We’re taking a break from our Tech Team Thursday webinars over summer. But we’ll be back on Thursday 6th September with a great new series!

These webinars are our opportunity to share the Tech Team’s knowledge with our DriveWorks Pro Customers – with an Active Subscription Support Contract – and Reseller Applications Engineers.

In our new series, Mike, a Technical Specialist at DriveWorks, will take a look at some of the cool new features and enhancements in DriveWorks 16 and he’ll show you how to use them!

Learning more about DriveWorks will enable you to get the most out of the software and throughout the webinars you can ask questions to advance your knowledge.

This is a great opportunity for you to catch up on any sessions you may have missed by visiting the technical webinar library in the DriveWorks Community.

Here’s a few of the great titles from our latest series:

Using DriveWorks Rules to Create Detailed Bills of Materials

Automating Everything SOLIDWORKS

A Guest Webinar by EvenKeel Orthotics & Performance Insoles

What’s New in DriveWorks 16 – Part 1

What’s New in DriveWorks 16 – Part 2

What’s New in DriveWorks 16 – Part 3

We are pleased to announce that we have a new Authorized DriveWorks Reseller in Denmark!

Teamworks provide software solutions and services that help their customers develop new and better products. Their support team consists of service-minded SOLIDWORKS professionals with at least 10 years of experience within SOLIDWORKS and related products. The company has two offices in Denmark based in Horsens and Ishøj.

Education and professional interest is the key for Teamworks. Their team have a common passion for SOLIDWORKS and they enjoy creating effective solutions for businesses.

We’re pleased that Teamworks are now selling and supporting DriveWorks too.

Welcome to the DriveWorks community, Teamworks!

Improving SOLIDWORKS Skills with the DriveWorksXpress Training & Certification

The Certified DriveWorksXpress Associate (CDWXA) is a free certification for anyone with SOLIDWORKS. Becoming a Certified DriveWorksXpress Associate improves SOLIDWORKS skills and makes engineering résumés stand out from the crowd.

Well Done to Ethan and Alana

Recently, Ethan and Alana from the First Robotics Team at Ayer Shirley Regional High School added to their SOLIDWORKS skills by completing the DriveWorksXpress Training and Certification, becoming Certified DriveWorksXpress Associates.

Although many engineering professionals and university students have successfully completed the training and become certified, Ethan and Alana are the first high school students to do so. They both completed the training quickly and scored exceptionally high, with Ethan achieving a perfect result of 100%.

Their CAD mentor, Earl also took the certification and is now a Certified DriveWorksXpress Associate too.

Here’s a bit more about them and what they had to say about getting certified…

Ethan, 17

Alana, 17

Earl, CAD Mentor

Earl has been the CAD mentor for the team for the last four years. Over that time, he has been teaching students how to use SOLIDWORKS to design parts and assemblies needed to build the robot that the team use in competitions.

This season he has encouraged the senior members of the team to become Certified SOLIDWORKS Associates (CSWA) and Certified DriveWorksXpress Associates (CDWXA).

“Over the past four years, the CAD team has been expanding their use of SOLIDWORKS from making sensor mounts in the first year to this year having all components of the robot developed in CAD before they end up on the robot. I felt that it was time for the two senior CAD students, Alana and Ethan, to prove their skills by taking the CSWA certification in their Junior year of High School.”

“As we have come to understand the team’s goals of approaching the robot design, we are now turning to DriveWorksXpress to help with the initial design of the robot in the hectic first week of the build season when we need to build the initial drivetrain of the robot. DriveWorksXpress will help us out in this goal.”

“As a result, Alana, Ethan and I went through the DriveWorksXpress tutorials and took the certification exam that followed the tutorial. All the while considering different parts of the robot that we could leverage the capabilities of DriveWorksXpress when defining our robot.”

A huge well done to Ethan, Alana and Earl for becoming Certified DriveWorksXpress Associates.
Ethan and Alana have made a great start on their careers in engineering.

If you’d like to become a Certified DriveWorksXpress Associate, all you need is a SOLIDWORKS license.

Get certified now at: www.driveworksxpresscertification.com

Last week Heather from the DriveWorks team was in Charlotte, North Carolina, presenting at two SOLIDWORKS user group meetings.

