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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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Making Contact
June 27, 2007 08:26 AMby Garin Gardiner
I few releases ago we added the ability to have contact in your assemblies between components. There are a few quick steps to enable contact in an assembly to help determine how various components will react in an assembly.
First, select the components you would like to be enabled to contact one another and right click to turn on contact (we don't include the entire assembly for performance reasons).
The final step that many users forget is to actually turn on the contact solver from the tools pull down. I actually came across this tip when I couldn't figure out why components were still passing through each other after turning their contact set on. I dont use contact often and forgot I needed to turn on the contact solver before it would allow me to see contact between the components.
Once the contact solver is activated you should be able to drag our components around to see how they react with contact on.
Enjoy!
Garin
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Official Inventor Podcast Episode #13 - Formula SAE Competition
June 21, 2007 08:51 PMby Garin Gardiner
Wednesday June 20, 2007 - Episode 13 Podcast Show Notes
Take a listen to the latest podcast from the Formula SAE Competition I had chance to attend in Fontana California. The following podcast has an interview from Richard Schaum (President of SAE International) and several students involved in designing and driving their school cars.
Download from iTunes or right click here and select "Save Target As..." to save a local copy
Blog Posts
Post 1
Post 2
Videos from testing, practice runs and competition
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Images
Tips and Tricks
Dreaded Pink Dot
inventor.blog.feedback@autodesk.com
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Formula SAE Recap
June 19, 2007 08:48 AMby Garin Gardiner
Now that the Formula West SAE competition is over I have posted several videos and images of the event. If you are interested in seeing what the participating students have been up to take a look at the links below.
www.flickr.com
Day 2 - Brake Check and testing of the cars before the real fun begins.
Day 3 - Acceleration and Autocross event
Day 4 - Endurance
Cant wait till next year!
Garin
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It's Wish List Time Again!
June 15, 2007 03:28 AMby Garin Gardiner
I am sure that many of you have wish list items you would like to have added into Inventor. Now is a great time to let your voice be heard and let us know what is important to you.
Voting for the latest cycle of the AUGI Inventor Wish List is live now until the end of June. Make sure you head over to the Augi wish list site to register as a user and make your vote today.
Here are just a few things you can vote on from one of the sub categories (Frame Generator).
1 - End Caps in Frame Generator - Steven Darcey
2 - Part Comparator - Adrian Salariu
3 - Sanitary Tubing and Fittings, add to CC - Eric THERRIAULT
4 - Single Frame Gen. Component Miter - Steven Darcey
Good Luck Voting!
Garin
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Formula SAE Student Competition
June 14, 2007 06:30 AMby Garin GardinerThis week I am attending the Formula SAE competition in Southern California.
The SAE competition is a competition put together for college students to design a car as a team over a period of about a year and then compete with their cars at one of several SAE events. This week is the Formula SAE West in which students have brought their cars to Southern California to battle it out against other colleges.
Autodesk is a proud sponsor for the various SAE competitions and I am excited to see what these students have done with their cars. Today was registration day so I wandered around talking to the various teams and snapped a few pictures. Friday and Saturday are the main competition days so stay tuned for more information on the final outcome of the challenge.
Garin
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Dreaded Pink Dot
June 7, 2007 05:12 AMby Garin Gardiner
From time to time when I am modeling I will make a drastic change early on in my design that results in a few features that need to be updated. The "pink dot" is often due to these types of changes early in the model where features can't locate the edge or vertex they previously were referenced to.
Chances are there was a change made that removed an edge or vertex that has caused a projected point to become sick. In the past you needed to delete all the line segments that were constrained to this reference point to be able to delete the actual point to clear this issue up.
With some of the constraint changes in Inventor 2008 this is a simple fix. While in the sketch, right click and select Constraint Visibility. From here you can filter out all constraints other than a new constraint type called Reference.
Now just locate the reference constraint that belongs to the sick point and right click to delete the constraint. This should remove the pink color and error message for the particular point that was sick. You might need to repeat these steps if you have more than one sick constraint.
Notice the point is no longer sick.
I hope that is a little tip that will save you a bit of time in the future if you run into this issue.
Enjoy!
Garin
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Phoenix Gold Rocks!
June 4, 2007 07:55 AMby Garin GardinerAmy and I had a chance to visit one of our local customers close to the Portland office a week ago and I thought I would share a little about the trip.
Phoenix Gold has been making great car audio products for years and doing more and more around home audio. We had a chance to sit down with Phil Eichmiller and have him show us how they are using Inventor and some of the interesting ways they use the power of it to do more than just design parts. First off take a look as some of their great products created and rendered in Inventor.
One interesting way they are using Inventor is in their preparation for various electronic shows like CES. They use Inventor to layout their booths with various Phoenix Gold products and images to visualize and what it will look like. This is something they were never able to do before they started using Inventor and they are very excited about the doors it has opened to them.
Take a look at one of their show layouts.
If you get a chance, head on over to http://www.phoenixgold.com/ and see some of their great products designed with Inventor.
Thanks again Phil!
Garin
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Inventor Feature Recognition 2008 is here!
June 1, 2007 08:09 PMby Garin GardinerFor those of you that have been using Inventor 2008 and have been wanting to use Feature Generator from http://labs.autodesk.com, you can now download an Inventor 11 & 2008 version. This has become a very popular tool by many of you that have imported geometry and want to convert it to feature rich parts. There have been several enhancements to this tool other than being updated to Inventor 2008.
Here are a list of the supported features it will translate.
Fillets
Chamfers
Holes
Extrude
Fillet
Sculpt.
New to Feature Recognition 2
Revolve
Shell
Sweep
Circular Pattern
Rectangular Pattern
Head on over to Labs and download it today!
Garin