What is DriveWorks Solo?
DriveWorks Solo allows you to create custom products quickly and easily AND generate all the detailed manufacturing information automatically in SolidWorks.

What are the benefits of DriveWorks Solo?
- You can create customizable forms to aid selections
- Preview Results – 3D Models, Drawings and Document
- Re-use Existing Company Data
- Template Documents for Responding to Sales Inquiries
- New Files Created Automatically

Session Schedule:
Session 1 Covers: Model Capture, Creating Forms, Building Rules, Running your Project, New File Names and Locations
January 24 11am – Noon EST

Session 2 Covers: Replacing Files, Tables, Form Navigation, Improving your Forms, Driving Replacement Files, Controlling Custom Properties
January 25 11am – Noon EST

Session 3 Covers: Documents, Controlling Drawings
January 26 11am – Noon EST

Sign up for all three sessions to get the full training course. Register today!

Carrie Patrick
Marketing Manager
3DVision Technologies ]]> http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/index.php/2012/01/20/free-driveworks-solo-online-training/feed/ 0 http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/index.php/2011/12/30/tips-for-your-configure-my-product-web-site/ http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/index.php/2011/12/30/tips-for-your-configure-my-product-web-site/#comments Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:53:06 +0000 Jeff Sweeney http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/?p=4242 I’ll never admit this publicly, but when I’m specifying a component for my design, it’s a pretty big deal if a supplier has a nice 3D model for me to drop into my design. If other variable are pretty close, the company with the easiest to use CAD models often gets my specification.

I’ve noticed since the release of the newer versions of DriveWorks Live, more and more companies are allowing us to download their models directly from their web sites. (Bonus: No programs to install on my end!)

The less time I have to spend modeling your product, the happier I am.

If you have just purchased DriveWorks and are looking for some usability tips…

• I want a single part. An assembly only if I need to see the motion of your product. Even then, the fewer the parts the better. I don’t want to have to spend a lot of time managing your files.
• Don’t make me learn your part numbering schema to specify your product. Let me pick on pictures of options or worst case drop downs and radio buttons. I do want to know what the final part number is, after my specification is complete. (I like sites that allow me to watch the price change as I modify options.)
• I like meta data being put in the file’s properties, however let me choose the file properties names. I don’t want additional file properties that have no meaning to me that I have to manually delete. Your name, part number and description is pretty much all I need.
• A quote included with the part’s download is nice, so is a nice cut sheet; I don’t want the entire catalog.
• I want a simple configuration of your part. Most of the time I want your models for space claiming. I don’t need the helical threads, air fins or other crazy detail -it slows down my assemblies. You can put your company’s logo on the part if it is a decal. If you want the details in the part because it makes the models look cool, give them to me in a separate configuration.

Pretty tough list? Nah, not really. Most of this is out of the box stuff for DriveWorks. Don’t forget, I am your customer, you help me, I’ll help you by buying your product.

Next week, Driveworks is offering two free classes to help you hit the ground running with either your DriveWorksXpress or DriveWorks Solo projects.

The DriveWorksXpress webinar is running on December 6th, 2011. (DriveWorksXpress is the version included within SolidWorks.)

The DriveWorks Solo webinar is on the next day, the 7th. (DriveWorks Solo is still available for a free 30 trial. Get the trial, then sign up!)

Click the links above to sign up or learn more.

Today I received an email from Glen Smith. (Yes, though you cannot prove it by his blog, he is still alive.) …. To show he still has some sweet automation skills, he made a little DriveWorks Live page showing three other color selection methods.

Goto: http://live.driveworks.co.uk/ Log in as “Jeff” and leave the password blank.

After you’ve read the directions, click on the color picker, then play with the three modes at the top of the dialog.

Just more cool ways to select colors with DriveWorks Pro.

(Play with the transparency values to see the little Easter Egg Glen left for me.)

It does. With Pro, you have a lot more control over your input forms…you can replace your typical radio buttons, check boxes, etc. with pictures.

As a simple example, in the image below, it may appear you are looking at six color swatches, but actually those are radio buttons! Your users can click on the color picture.

You still can use the list method I described in the previous blog for Pro too, in fact it has advantages when you have many colors to choose from -but most of the time, a picture is better than words.

Sadly, someone let the hippies have their way, and now there are many more colors. Most I have no idea what they look like by name alone. Thus if you give me a simple list of colors it has little value to me.

My challenge was that I wanted to be able to let my user choose between a very large list of colors in DriveWorks Solo.