One of the meetings she attended, the Burlington Alamance County SOLIDWORKS User Group (BACON SWUG) is led by James Adkins, our most recent winner of the DriveWorks Award for SWUGN Leader of the Year.

As Heather was going to be in the North Carolina area for a couple of days, we decided to organize a social networking get together for DriveWorks customers and resellers in the area.

The group met on Tuesday 5th June at The Union bar to network and share ideas over a beer and pizza. It was a fun evening and it was nice to hear them sharing stories about the great work they’re doing with DriveWorks!

Here’s a few photos from the get together…

Last week Heather from the DriveWorks team was on the road again! This time she headed south to visit two SOLIDWORKS User Group meetings in North Carolina.

“First up was a visit with Steve Frick at the Piedmont Triad SOLIDWORKS User Group. Steve was such a gracious host and made us feel welcome from the time we walked in until our goodbyes at the door. The meeting was small and intimate, which made it great for conversations over dinner.

I presented on DriveWorksXpress and the DriveWorksXpress Training and Certification Program. I showed folks how they can start automating their repetitive designs with DriveWorksXpress and how they can add to their CAD skills and certifications by becoming a Certified DriveWorksXpress Associate.

The next evening, I visited with the Burlington Alamance County SOLIDWORKS User Group. The “BACON SWUG” is led by James Adkins, our most recent winner of the DriveWorks Award for SWUGN Leader of the Year.

James won the award at SOLIDWORKS World 2018 due to his commitment to education.

Thank you to both group leaders for opening your meetings to host us for the week! It was great to see you again and we look forward to working with you again soon.”

The finalists have been announced for the 2018 Warrington Business Awards and we are pleased to announce that Maria Sarkar, VP and Co-Founder of DriveWorks, has been shortlisted for the ‘Business Woman of the Year’ award!

The Warrington Business Awards celebrate the success of local businesses and recognise the contributions they make to the local community.

Maria is committed to helping the local community and she works with Glen Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of DriveWorks, to create a strong family environment which is passed on to everyone.

Maria and Glen highly promote technology as a career path for young people, work closely with many Northern universities and support local business and networking initiatives. Maria also speaks at many industry events and she hopes to inspire other women to look at technology as a positive career choice.

Showcasing Remarkable Entrepreneurs

Danny Hudson, Warrington Business Awards 2018 Organising Committee Member, said: “Each year we are amazed at the quality of the nominations across all of the Warrington Business Awards categories and 2018 has been no different.

Ensuring our town has the opportunity to showcase the remarkable entrepreneurs, executives, apprentices and organisations of our local community is why all of us on the organising committee are so passionate about volunteering our time.

Massive congratulations to all of the finalists and an enormous thank you to everyone who entered.”

The awards ceremony takes place on Friday 8th June 2018 at Lymm Rugby Club.

The DriveWorks team will be attending to support Maria and we wish her the best of luck!

“Before we can start troubleshooting anything, we need to first figure out what is wrong. Now I mean this in the most general way. Are we having a problem where the drawing is incorrect? Are we having a problem even getting a drawing to generate when we release? Are we even getting to the point where we can release? Is our computer even able to startup? If the problem is the last one, try turning it off and back on again.

Generally speaking, the process for troubleshooting any issue involves:

• Making sure that the problem is repeatable
• Determining the steps required to repeat the problem
• Performing those steps…all except the last one
• Peeking under the hood (bonnet) to see what is going on

Our friends down on the (Laskey) farm have built some great tools into DriveWorks for peeking at the inner workings of the product. The tools that you will use will depend upon the problem you are having and where in the specification process you are experiencing your “undesirable results.”

Let’s take a look at a few of those tools and the areas where they can help.”

Form Design Test Mode

“Top and center in the form designer is the ‘Test Mode’ button. Form test mode allows you to test a few crucial parts of your project. First, you can check validations that you build into your forms. Minimum and maximum values, list items, default values, table data and more can all be calculated dynamically through control property rules. Test mode allows you to enter various inputs to make sure that your inputs only accept complete, accurate, and manufacturable information.

Control locations, sizes, visibility, text and appearances can all be driven by rules as well, creating a dynamic form to help your users best experience the design of your product. Test mode allows you to ensure that these dynamics are working how you would expect them to work. 3D Preview controls are also “live” during test mode, allowing you to check your 3DEXPERIENCE (as long as it doesn’t require SOLIDWORKS or macros).

