3D Printing - Objet Alaris 30

I recently had a chance to receive training on a 3D printer from a company called Objet. For the longest time I was fascinated by this technology. I understood the general concept. But, after learning more about what makes these machines tick, it made me even more curious to explore it to the full. Needless to say I can't stop printing! I was there for a whole week learning how to print and do basic service of the machine. It basically will accept any STL formated file from virtually any CAD system. What I'm envisioning is a 3D scanner setup. Along with that is a CAD program such as SolidWorks. You can scan your model. Clean it up in the CAD system. Then export it as an STL file to be printed on the machine.

It is a bit tricky to get it going. But, it gets easier as you go.

Below is a promo video that shows how it does the magic.

Autodesk Inventor receives a CATIA V5 Translator

Recently Autodesk introduced a CATIA V5 translator for the Inventor 2009 software. It supports CATIA files up to R18 (which is what most of us are running). This is a very significant feature. CATIA happens to be an expensive software to own and run. So, If you happen to be a design firm that occasionally gets some V5 files, this is a great solution. It works on both native V5 parts and assemblies. The best thing here is that it's a free download. You want to make sure that you're running service pack 1 in Inventor 2009. I had a chance to play with it and it looks very promising. The question that begs an answer is: Why doesn't SolidWorks have the same capability? It's owned by the same company that makes CATIA: Dassault Systemes! It's probably conflict of interest. Dassault probably doesn't want to see a mass exodus from it's CATIA ranks over to the cheaper midrange CAD software. Only the future will tell how Dassault will handle this delicate situation.

I've created video that shows how to use this feature.

CATIA V5 - Create & Link Fillets in a Sketch

This is a demo of how you can create corners in a V5 sketch automatically. This eliminates the tedious task of going around clicking each and every individual element. Note that the 4 fillets are also linked together in a formula.

How to add a Custom Property in Drawing mode

In SolidWorks drawing mode, Occasionally, users need to add a custom column. For example, you can add a material column to your Bill of Materials. Now, it is quite the procedure to do so. The column does not appear automatically. you need to specify a material for the part in question. Then, you need to enable the custom property so that the BOM can see that entry in the custom field back in drawing mode.