Dec 4th 6pm pst
click for meeting notes
This Wednesday in California USA, we'll be broadcasting the users group meeting.
click for gotomeeting
At this meeting we'll be talking about project structures and how to use parts, part studios, assemblies, documents & folders to build something cool. Is the way you build a simple fixture the same way you'd build an automated production line? Where do you start? Is the structure important?
We'll be recording this group meeting and posting it at rustyshed.com. If you have any comments, please post'm here. We read this forum.
Comments
@paul_arden maybe we should be having a one in Melbourne again and invite Bill as a special guest to share on GoTo Meeting (timezone may be an issue though).
Twitter: @onshapetricks & @babart1977
I like that idea, let's figure it out.
I hope you can make it to our group meeting.
Twitter: @onshapetricks & @babart1977
I'll record it & post it. Post your comments here, I'll be checking in.
Thanks for attending, I'm no longer a webinar virgin and I'm feeling ok. There's things we need to do like have multiple computers in the room picking up sound. It's important not to have any computers in the room playing sound as it creates a feedback loop. We were monitoring the session for a while which was playing sound and caused the loop. We will work on the presentation and polish it up. Sorry for the loop.
We run our group backwards and the 1st hour is just bullshitting with others. It's funny because everyone shows up at 5pm when the bull starts. I turned the webinar on during this time to make sure it was working. In the beginning, I was working with Sean on his 1st assembly. That's what all the sliders were. Sean is a manufacturer who can accept a shared file from me and make a part. No drawings. He's special and coming up to speed quickly. We need more suppliers that can work this way.
Non-blocking is async code, callbacks.... for those who wonder. It's a major difference between Onshape & SW (or any other desktop app). It's the reason at the end, when the internet acted up, I just finished and let the system catch up. I like it, and pointed it out to all the SW people in the room. You don't have to wait for the command to complete before moving on to the next. Although, like John says, you can't finish before it starts, there are limits. I find a lot of people wait before proceeding to the next command which is indicative of older blocking systems. Just open the throttle a little bit.
I do use the feature clock, especially on other peoples stuff that I have to work on. It's good to know which features are taxing the system. When I'm designing, I tend to know what is slow and I try to fix it. Bruce that's a good point, know your model and which features are expensive.
It'd be fun to have a group of people who share how they use onshape. I will attend your webinar.
Thanks for participating.
Onshape tends to drop an input or 6 in-between almost at random. Must have more to do with a disconnect between the browser sending an input and the server listening for the input. I'm not sure. All I know is you really need to have more patience with Onshape when making selections or typing in dimensions (they improved dimension input recently, but still happens once in a while).
When it comes to closing a command, then starting a new one. Yes, you don't need to wait for the model to regenerate completely, whereas SolidWorks you absolutely cannot go on to the next command until the previous one is closed.
When you were attempting to stretch the extrude at the very end of the webinar, you were overloading the inputs and it was going haywire. That is the normal experience I have with Onshape when you push the non-blocking envelope
In my opinion, dragging the arrows with "final" toggled is "usually" not practical, for the reason you were struggling there. If you don't have the foresight to roll up to the tree, it ends up being a waste of time and is so slow it makes me grit my teeth and want to throw my mouse or break something.
It is much faster and less bouncy to just take the measurement or enter a guess value, then tweaking it in small increments by typing in a new value when "eye-balling" the dimension. The regeneration time of the model solving "many times a second" while dragging, on top of the internet latency just make that arrow too sluggish.
Twitter: @onshapetricks & @babart1977
You have a nice computer, I should show you my SW screen. I'd show you all the dll's loading and me waiting to click a command.
Click save and wait, wait, wait. I saved all the time, remember to save, remember those days?
I know pc's buffer the keyboard, but window clicks aren't buffered. Other than that, it's a blocked process, one command waits for the next.
I have better success with OS catching up with me and there's more stuff that's async. I prefer OS's overall performance but I'm amazed with the cloud and how sockets work. Maybe it's this fascination that has me mesmerized.
I wonder how many people are even close enough to grand rapids besides @brian_brady, or possibly his students??
Wish we could figure this user group think out....
at least it keeps every key press, even when I open notepad
Onshape will tend to drop input if I tried that in their BOM.
Although, with Onshape, I copy the BOM to a spreadsheet, do the edits, the paste the entire BOM back into Onshape. FTW! That means I can do the Entire BOM, rename, re-part number, Set qtys, all at the same time in about a minute in Onshape. SW takes a day (which is why I'm here working saturday...)
Part studios with an assembly rocks for this reason alone.
The purpose of this user group was to show that part studios are very powerful and you can get a lot done with them. Most people I know using OS are doing small projects in a part studio with success.
The next meeting we'll introduce assemblies, and at first, we'll keep it simple. I really think the best solution for a project utilizes both part studios & assemblies and I want to show people this path.
Later on.... discussions about assembly structures will take over and this will never end. It's so vast with unlimited permutations which means we'll never define it. This is the reason I'd like to show case your's & Bruce's project structure because it'll be different than mine. If you don't want to start up a user group, would you present at ours? I'd love to have you guys share your CAD chops to the world from the San Diego User's Group.
I am curious, in your video, how is SW buffering the screen picks? I know C# now has async & await, but I doubt its buffering keyboarding & mouse picking using this newer technology. Personally, I really don't care how they do it, I'm not into desktop computing any more.
I use sockets on my site and flutter changes between the browser screen & database. I can't guarantee the order in which 20 changes occur but they won't get messed up. Although, if you change the same field 5 times I can't guarantee that that field will update in an ordered sequence. The ending value could end up being the 4th entry. So, don't do that, it's called callback hell for a reason.
One thing I noticed with onshape, with geometry updates, they don't show intermediate steps. It's as though they watch the geometry cue and process all requests before returning the final display. That's a real time saver to only send the final geometric results versus waiting seconds for the screen flashing the progression of your changes. With a socket and on the backend servers, you could cue up user requests in a cache, process them in order, then send the final display list back when the cue is empty. You know who the users are and can keep track of their requests. Think of it as a smart keyboard caching subsystem, same keyboard concept just on steroids.
I have no idea how OS does it, I can speculate though..... The cloud is different.
I should have recorded my screen but.....
I had to review a SW drawing so:
-start parallels
-start windows
-start solidworks
-get file from epdm
-crash
-start solidworks
-get file from epdm again
20 minutes. I hate that whole paradigm. That's my world.
It looks like you may handle asm the same as me though anyway.
I just assemble a mess. Then use the bom to select all of the same parts then sort the tree with that selection.
At the same time, rename at least the name of the part in the bom to make it easier to spot in the tree.
Then I copy everythig to a google spreadsheet that is formatted to let me paste everything in as garbage, and it will rename every field in the format my company wants.
Then I copy the cells from there and paste it in as one big chunk.
The edit speed of google sheets is far quicker than Onshape, obviously because they don't need to chase down a bunch of parts/configs etc. to apply each input.
So, by doing that, what would take literally a full day (consistently for the projects I have done) in SW. Takes about 5 minutes in Onshape.
SW sorts faster but renames parts only on save, and god forbid you have a part with the same name on disk. Then you have to rename ALL those parts first with a random suffix, save, then you can go thru and rename.
Heaven help you if someone else in your company has an edrawing of one of the parts.. then it saves the new name in SW, doesn't save it in windows because it is read only. Crashes SW. Now you have a corrupt assembly. So you try and re-reference all the broken parts, then go to everyones computer and make sure the close everything, then start over..
If you like I could make a short demo of all of this and post on youtube.
Let's wait for another user groups and we'll let you share your screen.