Season Greeting & Important Announcement!

To all of our reader, we would like to wish all of you Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Wish Santa bring you the gift of never ending happiness this Christmas!

On this Christmas season as well, we would like to announce that currently we are in the midst of preparing the first volume of our own SolidWorks tutorial. This tutorial will be a very useful guide for all of you who are new to SolidWorks and wanted to learn more about this software.

The tutorial will be based on our Lego Tutorial, with some modifications and update. Our initial Lego tutorial only teaches you the very basic function, which is Extrude Boss/Base and Assembly. The new tutorial would teach you how to use all SolidWorks basic functions, including Revolve, Loft, Sweep, as well as Pattern.

The tutorial tutorial would be released around mid of January 2015, so keep an eye on it! Please follow us to keep you updated!

Working with High Resolution Computer Screen

Alright, recently I bought a new tablet laptop, which is the Lenovo Yoga Pro 2. It is not necessarily the fastest computer for CAD software, but I was looking for portability. Everything in this computer works perfectly fine. The solid state memory will take only 3 seconds to start up the computer, and it is pretty light-weight and slim for a laptop.

The display is marvelous, displaying up to 3200 x 1800 resolution, any video would appear flawless. But despite that, it is causing few problems.

Few software seems to be incompatible with the resolution, displaying a very very small view. This problem was very well explained by Scott Hanselman here. According to the Lenovo forum, this root cause of this issue is that the software installed to the computer does not have resolution adaptive programmed to it. And this exception also happened to CAD software as well.

While the small icon is still visible (thanks to the high screen resolution), it is almost un-clickable. You will need like 3 seconds just to adjust the location of your mouse cursor in order to click the right things. After 30 minutes of modelling, trust me, you have achieved nothing. Well, maybe something, but not much.

Snapshot of SolidWorks in high resolution screen. Notice how small the icons are..

Another snapshot. Compare the sketch icon besides the Front Plane at model tree. Tell me how to click this icon?

Looking at the current trend, I don't foresee that any CAD software would update their programming as high resolution device is not that very common. Furthermore, typical CAD software user would rather to install their software on desktop rather than on portable laptop.

To handle with this issue, what I did was to set the screen resolution to 1600 X 900, and activate the "Let me choose one scaling level for all my displays", and then choose the 100% options. You will need to restart your computer in order for this changes to take place.

This option works like wonder not only for CAD software, but for other software that does not support resolution compatibility, for example Photoshop, AutoCAD, and Adobe After Effect. The high resolution is a little bit sacrificed with this option, and watching videos are not as pleasant as previously. And here's the million dollar question. Why would we're paying for device that can display good resolution when we're using only half of its capability? Its like buying a Lamborghini and use it only to buy groceries..

Set the screen resolution to 1600 x 900

And thick the "Let me choose one scaling level for all my displays"

SolidWorks - Radius/Diameter Dimension on Revolve

This time I will share a simple tricks that can be useful when  using Smart Dimension in SolidWorks for Revolve function.

Sometimes, we wanted to specify the diameter of a certain part, while on other occasion, we want to specify the radius. Even radius can be easily obtained from diameter, by dividing by 2, on certain dimension it can't be easily achieved. Using calculator might waste a little bit of your time.

The tricks below will show you how to convert diameter to radius without even doing a calculation.

1. To start off, you need to have a center line as a center of revolution.
2. Draw a profile that you want to revolve.
3. Using Smart Dimension, place a dimension between the center line and the sketch you want to give the dimension. Placing the dimension on the same side of the sketch would give you a radius (on the image below is on the right side of the center line).
4. To convert it to diameter, simply drag your mouse to the other side of the center line before you place the dimension.
5. That simple tricks would save you a little bit of time!

Giving radius or diameter on SolidWorks. Place dimension on the same side of the sketch to give radius, place it on the other side to give diameter.

SolidWorks - Customizing Your Own Keyboard Shortcut

One good thing about SolidWorks is that it is very customizable. Users are able to assign or customize their own keyboard shortcut. With that, users can assign certain hot keys on their keyboard to their mostly used features. By default, SolidWorks have assigned certain hotkeys, for example "E" for extrude, "Enter" for last used commands, "Ctrl + N" for New File, etc.

Customizing your own keyboard shortcut can be done following these steps:
1. Launch SolidWorks and click New > Part. Search for the Options button on top, click the arrow besides the icon, and select Customize.
Note: The Customize would not appear immediately when you launch SolidWorks. You need to create part/assembly/drawing in order to access this function.

Accessing Customize Function

2. On the Customize window, go to Keyboard tab. To change any hot keys, just click on the Shortcut(s) column, and press your own hotkeys. Note that you can input combinations of hotkeys, e.g. Ctrl + s, Alt + N, etc.

Customizing Keyboard Shortcut

3. Click OK to confirm.