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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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Design Accelerators (Video Podcast Episode 22)
March 27, 2008 12:18 AMby Garin Gardiner
This episode we cover the use of several of the Design Accelerators in Inventor such as shaft generator, bolted connection, and belt generator.
Zune - coming soon
Don't forget to leave feedback by adding a comment to this post or email me.5 Comments | Add CommentIn In the Machine > Autodesk Inventor, Podcast
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Wondering Where Your MDT Disk Is?
March 25, 2008 06:40 PMby Garin Gardiner
With the release of the Inventor 2009 products we are changing the way you receive Mechanical Desktop software.
While all Inventor 2009 products include Autodesk Mechanical Desktop 2009 the software is no longer included on the Inventor DVD.
Customers who still use Mechanical Desktop must download an additional add-in. This change is designed to simplify the installation experience for the majority of customers who do not use Mechanical Desktop and reduce production of unused DVDs.
There is a notification card included in the DVD box that explains the change and invites customers to visit www.autodesk.com/mdt where they can download the required files. This download page includes a short questionnaire which will enable us to improve our understanding of current MDT usage. You can also request physical media after completing the questionnaire.
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What's New with Inventor 2009 (Article3)
March 24, 2008 07:12 PMby Garin GardinerWhat's New Article #3: Self Draining Lines
Prescription medicines, healthcare products such contact lens solution, nasal sprays and mouth rinse, processed foods and drinks all have one thing in common. They are all manufactured in sterile processing equipment so that you and I are not exposed to harmful bacteria when we use the products.
Engineers in these industries face complex challenges when they design the process lines – the tubes and pipes that carry the product. They must specify approved stainless steel fittings and avoid geometry that could trap biological agents or harbor bacteria. Finally, all process lines must be designed with runoff to facilitate cleaning and sterilization.
Why is this important?
With the new self draining pipe styles in Inventor Professional 2009 we have an excellent solution for engineers who design skids and process equipment in these industries.
Rules based pipe routing enables users to quickly create Digital Prototypes that facilitate design reviews with customers and regulatory organizations. It’s much easier to optimize pipe runs, figure out the right location for valves and other equipment and when the design is right, the proven capabilities of the Inventor drawing tools and the power of DWG TrueConnect streamline the process of producing and distributing accurate manufacturing drawings.
Self Draining Tube & Pipe Styles
With Inventor 2009 you can set up tube and pipe styles to design process lines that comply with ASME BPE standards.
Then, by selecting the “self draining” option in the Tube & Pipe Styles Editor and entering the target slope or runoff angle, you can quickly create pipe routes that comply with the required run off angle.
There’s even an Angle Calculator that helps to compute the angle from a specified drop. In addition to standard 45 and 90 degree elbows, self draining pipe styles include custom elbows for use with fittings with non-standard angles such as 92 or 91 degrees.
Summary
Tube & Pipe design in Autodesk Inventor is widely used by many customers to reduce the time required to design tubing, piping, and flexible hose due to its powerful rules-based routing tools.
With Inventor Professional 2009, these benefits are now available to create self draining in your digital prototypes for items such as skids and process equipment. It will provide particularly strong benefits to those of you that supply equipment to the pharmaceutical, food and personal care industries where equipment must comply with ASME BPE standards for sterility and cleanability.
0 Comment | Add CommentIn In the Machine > News, Autodesk Inventor
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Why be Flexible?
March 19, 2008 11:10 PMby Garin Gardiner
As many of you have probably already discovered, when you insert or create an assembly inside of another assembly (sub-assembly) it is looked at as a rigid body. An example of this would be to insert a shock assembly into an RC car and want it to be able to compress. There is an easy way to do this by making it flexible. You might wonder why this isn't the default behavior when you first insert an assembly into another assembly. The key reason for this is performance - if every sub-assembly were to be flexible it would require your computer to work very hard to solve almost every constraint in you assembly. For this reason we allow you to simply turn the flexible behavior on as necessary.
First let’s take a look at the shock we want to be flexible so it can be compressed differently in each instance in an assembly.
Now let’s insert this into the RC Car and specify that it will be a flexible assembly. Once you have constrained it into place right click on the assembly (either in the browser or model window) and select flexible. That’s it! As long as the assembly has free degrees of freedom, you will be able to adjust the sub-assembly as necessary.
You can take this one step farther by creating positional representations to save the positional states. Perhaps in the future I will create a post or podcast showing what you can do with positional representations.
Enjoy!
3 Comments | Add CommentIn In the Machine > Autodesk Inventor, Tips
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How to Reduce Sinusoidal Depleneration
March 14, 2008 03:39 PMby Garin GardinerIn case you have wondered what to do with that old pre-fabulated amulite or what spurving bearings are, take a look at this Rockwell Automation video.