Nice, pretty, but what color is sienna?

Here was my solution.

I set the background color property of the list control to be equal to the color chosen. The default background color for all controls is white. (I know that color!)

See that little gray dot next to the color in the image above? That means the property is static and cannot be changed by a rule, but if you double click on the gray dot, you can create a rule to connect the background color to the color chosen. Like this:

Now when you change the color in the list box, the background color will dynamically change!

This works pretty good, unless the user chooses black, then you can’t see the text.

A second option would be to add a little picture box near your drop down, and just like before, link the background color to the chosen color value.

Parting tip: This doesn’t work for every color ever named. Ensure your drop list contains only colors listed in the DriveWorks Solo color web tab –even DriveWorks knows only a finite number of colors.

Let’s take an easy example. Let’s imagine we want to drive a dimension of a part based on a DriveWorks drop down box that contains the values: “Small”, “Medium” and “Large”. [We'll name the input "Choice" in DriveWorks.] We want the values of the driven dimension to be 2, 3, and 4 respectively.

So we build our DriveWorks rule to look like this:

To use Excel as a debugger, paste the formula into Excel as I did below at cell A1. (Put the equal sign in front.) At this point, Excel is going to do some simple syntax checking and parenthesis will be color coded to help you match them up. In our case the syntax is correct so Excel takes the equation without much of an issue.

However we do have a problem. The DriveWorks input “Choice” doesn’t make any sense to Excel. That is why it is giving us the “#NAME?” error. The solution is to create a named range with the same name as our DriveWorks input. Excel will substitute the values in the named ranges for the DriveWorks input. In the example below, I named name cell C1 “Choice”. Do this by: highlighting the cell, then type the name of the range [DriveWorks input] in the area just to the left of the equation…the trick is to hit the Enter key when you are done, do not click out of that cell with your mouse.

You see that now cell A1 has the value of “4″, which is logical because “Choice” (the cell formerly known as C1) is neither “Small”, “Medium” nor “Large”. I can now put different values into “Choice” and watch my equation update.

For gruesome equations -with many DriveWorks inputs, nested if-thens and more parenthesis than a lisp routine, I almost always use this trick as a sanity check…it is a fast way to ensure my equations are behaving as I expect.

1. SolidWorks’ “Pack and go” is a nice little application, but you didn’t go to school to spend hours at a time copying existing designs and tweaking them to your needs.
2. DriveWorks helps ensure you don’t make typos or other silly mistakes looking through charts, lookup tables or trying to remember your company’s “tribal knowledge”.
3. You don’t get DriveWorks sauce on your shirt.
4. Taking an average design cycle down from days to minutes would give you time to improve your designs rather and simply putting out the same product year after year.
5. Allowing your customers to specify your products on-line is crazy cool. (Plus you don’t have to talk to them as often on the phone.)
6. When your sales force has DriveWorks, they don’t “sell first then ask engineering if they can make it later”….or at least not as often.
7. You don’t burn your mouth on DriveWorks.
8. Putting together quotes is faster, easier -and because the CAD work is complete, more accurate. You’ll have more time to do the things you enjoy, like eating pizza.

Paul makes some good points, that boil down to “getting it right the first time”. We all know there are huge advantages to that. Faster time to market, less waste, happier customers, more quotes, more room on your shop floor to do the hard stuff, etc. Crazy money to be saved.

DriveWorks also has case studies where design time has gone from weeks down to minutes. Easy savings to see there.

But again: “nobody ever saved themselves into being a millionaire”.

How do you become “the millionaire”? Build a better mouse trap. Innovate rather than duplicate. You hire the best engineers you can find, pay a $60/hour burden rate for them to “Pack and Go” or “Copy Tree” the designs over and over? All the while they could be working on innovation. Improving your products.

Design Automation, frees your engineer’s time up to make the product better.

So the next logical question is: “Can you incorporate DriveWorks Live into your existing web site?” -Do you think I would have brought it up if you couldn’t? Here is a pretty cool example: http://www.driveworkssolo.com/index.php/what-is-solo/roi. That ROI tool at the bottom of the page is powered by DriveWorks Professional/Live.

Lately I’ve found I use the web when considering nearly all of my purchases. I may not actually buy the product over the web, but I certainly go to the company’s web site to see what they have to offer. When comparing two competitors, it certainly is helpful if their site gives me a clear insight to what they have to offer.

Oh…the 3D preview format doesn’t have to be in eDrawings, it supports other 3D formats too. – In the off chance that not all of your customers use Internet Explorer.