The CAD Insider

SolidWorks Training Diary: Readers Give Encouragement

So many of you have taken time to provide encouragement to me as I embark on my SolidWorks training. I have not been able to thank everyone personally but let me tell you all that the cards and letters means a lot and I appreciate it.

My favorite is still an offer from a reader who offered to lend me his 13 year old daughter. Apparently, she had no trouble whatsoever going through the online tutorials. Thank you, Mr. Farmer. You may keep your daughter at home but your words have given me insight. It may be that youth, unencumbered by decades if CAD baggage, might have an advantage.

It seems like my bumbling ways may have reminded several users that they, too, may have encountered some difficulty when they started. But almost all have said "hang in there" and a lot of them have gone on to achieve expert status.

Several readers have recommended a SolidProfessor, a multimedia accompaniment to SolidWorks. I have installed SolidProfessor and I am hopeful that will help. Also, SolidWorks has updated my software (to SolidWorks 2007) and it no longer bugs me about expiration.

I will be changing the titles to more accurately reflect the time spent in training. I had been using days (example Day 3) but as has been pointed out to me, this gives the idea that whole days are being spent on each training session. But given my day job, I'm spending about an hour or less per session so I better find a better heading.

So, buoyed by all the reader support (thanks, again), a brand spanking new edition of SolidWorks and the assistance of SolidProfessor, I'm jumping back in.

SolidWorks Training Diary Day 3 -- Grinding to a Halt

The honeymoon is over. The software that at first was a series of small joys has ground me down under its weight. But I'm not about to give up.

As I tried to load drawing templates for the 3rd online tutorial (Creating Drawings), I was stymied by annoying popup messages about how the software was not registered. No duh. I am still waiting for an email from SolidWorks with my registration information sent 9 days ago. Could it be caught in my spam filter? No such luck. Stubbornly, the tutorial let's me go no further.

Maybe I don't need the handholding tutorials. I venture out on my own. I try to make hex head bolt in the manner suggested by the tutorials and start an extrusion. I am able to pick a plane and then I find myself in the sketch menu. I see a buttons for lines, rectangles, circles... No hex. No polygon. But it must be there -- that is such a basic shape. Maybe I have to make a circle first and then approximate it but I can find nothing that lets me do that either. I reach for SolidWorks for Dummies and sure enough there is a POLYGON command listed in the index. But where? Am I going blind? I call over a colleague to make sure I am not missing a button in plain sight. They don't see one either. But it's here in the book, I protest to no one in particular. "Look at the online help," they say. Aha!  I find it the pull down menu under Tools/Sketch Entities. Why it doesn't appear in the extrusion sequence of buttons is a question left for later.

I am (semi) successful in creating the body of the bolt but have done something wrong as the body and head are not properly unioned. I move on. I am happy to see SolidWorks' many HELIX commands and I rough up a helical curve which I hope to use to create the threads. Now that worked really well. But as I try to create a profile that will make the cut as it follows the helical curve, I realize I don't know how to define a plane at an arbitrary place in space. Back to the book...

Just by coincidence, I get a call from my SolidWorks contact. Had she heard me banging my head against my computer from across the country? Perhaps sensing my increasing frustration from this very blog she suggests I take class room training like most SolidWorks users do. Maybe I should. Or they could send someone to my office. I get the feeling that house calls are not extended to all users. I have to decline that offer. I can't accept special treatment  as I'm trying to simulate a real user experience. She tells me she will send me the latest version (SW07). I think I should wait til that gets here -- it may have fixed some of the issues I am having.

I send an email to my local SolidWorks VAR, a company called GoEngineer, re. the next basic SolidWorks classroom training is offered soon but only 9AM-5PM. I wonder how I could fit that in.

Do People Pirate Software Because It Is Expensive?

Why do people pirate software? You might think it would be because they can't afford it. To test this theory, I did a little research and found that cost of software did have a lot to do with it -- but that was not the whole story.

In a study done of several countries*, the relative cost of software is compared to the piracy rate in that country. Relative cost is defined as the cost relative to monthly earnings (gross domestic product per capita, to be more exact). In Vietnam (which has the highest piracy rate of any country at 94%), that's the same as spending 16 months of gross domestic product/capita -- in other words, it would be like an American spending over $48,000 for Office and Windows XP!