The trick about the Form Design Test Mode that most people don’t recognize is that the values that you enter in test mode will persist throughout the remainder of your project. This means that any values that you enter in test mode will be the input values that are used in the calculations in your variables and the lookups in your model rules and in documents and calculation tables and everywhere. Just like you put in values to test dynamics and validations, use test mode to put in test values to test your rules everywhere else within your implementation. And what’s more, these values will persist when you start a new specification. So, if you want values to be prepopulated when the user opens a form, you can just preset them in Form Design Test Mode.”

Specification Test Mode

“If your issues crop up further in the process, while the user is specifying, DriveWorks Administrator also has a Specification Test Mode. This allows you to poke around inside the workings of the specification while it’s running. You can view variable values, see sample output documents, view and even analyze model rules. Because this test mode effectively pauses your specification, this is the tool that will show you the state of everything right before it goes south. Here you will typically find the #VALUE! that is causing your problems.”

Model Insight

“Inside of specification test mode, you can view the values that are going to be used to drive your SOLIDWORKS models and drawings. The next step forward is to actually generate those models. Model Insight (a fancy name for generating test models) allows you to generate any component or assembly in the tree. This will allow you to easily troubleshoot one part without having to release the 42,412 other parts, assemblies and drawings. You can use the OnDemand model generation engine, but Model Insight kicks in when you choose to generate the model using Queued, Interactive generation.

Queued generation is the method used by Autopilot and by SOLIDWORKS when going through the Model Generation Queue (blue cube-like icon). The interactive part is that DriveWorks provides a complete list of tasks to be performed and you can walk through the model generation line by line, like a debug mode in a program or macro. You can set breakpoints, tell DriveWorks to stop when it hits an error, or you can tell it just to plow through. You can view API events (for those of us that use and write Model Generation tasks) and you can always scroll back to look at the details of the tasks performed. And yes, this will even run model generation tasks as well as SOLIDWORKS macros on the models and drawings.”

Profiler

“Probably the least known tool in the DriveWorks troubleshooting arsenal is the profiler. The profiler shows you, in real time, every step that DriveWorks is performing and when I say “every step”, I mean EVERY STEP. Every value that gets calculated and recalculated, every table that is synchronized, every step of every specification macro, even the updating of the form size variables is shown in the profiler window. This can create quite a massive list of events to sort through and the sheer act of recording all of these steps to the window can significantly affect your performance. So the profiler is generally not the first weapon that we pull to attack an issue.

While the profiler will affect your performance, it will also report back about that performance, showing how long each task and calculation took to perform. This is very useful for identifying the source of slow specifications, forms and releases.”

Reports

“Some of the information that the profiler provides is recorded in the specification, release and model generation reports that DriveWorks creates. In the Settings dialog, you can set the level of detail for specification reports and for model generation reports, and PDM Pro reports all separately. Verbose mode is great for troubleshooting, but should only be enabled when you are actually troubleshooting. Much like the Profiler, this reporting mechanism can log a lot of steps and can significantly affect the performance of your specifications.

Each model generation gets its own model generation report. This means that sub-components that are generated, then swapped into an assembly will have their own report. This also means that if a model generation “terminates less than gracefully”, each generation context will have its own report. This will allow you to see exactly where the generation guardian angels looked away.

Listen up, those of you that work with the DriveWorks SDK to write your own specification tasks, model generation tasks and even project extenders. As a developer, you have the same access to the report writer as the DriveWorks folks do. USE IT! You can set the reporting level for each entry along with the various pieces of information in the row. This controls which report entries are only written when verbose is selected. Additionally, you can utilize BeginProcess to create the collapsible sections within the report (just don’t forget your corresponding EndProcess).”

The List Goes On…

“Troubleshooting tools exist all throughout DriveWorks (one might even say they’re “pervasive”). From the Values, Steps and Drill Down tabs in the rules builder to the Preview modes in documents and calculation tables, the tools are plentiful. Which to use all depends on the type of troubleshooting and where in the specification process you currently reside. So before you phone up your handy dandy reseller tech support, take a look at the steps that you are performing (you document them before you call for support, right??) and take a look for the troubleshooting tools that are right there inside of DriveWorks Administrator. You just might be able to save yourself from that awkward moment when you have to admit that the “bug” that you found in DriveWorks was actually a cricket that you wrote into your rule.”

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