NEWSUG Meeting Minutes

September 1, 2004, 5:00 p.m., Fox Valley Technical College, Appleton, Wisconsin

While this report generally covers the meeting events, they have been arranged into a logical sequence and refined with the purpose of making them helpful without necessarily precisely representing the facts as they happened.

 

27 people attended this meeting.

 

Click on links for easy navigation

Recording and Playing a SolidWorks Macro

SolidWorks Customization

Customization Exercises

Next meeting

Announcements—Bob Braun

Meeting Minutes

Response to the question about who uses the posted minutes and how much, only a few people read the minutes. They mostly use it for seeing what they missed and for seeing what should have happened. Because writing the minutes takes many hours for the board of directors, consideration will be given to creating alternate formats that will be less work.

Board Candidates

These members have agreed to consider joining the NEWSUG Board of Directors.

Dennis Roitt, Fisher Hamilton

Nate Leiternitz, Miller Electric

Paul Verhagen, Miller Electric.

Dennis also agreed to serve on the Board of Directors. He was unanimously voted in.

Paul decided that he is too busy to serve and withdrew his name.

Meeting Day

Because of a conflict with some members with Wednesday as the meeting date, we voted to meet on Tuesdays. Future meetings will be held on the first Tuesday in September, December and March and the last Tuesday in May.

Upcoming Events

Midwest User Group Meeting on September 8 through 10 in Lake Geneva

Cosmos User Group Meeting on November 3

Combined SolidWorks User Group Meeting in November.

Information on the Midwest User Group meeting can be gotten from the Graphic Systems web site. Information on the Cosmos User Group and Combined SolidWorks User Group meetings can be gotten from Impact Engineering.

Recording and Playing a SolidWorks Macro – Dennis Roitt Up

Record a macro with these steps:

    1. Display your macro toolbar. It looks like this.
    2. Select record with the middle icon.
    3. Do the activity that you want to record.
    4. Stop the macro record with the second icon in the macro tool bar.
    5. Give the macro a representative name and save it.

Dennis demonstrated the idea with a macro to turn on dual dimensions.

Once you have the macro recorded, you can review it or edit it by selecting the last icon in the tool bar and selecting the macro from the list.

You can run the macro by pushing the first icon in the toolbar and selecting the macro from the list.

 

You can create an icon to run the macro with these steps:

1. Go to the Tools|Customize menu.

2. Select the Commands tab and scroll down to the Macro category.

3. Select the New Macro icon and drag it to an existing menu, like the macro menu.

4. Fill in the boxes in the pull down form. Select the macro from the dialog box. Change the image to a bitmap image of your choice. While in the ideal case, the image bitmap will be 16 X 16 pixels, any larger size will be shrunk down to meet the requirementes.

  1. Select OK.

 

For additional details on recording and playing macros, go to the SolidWorks help menu. This is not to be confused with the special SolidWorks API help menu. Here is a screen shot of the menu.

 

 

SolidWorks Customization – Greg Jankowski Up

The presentation that Greg worked from can be found with this link. Here is a brief summary of the points that he made.

 If there is more than one SolidWorks user in your company, you want to customize it and administer it in order to work well together and get good results.

 Regularly defragment your hard disk and clean out temporary files.

 In SolidWorks 2004 and SolidWorks 2005, the deployment wizard has been substantially enhanced. Tools have been added to permit you to save your customized settings and restore them.

 The tools can be found under the Start|Programs|SolidWorks menu.

 Save all macros and customized features in a folder away from the default SolidWorks program folder in order to preserve them during SolidWorks upgrades.

 File locations can point to multiple locations simultaneously. This permits you to work with centrally administered templates and macros while adding personal macros and other customized features.

 Macros can be written in a combination of these techniques:

 Record the activity, like Dennis demonstrated.

 Find a similar macro on the SolidWorks web site or from one of the links on the NEWSUG web site.

 Look at the recorded macros from the above sources and learn how they work.

 Record sample macros that you have no intention of using. Look at the code to see how they work.

 Combine all of the above techniques to create or edit your own macros.

 SolidWorks 2005 has a new deployment wizard that makes deploying and managing many systems much easier and more reliable.

 

Under the SolidWorks Help menu, there is an entire section on SolidWorks API and Add-Ins Help Topics. This section is recommended reading for those who wish to go beyond basic macro recording and playing.

 

 

 

User Customization Exercises Up

Users were encouraged to work in small groups on these exercises. They were selected to demonstrate and learn customization.

 Modify template files to add reverse iso view.

 Open a new part or assembly file.

 With your arrow keys, rotate the planes until you get the desired reverse iso orientation.

 Save that view with a logical name like reverse iso. One way to get to a toolbar to save the view is by pressing the space bar.

 Save the file with the Save As command. Select a Template file type.

 Create hot keys to:
Toggle plane visibility on and off (P)
Toggle origin visibility on and off (O)
Return to your previous view (V)
Make selected sketch components collinear
Make selected sketch components tangent (T)

 Go to the Tools|Customize menu.

 Select the fourth tab, Keyboard.

 Scroll down the categories until you find the category for the function that you want to create. The first three in this exercise are under View. The last two are under Others.

 In the text box Press new shortcut key enter the shortcut that you want to use.

 Press the Assign command button.

 

 When you have assigned all of the hot keys that you want, select the OK command button.

 Change a drop down menu to include items that are not default and remove items that you do not use. The example was in an assembly model: Right click on the part to add Move and Replace component to the drop down menu.

 

 Virtually all SolidWorks menus have a command at the bottom called Customize. Select it.

 

 

 Check or leave checked the items that you want to display with this menu and uncheck or leave unchecked those items that you to not want to show on this menu.

We also had these challenge exercises, which were not solved in the meeting. The suggestion was to go to the SolidWorks web site or web sites listed in the NEWSUG links page to find similar macros. Modify those macros to get the desired results. You can also create test macros just to see what the code looks like. That code can be cut and pasted to make the working macro that you want.

 

 Create a macro and icon to open the sketcher and change the view to normal of the selected plane. The challenge of this exercise is that simply recording the macro will tie it to the plane that is selected when the macro is written.

 Write a macro to alphanumerically sort the assembly tree.

Up

Next meeting

Our next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, December 7, 2004. Tentative topics will be Rapid Prototyping and Industrial Design, Surfacing , Shapes and Lofting.