Piracy rate is based on data by the Business Software Alliance (BSA).

Curious to see if there was a relationship beyond that example, I plotted the data from the report:

(click to see graph)

While in general the lower the relative cost, the less the incidence of piracy, this is not always the case. It's true that in the well-off US, where software costs little compared to what people earn, piracy rates stand low at 25%. In poor Nigeria, the same software purchase feels like over $60,000 and the piracy rate shoots up to 71%. But drawing a straight line between the two ignores significant exceptions that suggest other factors at play. For example, in oil-rich Bahrain and Kuwait, the same software feels like a mere (!)  $1,621 and $1,231 respectively but the piracy rates are still among the highest (over 75%). Could it be that in some countries piracy laws, if they even they exist, are not enforced? This could lead to a culture of piracy where the norm is pirated software and someone who pays full price is seen as a sucker.

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*Ghosh, Rishab Aiyer, License Fees and GDP per Capita: the Case for Open Source in Developing Countries, First Monday, November 2003

SolidWorks Training Diary Day 2 -- No LIP Command

I'm trying lesson two for the 3rd time. Trying to putting a lip on a simple part, I seem to have hit a speed bump. Twice now I have closed the lesson in frustration wondering what I had done wrong. I may have gone too fast in the part where an existing face is used to create sketch geometry and the resulting extrusion looked nothing like the example. Oh, why don't they just have a LIP command, for God's sake!

So now I'm already 30 minutes into the 30 minute tutorial and feeling retarded.

It turns out I wasn't following directions. Through the part about forming a  lip, one must just blindly follow instruction even if reasons as to why sketch geometry is being creating may not be clear. SolidWorks may have left explanation out so the lesson would not seem so wordy.

What have I learned? Don't race ahead and try to outsmart the program, for one thing. I was also reminded that MCAD programs like SolidWorks, while easier to use than ever before, are still not child's play. Not everything will be a push button. There is still some skills to be mastered, some memorization. Mastery will come if time is invested and patience is practiced.

 

SolidWorks Training Diary -- Day 1

I have covered SolidWorks the company almost from its inception, starting in 1996. I have reviewed the product. I have sat through many SolidWorks demos. I have seen every incarnation since SolidWorks 95. I have attended SolidWorks user conferences. I have even visited SolidWorks headquarters and learned how it was made. So how hard could learning SolidWorks be, even after a long absence of hands-on use?

I unpack the software. Whoa! A lot has changed in 10 years. SolidWorks 2006 Office Premium comes on 4 CDs. Shouldn't a program that big be on a DVD?

The installation on my laptop took a while but completed fine except for registering online. I had to take the email registration option which means I have to be reminded of days remaining every time I use the software until I get a registration code from SolidWorks.

SolidWorks prompts you to select your level of expertise. I picked the beginner mode. I think this will give me more prompts and wizards. I'm going to need all the help I can get.

It's all a little intimidating. How am I going to learn all this? Relax, I tell myself. I'm an engineer. My kind have put people on the moon. I jumped right into the online tutorials. There is a fairly big set of "30-minute" tutorials included that take you from a simple part to assemblies to drawings and so on. I have the SolidWorks for Dummies book on hand but these online tutorials may be all I need.

I set about to create a simple part, Lesson 1. The opening screen is a pleasant light gradient blue. The icons have an artistic touch. Even on a 1600 wide laptop screen, the toolbars and menus leave a big window to work in.

I follow the directions, which are clear and well illustrated. I follow steps carefully. I love the way a selected plane moves normal to the view. Even zooms are pleasantly dynamic. Extrusion directions are shown on screen. Dimensions pop up and and are used to modify the approximately sketched part. The dimensions appear to be in millimeters though I swore I selected feet and inches. But I'm having so much fun, I continue. I'm sure that can be fixed later. Circles become concentric to other circles without me hardly trying. Filleted edges are previewed before becoming part of the model. Extrusions are removed properly the first time -- no trial and error. The piece is "skinned" (made into a thin wall part) with push button ease. Then for kicks, a section plane is moved through the part and shows inner detail.