I know this has been out for a while and I am sure some of you have seen it but I thought we could all use a little humor at the end of a long week.
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Remove Those Flat Faces
March 9, 2008 10:38 PMby Garin GardinerThis tip is more aimed at those of you that create consumer products although I am guessing several of you that don't necessarily design consumer products will be able to take advantage of the tip. The other day I was designing something and needed to take a flat face and replace it with a slight dome. If you look at most consumer products, they often have close to planer faces although they often have a very slight dome on them that can be difficult to create. It is possible to use a "loft to point" to achieve this although I wanted a little more control. I ended up running across an interesting work flow that is very easy and gives me the look I often want. This tip has already found several great uses for me and I thought it might be of use to some of you. I will use this on a very basic box to give you an idea of the technique.
First I just create a rectangle and extrude it up to get a shape similar to what you see.
I then added fillets around the entire box using the setback option to give me a very nice rounded edges on the top surface. This will help my top domed surface look even better usign setback isn't required to make the dome.
From there I create a work plane offset from the top surface that has a small negative value so that it penetrates the box that we have created. The offset you use will depend on the size of the fillet and how high you want the dome. In my case I have a 1mm fillet so I will create a plane that is -.01mm from the top face.
the next step will be to either use the split or sculpt tool to remove the very small amount of material above the work plane. you wont see much of a difference but this will be more clear once we create the done.
Now that the excess material is removed we will delete the top surface which will convert our part from a solid body to a hybrid surface model that will allow us to create the dome we are looking for.
We can now use the Boundary Patch feature and select the open edge where the deleted surface once was. It will default to a "Free Condition" which will be planer just like the deleted surface so select the drop down and choose "Tangent Condition" to get a nice Tangent surface. For the following image I turned off the Translucency for the boundary surface so you can see it better.
We are almost finished! Now just select the Stitch command so that we can select the original extrusion and the new boundary patch surface to turn them back into a solid body.
It is very subtle at this point which is what I typically want although you can adjust the original offset plane with a larger negative value to create a higher dome. Lets take a look at the side view of our model to see what we have done.
Original Part
Part with dome
This is a very basic shape to show this although you can use much more complex objects to use this and get great results.
Let me know if you find this type of tip to be useful.
Garin
7 Comments | Add CommentIn In the Machine > Autodesk Inventor, Tips, Inventor LT
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What's New with Inventor 2009 (Article 2)
March 7, 2008 05:03 PMby Garin GardinerArticle #2: Drawing Manager Productivity
Attention to detail: Drawings have always been used to deliver a precise message to manufacturing without cluttering the limited amount of space available. With the enhanced Drawing Manager in Inventor 2009, several powerful tools have been added that enable you to convey more meaningful information to other designers and manufacturing partners, while speeding the process of detailing considerably.Crop ViewComplex assembly or part drawings generate complex drawing views. With the new Crop View tool you can quickly and easily remove unneeded areas of a drawing view to highlight the area of interest. Many other CAD products provide only a basic rectangular crop. Inventor 2009, however, allows rectangular, polygonal, and circular crops.
To control the boundary box of the cropped view, the same powerful sketch constraints available in parts can be used such as splines, lines and more. Just another great way to leverage Inventor features.
Automated Centerlines
The process of detailing the drawings can take as much as 80% of the entire project! What better way to save time than automating tasks that need to be repeated in multiple views? Automatic centerlines do exactly this. By selecting several views, (or using a filter and window selecting the views), you can rapidly create all the needed centerlines. Even centerlines for sheet metal and punch tools are supported!
Enhanced Styles Companies often use a particular format for the display of section, detail, and auxiliary views and many customers need to customize the labels associated with these view types. Changes to items like view boundaries, and arrowhead styles, along with the corresponding view labels must be fast and intuitive.
The new View Annotation Style provides increased control over Section, Auxiliary, and Detail views using graphical menus to simplify selection of the desired style.
Additional fields in the style allows you to modify the extension line length, the style and size of the terminator, or arrowhead, and the text style for the label.
Summary
Autodesk Inventor 2009 has many new Drawing Manager features that save time, and are integrated into a natural workflow. These improvements will save you from hours of repetitive work increasing both productivity and satisfaction.
Enjoy the new information on Inventor 2009!
Garin
0 Comment | Add CommentIn In the Machine > Autodesk Inventor, News
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What's New 2009
March 5, 2008 06:56 PMby Garin Gardiner
Have you wanted to see what was going to be in the next release of Inventor? Now you can download the What's New document and see what new features will be the best fit for you. Feel free to add comments on your thought about Inventor 2009 - looking forward to getting your feedback.
Enjoy!
Garin
0 Comment | Add CommentIn In the Machine > Autodesk Inventor, News