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In The Machine is the official blog of the Inventor Product Management Team. It is a way for us to share Inventor news, interesting information about successful Inventor customers and partners as well as tips and tricks. From time to time we’ll also use the blog to solicit feedback from users via surveys. This blog is hosted by Garin Gardiner our Technical Marketing Manager.
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Hole Note Quantity
May 31, 2006 11:08 AMby Garin GardinerIf you need to display the quantity of like holes in a drawing view, there are a few options to do this. Create a hole note from one of the holes and edit the note. You can insert the Quantity Note property from the values and symbols section to display the quantity of holes in the pattern/view.
To specify if you want the quantity to be added from a pattern of from the drawing view, select the Edit Quantity Note in the Option section and choose the appropriate selection.
This is now associatively linked so any changes to the pattern/view will update the hole note.
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International Pickle Week
May 30, 2006 11:13 PMbyBet you didn't know it was International Pickle Week! And it is a 10 day week to boot. Inventor customer, Mt. Olive Pickles is celebrating with a Pickle Palooza!
I stole some information about these guys from an upcoming press releaese....
Mt. Olive Pickle Company, is the second-best selling brand of non-refrigerated pickles in the country, and they use Inventor to design and document the machinery that comprises its pickle processing plants.
Mt. Olive's facilities are located on 110 acres of land, with approximately 970,000 square feet of production, office and warehouse space. The company has over 1,200 fiberglass and plastic brine vats, with storage capacity in excess of 40 million pounds of cucumbers.
"Autodesk Inventor plays a key role in our entire pickling process," explained Jimmy Carr, Plant Engineer at Mt. Olive. "We use Autodesk Inventor to design all of the conveyor belts, brush washing equipment, cutting equipment, and the piping and run systems, which are high-purity sanitary systems like you see in dairies. We also used Inventor to create the custom filling machine, which places the actual pickles in the jar. By having all of our machinery and equipment in Inventor, we're able to troubleshoot production problems much more quickly, and prevent costly downtime. The level of detail provided in Autodesk Inventor 11 is really helpful for providing either management or vendors with exact measurements and details of the production machinery if there's ever a problem."
-Amy
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More Inventor Press Coverage
May 26, 2006 11:01 PMbyYou are probably getting tired of me pointing you to articles on Inventor. However, two recent pieces with a slightly different perspective caught my eye.
The first is a Machine Design article, written by Inventor customer Matthew Sawhill from Townsend Engineering, in Des Moines Iowa. Matt is a very active member of the Inventor community and is president of his user group often presenting tips and tricks and he has presented at AU.
He writes about designing 4 bar linkages in Autodesk Inventor without using any equations! You can read it here.
In the second article, Cadalyst writer Kenneth Wong interviewed David Beck and 3 students on the Cybersonics team from Palisades H.S., winners of the Autodesk Inventor Award at the FIRST Robotics Championships. This team from Bucks County, PA used Autodesk Inventor to design their robot. Read about them here.
If you want to keep up with all the coverage of Inventor we created a new page here on autodesk.com that includes links to the latest and greatest articles.
-amy
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Survey on Working with Drawings
May 23, 2006 12:42 PMbyMy blogging buddy Grant Rochelle just posted a survey on working with drawings. It's a quick one and we'd really appreciate it if you could take a minute (literaly) to fill it out. We have a few simple questions on the type of information you typically put on a drawing (made in any CAD system) and who uses it.
Survey link is http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=286992174898
Thanks! Amy
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Browser Search
May 18, 2006 11:48 PMby Garin GardinerI am still trying to remember all the new features in R11 and one that has become more and more helpful is the ability to search for items in the browser. Have you ever wanted to be able to search for and select components, constraints, features, sketches and welds from the browser? Now in Inventor 11 you have a Find tool in the Model browser that will allow you to define search criteria and find all the matching objects to delete, suppress / un-suppress and more. I have found this very helpful to locate sick constraints and suppress all model fillets. Once you have set up a search, you can also save it for later use if it is a commonly used task.
Happy searching.
Garin
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Move Sketch Entities without Points
May 12, 2006 08:00 AMby Garin GardinerFor those of you with an AutoCAD background, you might be happy to know that the 2D move command now allows you to select points in space similar to AutoCAD (you don't need to create to/from points). Now you can select an object to move, specify both a start and end point in space (no need for an actual point). It's a small change but makes the tool much more usable.
Garin
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Western PA User Group Meeting
May 10, 2006 08:02 AMbyLast week I attended an Inventor user group meeting in Pittsburgh, PA. It was held at the Westinghouse Energy Center (thank you Westinghouse!) and we had over 100 attendees. Most had been using Inventor for 3 or more years. I presented a bit on our strategy and vision and several of the MESA CAD application engineers did some demos of Inventor. One fun presentation was on "Things I like about Inventor that begin with I" - this presentation highlighted the time savings advantages of using iFeatures and iMates. Some of the R11 features reviewed were the Frame Generator, Shape Description (there was lots of excitement over the new filleting options), configurations and large assembly managment. As expected there was also a lot of interest in the new functionality added to the Drawing Manager - since at the end of the day most of the attendees still need to make drawings. Some of the highlights included:
- Associative Chamfer dimensions
- Ability to move dimensions between views
- Ability to use a user-defined view scale when creating a drawing view
- Inspection dimensions
- Copy formatting properties between dimensions
- Editing material properties in the BOM Editor
- Custom iproperties at the drawing level
- Ability to input text rotation when adding text
- Acess to windows symbols via the character map
If you are looking for a user group meeting in your area you can search the Events page on the community portal and if you are in the US or Canada you can check out the events page at Autodesk.com.
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Do you run more than one version of Inventor at a time?
May 9, 2006 07:51 AMbyWe are gathering some data on when and why our users run more than one version of Inventor on the same computer. Please take a minute to fill out this survey. We appreciate your input!
-Amy
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Delete 2D/3D Sketch Coincident Constraint
May 8, 2006 08:13 AMby Garin GardinerPeriodically I need to remove the coincident constraint between two lines. In the past I would have to display constraints, delete the one I wanted removed then turn off constraints again. With Inventor R11 you can select the line near the end you want to remove the constraint, right click and select Delete Coincident Constraint. This will also work on circles that share the same center point.
Garin
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Electronic Foosball Anyone?
May 4, 2006 08:08 PMbyEver wanted to play foosball but didn't have a worthy opponent? Well a group of seniors at Rice University have created what they believe to be the first computer controled foosball game- and they modeled it all in Inventor. Read about it in American Machinest.
-Amy