SolidWorks World 2009 “Wednesday”
Fielder Hiss opened Wednesday’s general session with a welcome and an introduction of Sponsor Don Richardson from Microsoft.
Mike North and Joe Grant, two of the guys from “prototype this” were the special guests for Wednesday. The came into the assembly on a rescue cart they designed on one of the shows. It was very hard to get a clear shot of Mike and Joe because during their presentation they both were in constant motion like kids with ADD and a sugar buzz. I finally got the next picture near the end.
On the show, both the mechanical and electrical systems are designed for what ever the challenge is. During the presentation they were trying to show the design process. One of the quotes and eventual theme they follow was “You don’t have to succeed to learn something”. “Sometimes failure is ok” which is alright in engineering because engineering is a path of discovery. Have fun with it.
After the ”prototype this” guys left the stage, the top ten list announcement was started by Bruce Holway the manager of product definition for SW. Bruce stated that SolidWorks has implemented over 70% of top ten from recent years. Brainstorm, which was an online community style web based forum, was used to create the top ten list. User group leaders from around the country were recognized and actually got to announce the top ten as voted on by the users. My new friend Randall Block (5th from the left) from the Happy Valley SolidWorks User Group got to name #5 (on-the-fly equation creation and editing). The next item on the agenda was the What’s new 2010. I won’t go into much detail but the list included such neat items as new view mates in assembly which works kinda like the isolate command but shows all the mated items based on what part you select and hides all others. Other things of interest were new mirror components optimization for components, multi-body sheetmetal, structural features like welds, updated dxf output and reference planes creation. I am looking forward to seeing the implementation of most of these items.
It’s hard to believe that the 3rd general session of SolidWorks World 2009 is over. I guess this leaves only one thing….looking forward to SolidWorks World 2010!
