Mike Puckett's Blog

Free Certification Exams To Once Again Be Offered At SolidWorks World

Day one of SolidWorks World 2010 will once again offer attendees the chance to take either the CSWP or CSWA exams free of charge.  Two sessions will be offered, and attendees wishing to take one of the exams will be automatically assigned a time.  The first session takes place from 10:00am until 2:00pm, and the second session will take place from 3:00pm until 7:00pm.   Day 1 of SolidWorks World 2010 takes place on January 31st, 2010.

Anyone who takes and passes the CSWP exam at SolidWorks World will automatically be able to attend the exclusive CSWP on Monday night at SolidWorks World

For more information on SolidWorks World 2010, visit the Official Site.

More information about the SolidWorks Certification Exams can be found on the SolidWorks Certification Site.

New SolidWorks Certification Logos Available

The SolidWorks Certification Logos provided to users that have successfully completed a SolidWorks Certification exam have been updated and we have also added logos for Certifications that previously didn't have one. To download your logos, simply visit the SolidWorks Certification Center. Let's take a look.

Certified SolidWorks Professional:

Certified SolidWorks Associate:

Advanced Sheet Metal:

Advanced Surfacing:

Advanced Simulation:

Coming soon, Advanced Mold Tools:

Also stay tuned for an announcement about the newest release of the CSWP exam that will include some new options for taking the exam.

Review: NVIDIA Quadro FX1800

When working in SolidWorks it is essential to have a workstation with a good graphics card.  SolidWorks maintains a list of approved graphics cards and drivers on their site.  NVIDIA has been one of the market leaders and this year has introduced it's tenth generation of Quadro Cards.  The FX1800 is considered one of the top mid-range cards.

The FX1800 sports 756 Megabytes of onboard memory, two digital display outputs, and one DVI output, all in a PCI Express interface.  The card itself does not require a separate power connector from the power supply.  While the FX1800 is listed as a top mid-level card, I would suggest it as the minimum card you would want to use in a CAD work station.  Google shopping had it priced for as low as $400.

The Quadro line of cards differ from the GeForce line of cards in many ways, and one important one.  The Quadro cards are only built by NVIDIA themselves, so they can guarantee quality and performance.  The GeForce line of cards have much looser specs, so they are not intended to perform as well, and are therefore constructed by a number of vendors around the world.

When it comes to drivers, NVIDIA makes sure that every Quadro Card passes the minimum requirements set forth by various CAD companies in the industry even before those companies test them.  So once they reach the consumer they are already set to pass certifications.

The NVIDIA Quadro is certified to run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.  

If your looking for a good card to put in your CAD workstation, the Quadro FX1800 definitely will fit your needs.  When building a CAD workstation, the graphics card is not the area you want to cut costs on.

NVIDIA has graciously agreed to allow me to donate the card they sent me for testing to be given away.  It will be a featured raffle prize at this years NESWUC event in Westford Mass on October 16th.  So if you are in the greater New England Area, be sure to sign up to attend the event for your shot at winning this card, and to experiance a great day of SolidWorks break out sessions.

Looking for something more powerful?  The new line of Quadro cards go all the way up to the FX5800 which bolsters 4gigabytes of onboard memory!  Google shopping had that card for around $3,000 and up.  You can read up on the entire line of Quadro Cards on the NVIDIA Site.

Note: The endorsement of this product is not intended to be an endorsement of this product by SolidWorks Corp, and was only intended as a personal review.

Now This Is A Large Assembly

Literally, look at this screen cap from a SolidWorks 2010 Beta 3 splash screen, notice the big rig shown in the picture to show scale:

Update: The company has a video on their site that has quite a bit of SolidWorks footage shown in it.  Link

What's New In SolidWorks 2010: View Orientation Upgrade

Whenever your in a model and you hit the normal to button without having preselected a face or plane, you then have to select a face or plane for SolidWorks to orient itself normal too.  Well not anymore, in SolidWorks 2010 when you select the normal to command, SolidWorks Will automatically orient itself to the nearest standard view.  I have said in the past it's the simeple interface upgrades that makes using SolidWorks that much better, and this is one of them. 

The folks over on the SolidWorks U.K. Blog did a wonderful job explaining this new feature and I would encourage to read their full write up at this link.  Also, don't forget to add theirRSS feed to your reader.

What's New In SolidWorks 2010: Well, The Whats New Guide

The What's New Guide is completely new and is a great way to browse all the new stuff for 2010.  You can view the What's New Guide for SolidWorks 2010 at Ricky Jordan's What's New Document Site.

Each year when the beta program would launch, one of the first things I would do would be to print out the guide and then take it to Staples to get it bound.  It made for a handy desktop reference during the beta program, and also as a way to see all the new stuff.  Ricky also has a bunch of great videos covering the whats new stuff at his site as well.

  

What's New In SolidWorks 2010: Sketch Fillet Preview

The sketch fillet tool in SolidWorks 2010 has gotten some improvements.  The first is the dynamic preview.  By simply hovering your mouse cursor over an intersection, you will get an orange preview of what the fillet will look like at that intersection before even selecting it:

 

Once the fillet is placed, you can dynamically drag the fillet to any size by grabbing the fillett and draging it, as you do you also get a full dynamic preview of the change of size as well as a numerical value:

 

Lastly you can now check the option to dimension each fillet as you create it:

What's New In SolidWorks 2010: Help System

The help files for SolidWorks 2010 are going online!  That will make it easier for a number of planned updates in the future and once something like this is online, the opportunities are endless as to what can be done with it.  The biggest benefit is that it can be updated at any time and the content will go live instantly, there will be no more waiting for it to be updated in a service pack.  Not to worry though if you have web access restrictions the current form of the help system will also be available and it will be updated as usual.  Here is a look at the new interface:

 

There is much more to come in this area of the software, so stay tuned to even more new stuff coming to the help and documentation system.

What's New In SolidWorks 2010: Remove All Appearances

SolidWorks 2010 now includes the ability to easily remove apperances from faces, features, bodies, or entire parts.

 

By clicking a face and then clicking the appearance orb you get the resulting menu above.  Simply click on a red X and that appearance is removed.  At the bottom of the menu you can even remove all appearances at once.  This new functionality saves you time in having to determine what has the appearance applied to it, and you no longer have to go to the feature manager to perfrom these options.

What's New In SolidWorks 2010: Hole Wizard 2D Sketch

Have you ever clicked the Hole Wizard tool in SolidWorks only to realise you are creating a 3D sketch once you enter the selection part of the tool?  Well if you are creating hole wizard features on 2D faces you no longer have to remember to pre-select a face before you launch the hole wizard tool. 

SolidWorks 2010 intorduces the option to create a 2D position sketch even without pre-selecting a face.  Here is how to do it:

Launch the hole wizard, select your feature and sizes, then click the position tab at the top of the feature manager.  The next screen you get will be:

 

Notice in the feature manager it is asking you to select a face to place your hole wizard feature on.  Of course if you want to do hole wizard features say on the cylindrical body of that part as well as the face, just click the 3D Sketch button and you will be in that mode.