GoEngineer Blog

Have you ever imported or exported a STEP file assembly and you are missing some of the components? If so, you have come to the right place for the steps to follow to fix the issue.

This is the fourth article in the series on manually importing CAD data into PDM. In this document we will cover the “Pack and Go” method of import.

In one of my recent SOLIDWORKS training classes, a student asked, “Can I use an Excel file to create a 3D sketch that can be then swept?” The answer is yes, and I decided to show him and the entire class the cool feature in SOLIDWORKS called Curve Through XYZ Points. The feature allows you to make some amazing parts that might otherwise cost you many hours of consternation.

The SOLIDWORKS Admin Portal is a web-based asset management system that allows a company administrator to assign serial numbers to end-users and manage online licenses. To find members in the Admin Portal, click Members and browse for the user’s name. You may also enter a name in the search fields and click Search at the bottom. Select the member you wish to assign a product.

In PDM Standard users can now easily convert many drawing files to PDF’s upon a drawings release or any other transition in a workflow. Follow these steps to execute convert to PDF tasks.

I acquired the Roboteurs RBX1 (Remix) robot arm from my colleague Preston Ruff who in a previous blog post, built and assembled the robot arm from a kit. The robot arm is a 6-axis robot with a pincer grip. Being an engineer and a fan of robots, I started to think of ways to improve the arm. The first thought that came to mind was that the gripper was simple and could be improved. So, I started to design improvements on my own.

The 2018 release of SOLIDWORKS PDM revision tables can be driven by the workflow in SOLIDWORKS PDM. Now revision tables can be added to drawings with no extra work by the engineers or drafters that are creating the drawings. As soon as a drawing is approved its revision table will be updated with the relevant information.

The “SOLIDWORKS PDM File Upgrade Tool” (Upgrade Tool) is a utility provided by SOLIDWORKS to help in upgrading files in the PDM vault. You make choices as to how you want to handle the updating process and then the Upgrade Tool will start crawling through the vault, checking out files, opening them in the current SOLIDWORKS version, saving them and then checking them into the vault.

A typical PDM workflow for revision controlled documents includes a ‘Pending Approval’ state for files that are being reviewed for approval. This state normally allows the reviewer to either approve the proposed change and release the new revision, or send it back for further work – the assumption here is the change would be accepted later if the required additional modifications are made.