With the venue for SolidWorks World this year being so close to Hollywood and with James Cameron as the keynote speaker we decided to inject a little star quality in to DriveWorks World.
Here are two of our stars - Bill Taylor and Jeremy Regnerus of SolidWorks learning their lines and being filmed prior to the movie. Thanks guys - can't wait to post the out-takes to my blog too!
24 hours of car/plane/plane and car again and here we are in Anaheim, building the booth and getting ready for what we are told is going to be a record breaking SolidWorks World
The convention centre is really impressive and it's great to have everything located so close together. A second hop from the hotel and we are in Partner Pavilion, amazing arena where the General Sessions will take place and the meeting rooms upstairs.
I checked out room 204c which is where I am presenting on Monday. Lots of chairs in there!
It was great to meet the Brisbane InterCad team - and someone managed to take LOTS of photos - thanks Melinda.
The Intercad Innovation day was also a day of trailers.... Ian had just uploaded the new DriveWorksXpress "Design a Guard Rail for a Trailer" files and example to the DriveWorksXpress site that day ..... and so I was keen to show the wholed story of automate something simple, add to it and who knows how far you will get - in other words from a trailer guard rail to a full trailer if you want.
This naturally led to a full DriveWorks demonstration of a truck, and I am pleased to say that I now know the maximum height specification for a truck in Australia - 4.3metres. I didn't know that before so now we can add this to the rules in the project. It's information like this that helps us explain the value of a being able to incorporate rules into DriveWorks. Now there will be no danger of me demonstrating over-size trucks that get stuck under bridges!!!
I had hoped to catch the full What's New in SolidWorks 2009? presentation in Christchurch but a spot of dense fog meant I flew the length and breadth of New Zealand (from Auckland to Queenstown) and back to Christchurch.... before meeting up with the Intercad team.
Anyway when I finally landed and caught up with the Intercad guys at the Innovation Day I was really impressed with some of the new features in SolidWorks - especially the stuff for Sheetmetal.
Of course I was delighted to see so many people had signed up for the session on Design Automation.
More news to follow from Brisbane and Melbourn soon
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WOW what an event!
All quiet ....
THEN...... Hundreds of very keen engineers all clamouring round our booth wanting to find out about DriveWorksXpress. It was great.
Thanks to Systematics for putting on a stunning SolidWorks 2009 event
The Partner Pavillion was very very well laid out and the food served througout the day was delicious
The presentations captivated the audience and there was a real sense of putting on an event.
It's that time of year again - SolidWorks Rollouts, major SolidWorks User Group Meetings and we are out in force.
Just received this photo of Lucinda and Philip who were attending the North East SolidWorks User Group.
A few weeks ago I was invited to present at the CADD Edge SolidWorks User Group meeting in Conneticut (USA).
The theme of the presentation was Design Automation, DriveWorksXpress and more. So before the meeting I decided to do a little extra homework and I looked at some of the feedback we have been getting on our DriveWorksXpress Community Site.
We have created an area where we have asked people to tell us what they have been doing with DriveWorksXpress and the results are fascinating.
The first thing to strike me was that engineers are using DriveWorksXpress to automate the design of common parts (or bits) as I keep calling them
Take a look at the image below
This is described as a Standard Sub-base.
The Engineer has to generate this or a variation of it on a regular basis
TIME SAVING - 96%
It used to take him 30 minutes to do each one
NOW it takes just 1 minute
He enters height, width, depth and machine name and generates a new part, assembly and drawing with custom properties updated automatically - Leaving him more time to design the rest of the machine.
So please don't think that Design Automation is for automating every single component of a machine all at once. The benefits come quickly and easily when you start with one bit at a time :)
It's things like this that I take for granted.....
Someone asked me this question this morning
"If I start a project in DriveWorksXpress .... can I use that data in full DriveWorks?"
YES YES YES
At DriveWorks we are in the business of Automation so ..... YES - OF COURSE you can upscale it to full DriveWorks... and our tech guys have made it very very easy.
You simply create a new project and tick the "Create from DriveWorksXpress Project" option.
Its dead easy :)
