks good I have that metric cross section or the metric area I will close that SolidWorks needs a nice little rebuild and then I can see in here that all of these have the appropriate value to them so if there's a drawing that's referencing that or a note or maybe that parameters driving something else some costing information who knows whatever you need it for it now exists and I populated it pretty much instantly instead of having to manually do it for every single configuration you so that is design tables nice little crash course the next thing we're gonna look at is drive works Express so drive works Express is one of those hidden gems inside of SolidWorks that everyone has but no one really uses it is in my opinion the best way to automate designs when you use them with equations drive works is great if you have a configurable design with an infinite amount of possibilities you can create the designs automatically based upon the customers requirements as you need them you can use drive works to create a SolidWorks part assembly and drawing file all based on the new configuration a drive works product is created in three simple steps you capture you create your input form and then you build your rules so let's take a deeper dive into the process so the first step in creating a drive works project in the SolidWorks environment is telling drive works what you would like to capture and make changes to so you can manipulate components their configuration dimensions custom properties and reference drawings these drawings will be used as a template to create a new drawing for the newly created versions of the product all dimensions notes and views will be created with their appropriate associations the next step is to create input forms to enter product requirements so validation controls are used to ensure inputs are always suitable for where they're going to be used so if you need a range between a certain number or a specific number of significant digits you can always put that in in a tooltip and use the validation controls to make sure that the inputs actually going to work you can have drop-down lists numeric text ranges checkboxes or spin buttons to create whatever user experience you want you can make the forms as complex or as simple as needed with customizable tooltips for clarity and then the final step in creating a drive works project is to build the rules to link input values with captured parameters the rules can be as simple as writing an input value to a captured parameter or extremely complex with functions and logical statement so you can say if parameter a is this then parameter B has to be this and you can make it as complex as your design process needs so let's take a peek at what exactly that looks like inside the SolidWorks environment so here I have this hydraulic single cylinder and depending on use case it could be thicker could be longer could have different fixtures here so this is kind of my master assembly and this has all of my components and then the drive works project after I run it and get the specific input is going to suppress certain components and change sizes of captured dimensions so you can find drive works express in the evaluate tab of your command manager and it's all the way on the right-hand side got the drive works Express wizard so clicking on that opens this nice little tab here and I'm just going to kind of run through again the the three step so the first step is capturing so I have said that I want to potentially make a change to all of these assemblies or components these are the few dimensions I want to change custom properties that I want to change as well as the specific drawing reference then I have my input form so we're gonna see what the input form looks like in a minute when I actually run this but I can come in here and you can see what it looks like you can have text box numeric text box pin button check box everything like that and then finally all of the rules that you put in so this specific project has 74 rules 60 in four file names 41 for custom properties we're just going to take a peek at some of the dimensions here so you can see that some of them have complex if statements and then some of them are really simple it's like okay it's just this input value plus eight or this input value plus three plus two wood whatever you need it to be you can put it in there so once you're done you hit your Run button and then this is kind of what your window looks like so this was drawn by me my bore size let's do three and a half stroke length put it at fifteen then my clevis type maybe I'll do a universal clevis pressure range pretty high pressure port size can come in here so again this is all restricted by that drop-down box and then all I have to do is hit create and drive works is going to create all those files based upon all of the rules that I have so we can see here my windows gonna flash a whole bunch I'm making a bunch of parts so it says these files are all getting created successfully custom properties are being changed and this is all based upon the input and then we can see right here my drawing is being made as well so you can imagine how long it would take to go through all of that information recalculate everything remake all the parts remate them all together all of that unfun stuff when I can just let drive works go off this master model take the initial legwork to build in those rules and design criteria and then I never really have to do it again so we can see in here this brand-new drawing was made all of my custom properties were updated so this is all the input information so the technical specs that I got from the client and then down in here my bill of materials and everything gets updated to the way that I want it to be so that's that's really cool that is drive works the cool thing about drive works is that they put all of their examples on their website so that this is a project provided by drive works I've done some of my own but they weren't as cool as this one so I chose this one instead we can go to their website you can download their examples and you can kind of reverse engineer play with them and get a better understanding for how Drive works actually works but that is drivers Express we also have different levels of drive work so just like SolidWorks has different levels drive works has different levels as well so up from the Express is what's called drive work solo so it has a more intuitive user face feels a lot cleaner it's not so restrictive and windows 95 you looking there's improved rules builder so you got more often xin there you can automate a little bit more with the drawings you can change the position of views you can change the scales you can even add or remove annotations in there instead of it just being a carbon copy of the drawing you can automate some more advanced features you can swap the master model so based upon the input criteria you can look at different master models they can be static or dynamic and then you can create some additional documentation as well like quotes bill of materials and different letters all the based upon the information in there so yeah go ahead - I was gonna say date it really takes that Express tool to a whole new level and what's kind of cool is you can take that Express product or the Express project that you've developed and bring it over into solo and enhance it with some of these extra extra options totally yeah and then then you're gonna want it though once you try it you're gonna want it you can't go back so we're offering a 30-day free trial of drive works solo and you can get that by going on to our website so in the handouts section of this webinar I have put a PDF of this entire presentation and this giant image here is a URL you click on it it'll bring you to the drive works free trial you give us this information that we probably already have because it's the same information of when you register for this webinar and yeah you can get your hands on drive work solo and see how far that can take you with with automating everything yeah that's a pretty cool option I want to thank everybody for joining the webinar today I know I certainly appreciate it they needed a great job really helpful stuff there thanks so much and thanks to all of you for taking a little bit of time out of your day to join us [Music] you you

Channel: Hawk Ridge Systems

Views: 10,277

Keywords: solidworks, solidworks 3d cad, 3d cad, 3d modeling, 3d design, Driveworks, Automation

Id: xcOmgg2wpO4

Length: 47min 59sec (2879 seconds)

Published: Tue May 19 2020