Now I am not old by any means, but I'm certainly starting to feel like it. I remember a time when something like virtual reality was found only in movies and TV shows. I would stay up on Friday nights watching Star Trek: The Next Generation as a kid, dreaming of what could be possible if something like the holodeck actually existed. It was a distant pipe dream that only seemed possible in the world of science fiction.
If you are part of any sort of complex design work, I'm sure you have the same problem everyone else does—you are up to your eyeballs in data. Without a proper system in place, it can be difficult to efficiently communicate a project's workflow between all involved parties. That's where SOLIDWORKS PDM solutions comes in handy. Find the files you're looking for, collaborate in real time, stay compliant and reduce liability with just a click of a button.
We here at Alignex receive a lot of questions regarding the functionality of the SOLIDWORKS software. One of the questions we receive often is how to take a standard image file and make it compatible with your Draftsight software. In this video, Alignex engineer Eric Weber walks you through the step by step process of how to convert any image file into a DXF file.
As Summer approaches, the school year is finally winding down and students around the country are getting ready for a much deserved couple months off. This also means a new edition of SOLIDWORKS Education Edition is out, and with it a plethora of new features guaranteed to help students be even more prepared for what awaits them after graduation.
Let’s get one thing straight, electronics designers are not paid to draw component symbols and footprints all day. Ideally, one would be able to obtain ready-made symbol & footprint for all the components he or she ever needed to use and drop them directly on the design. However, the reality is even though there are a great deal of verified library components on the web for download, there will always be a quite a few component symbols or footprints that you need to create by yourself.
In part 1 of our blog we covered the business value of driving our design with simulation. In this post it’s time to “get into the weeds” a bit. When setting up simulation studies and specifically optimization, we often think back to setting up proofs or “showing your work” in an exam. If you wanted any partial credit at all before you start trying to solve the problem you need to lay out your: “Givens, Assumptions and Unknowns”.
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. I’m the guy most of these questions come to at Alignex.
Around the time email replaced the carrier pigeon as our main form of non-verbal communication (mid '90s), SOLIDWORKS hit the market with an innovative new CAD product to make the everyday lives of designers and engineers easier.
Fast forward to 2018 and the platform has evolved into, well…a platform. No longer a singular tool with only the designer in mind, it now makes life easier for every person involved in the manufacturing process by offering a variety of purpose-built solutions that, when brought together, combine to form a manufacturing Megazord.
2018, another productive year for fellow electro-mechanical engineers. Thanks to your feedback and the SOLIDWORKS dev team, SOLIDWORKS’ unique ECAD-MCAD collaborative PCB design tools have evolved, boosting your productivity to a new level while saving time and money.
Since the release of SOLIDWORKS CAM a few months back, we here at Alignex have received lots of questions about what the new software package has to offer. We decided it was finally time to just sit down and hammer out some of the most commonly asked questions in order to make it clearer how SOLIDWORKS CAM would fit into your current workflow.