I have made a part. It was not only easy, it was a series of small delights. In fact, the part came together so easily, I hardly notice what I have not had to do. I have not had to assign parameters and fully constrain a sketch. I haven't had to use the right hand rule to determine directions in 3D. I haven't had to double check if the proper curve/face/line have been selected even once. I haven't had to interrupt a command to determine the midpoint/endpoint of a line. I haven't had to rotate a part around to clear up ambiguities. I realize these ways may be remnants of my AutoCAD/Mechanical Desktop days. MCAD software has come a long way. Or is it just SolidWorks?

SolidWorks Training Diary--Intro

Readers may think CAD insiders are CAD experts. Some actually are. Lynn Allen and David Cohen can both show even veteran CAD users a trick or two.  Another example is Ralph Grabowski, who can fill a book (several, actually) about using CAD products. Then there's me. Years of covering the industry from a "higher level" have taken a toll. I wasn't sure I could model even a simple part any more -- the kind I used to assign to one of my first semester students. I used to teach CAD to college students. That seems like such a long time ago.

In an attempt to relive those glory days, I snatched a demo copy of SolidWorks off my shelf. I was going to dive in and get dirty. I felt like the football hero cliché, playing days long over, after years of watching the game from the couch, getting up to play with the kids.

What will follow is a diary of my day to day experiences trying to learn the SolidWorks program. As I will steal time from my day job (the aforementioned "higher level" coverage), I plan on run through the tutorials, do a little self-teaching -- maybe even model something significant. In doing so, I hope not only to rekindle an interest but to get back in touch my readers. For those considering buying an MCAD program, this may actually be useful. And maybe I can even make use out of an expensive -- and long neglected --engineering education.

The Silence is Deafening

The CAD online editor/journalist community is pretty tight. News that affects any of us is usually passed around, discussed among ourselves and usually is reported on. So when a high profile member of our CAD community, Evan Yares, was recently in the news (Open Design Alliance Puts Yares on Administrative Leave), I expected the blogs to light up and the emails to fly. But with the exception of coverage provided by the intrepid Randall Newton, editor/publisher/owner of AECnews.com, every one got strangely silent. Even after a follow-up story (Suspect Arrested in Open Design Alliance Embezzlement Case) a few days later, I heard nothing. Nor was I able to dig up anything on the Web. What makes it even stranger is that the story broke during the IntelliCAD World Meeting in British Columbia, an event at which CAD journalists were present.

FEA On the Cheap for Students

Many CAD vendors have already discovered that the best way to introduce users to their software is to give it away for free. IMSI did this with TurboCAD years ago. Lately, Alibre and UGS have joined the great giveaway. While our site FreeCAD.com lists several free FEA programs (see FEA programs), major CAE vendors have held firm with their (high) prices. But just this week, Dassault Systemes introduced a student version of Abaqus. Okay, it's not free ($99 + $20 for the manual) and it's only for students, but it seems to be a step in that direction.

Just to make sure you don't try using ABAQUS for commercial purposes, Dassault imposes these limits on the ABAQUS Student Edition 6.6:

• 1,000 node models
• no support for user-defined subroutines
• no distributed parallel processing

The 1,000 node limit seems to be on the small side, especially since meshers these days seem to be relying on small element size to increase the accuracy of the results. Other than that, this seems to be a pretty capable program.

Where where these guys when I was going through engineering school?

Simulation results in ABAQUS/Explicit show high-speed impact of a spherical dome by a rigid projectile. The dome is representative of a pressure vessel (gas tank, liquid container, etc.). The model considers large deformation effects, yielding and contact conditions.
(picture and caption provided by Dassault Systemes)

Find out more at http://www.abaqus.com/products/se_order.html

Why Do You Buy CAD Software? Survey Result (preliminary)

Here are some results from our survey "Why Do You Buy CAD Software?"

Here are the most factors, listed in order of importance:

1. robustness of software (most important) 8.1
2. read legacy data 7.4
3. initial cost and maintenance 5.7
4. reputation of company  5.6
5. write legacy data 5.6
6. availability of trained personnel  5.5
7. popularity  5.1
8. evaluation during a trial period 5.0
9. scores in benchmarks 4.8
10. published reviews  3.7
11. case histories 3.4
12. shoot outs  2.8
13. advertising (least important) 1.0

The numbers after each entry represent an weighted score showing relative importance and is normalized to the lowest score. From those numbers, you can tell that #1 robustness was 8.1 times more important than advertising.

Over 120 people have taken they survey so far. If you haven't already, please give your input at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=891102592287. The survey will be online through November