Articles by: Chris Briand, CSWE
Take control of your SOLIDWORKS assets using the SOLIDWORKS Admin Portal The SOLIDWORKS Admin Portal is an online service and management interface, where individuals who administrate any size group of SOLIDWORKS licenses can manage an organizations SOLIDWORKS assets. The main focus of the Admin Portal is the management and control over the assignment of standalone SOLIDWORKS licenses. The Admin Portal is “In The Cloud” and accessible from anywhere online, which makes it easy for those responsible for SOLIDWORKS licenses to: Monitor all of an organizations SOLIDWORKS Assets Invite individual users to make SOLIDWORKS Assets accessible to them. Toggle the status of the ONLINE LICENSING MODEL for SOLIDWORKS ASSETS Appoint other users as LICENSE Administrators Revoke licenses from users In order to take advantage of the SOLIDWORKS ONLINE LICENSE model, an individual with a SOLIDWORKS ID will need to login and “declare” themselves to be the “Administrator” for an organizations assets….
This is the first article in our SOLIDWORKS Online Licensing Series, which also includes: Introducing SOLIDWORKS Online Licensing! Getting Started with the SOLIDWORKS Admin Portal How to Invite Users to participate in SOLIDWORKS Online Licensing Assign SOLIDWORKS Products to Members using the SOLIDWORKS Admin Portal How to enable Online Licensing for your SOLIDWORKS Products Transition your SOLIDWORKS Installation over to use SOLIDWORKS Online Licensing What is Online Licensing? For those of you that have ever encountered SOLIDWORKS License Activation Errors in the past, or require the flexibility to run a single SOLIDWORKS License on multiple systems, we have some great news to share! A new online licensing model is available for use within SOLIDWORKS 2018 and 2019! “SOLIDWORKS Online Licensing” allows you to tie one or multiple licenses of SOLIDWORKS to a SOLIDWORKS ID. Practically speaking this means that you can simply login to any SOLIDWORKS installation with your SOLIDWORKS ID and…
A variety of techniques can be employed when building assemblies in SOLIDWORKS. In some cases the weldment module is used as the primary assembly environment, in other cases we see welded bodies being created as individual assembly components before they are placed together at the assembly level. In the end it often narrows down to how you wish to manage the Weldment Cut List. In this article, we are going to focus our attention on managing the Cut List properties from a component that is imported into another component. This is done when inserting a part file into the next and choosing the appropriate options from the list of items that “Transfer” from the component being inserted or added to the parent component. We will start with two weldments each as its own separate part file: Each one of these weldment components has it’s respective cut list that exist before…
One of the most common practices we run across while discussing weldment functionality with clients is the use of ‘Modeled Welds’ which are additional Solid Bodies that exist in the weldment file to represent the physical mass where a weld would exist — generally in a shape that the fillet bead tool cannot be applied, as shown in the example below: Typically the Cut List folder (Solid Bodies) would appear similar to the image below, if one was using Cut List items to apply properties to the various members comprising the weldment. This includes separation of the bodies representing welds into their own folder. The technique that you may consider applying here is a workflow to specifically exclude a number of the bodies from the Cut List, such as those gathered within the MODELED WELDS folder, that can be created manually or automatically, depending upon your settings. Exclude from Cut…
Redirected Folders seemed like a good idea at the time? If you are an IT administrator that is tasked with providing support to SOLIDWORKS users, one can often get caught up in the various conflicts that arise between SOLIDWORKS and it’s need for accessibility to the local system in order to function properly. This will most often manifest itself within high security environments as SOLIDWORKS bumps into the various tools, policies and practices that you choose to deploy, in order to keep the entirety of your user base safe from malicious intent. One technique you may choose to employ with your users is the concept of “Redirected Folders” driven by your Group Policy. The intent behind this option of redirected folders is a first class plan – re-point a user’s most common directories to a server location where they can be backed up each night automatically, without any complex…
Practical Values for approximating “Zero Radius” bends in SOLIDWORKS
I am as sure as the words posted here that every sheet metal designer has been asked to fudge some values to represent a “SOLIDWORKS Zero Radius” bend or a “SOLIDWORKS Sharp Corner” at some point along the way. As it turns out there is a procedure for ensuring sharp corners in SOLIDWORKS, however it leans more toward a work-around modeling method, which won’t always apply to your design scenario. Strictly speaking you can enter 0.001mm or 0.00003937in as a tiny default bend radius, as these are the minimum values that SOLIDWORKS will accept. (FYI – SOLIDWORKS is converting everything in metric in the background) Those values MAY work on parts that don’t have an odd angles, but once you add angular geometry to the component, the bend areas become too small and often fail with the complexity of the geometry. Most often the use of the absolute minimum bend…
SOLIDWORKS Automatic Solve order is Greyed out? If you have encountered any instances where the “Automatic Solve Order” for equations is disabled, it may be due to to a setting titled “Display potential circular references in equations:” The options that govern the possibilities for circular references in equations may be found under Tools > Options > System Options > Messages/Errors/Warnings. When the option is set to “Never” it should enable the Automatic Solve order options and you can carry on working within the equation dialog.
Every now and then, one of our fantastic support staff here at Javelin, run across a dialog that they have never seen before…. it’s a rare case to be sure. Especially rare if the features involved have been around forever and the dialog box itself has been available since the 2013 release of SOLIDWORKS. That is exactly what I managed to find late last month when working with one of our clients. Enter stage Right the “Open External Referenced Documents” Dialog. Some users may find this feature handy as it makes the user aware directly that there are referenced models that will not update unless their referenced files are opened and loaded into RAM. If one wanted to resume prior behavior of SOLIDWORKS that did not display this dialog, we’d have a few options to do so. The first would be to adjust the “Load referenced documents:” option found under…