The Longest Journey from Bangkok to Singapore

11/28 – 7:15 PM local time. My flight was originally scheduled for 7:05 PM, but it’s now delayed until 10:50 PM to Singapore. It’s a special flight from Malaysia Airlines to bring people like me out of Bangkok, from Phuket Airport. I use to call myself “Le voyageur éternel”. I start travelling non-stop for work since 1994, except the year of 1999 when I was working at Mack Truck in Pennsylvania.
I have scheduled this trip with Lai Yee since early October. We wanted to bring SolidWorks Innovation to customers who can’t attend the regular events. First of all, they are important customers but because they are far away from major cities. This is the first time that we experiment such activities. On site, we have almost close to 40 attendees. I was very excited to show them Enterprise PDM and 3DVIA Composer.
Ved asked me on Monday morning whether I really wanted to make this trip. I did my homework and check with the airline. The flight was almost full and the previous flight was overbooked. That should be OK then, I won’t be alone in Bangkok. So I was heading to Bangkok. Arriving in Bangkok on Monday at 6:00 PM, it was business as usual. Several passengers from the same checked in at the same hotel than me.
On Tuesday, I went to Bangna and worked at Applicad office. We prepared for the event next day. I ran over and over the demo. I had to do it because I had the pre-Beta version of Enterprise PDM 2009 SP2. I don’t want to see it crash. I used the Beta version of 3DVIA Composer as well. Anyway, who know that I’m using the Beta version.
I took the taxi back to hotel around 4:00 PM. It was still business as usual. I decided to stop by Central, one of the biggest department stores in Bangkok. They gave me a special discount card valid for 2 years. I was quite happy, on top of this, if purchased using Amex, you can get 3% discount more. I bought few things for my daughters and a rose candle for my wife.
Just before going to bed, I received several calls from friends and family announcing the news, “Airport is closed”.
Ved called me early in the morning the next day, ordering me to take the first flight out of Thailand. I was on the way to the customer already. Let’s do it after the event then. The customer is not in Bangkok, they are in Ayuthaya, the ancient capital of Thailand, and about 90 minutes drive from Applicad office.

Ayuthaya Old Palace

The event went very well with close to 30 attendees. Patipat and his team presented SolidWorks 2009 until lunch time. I had 90 minutes to present Enterprise PDM and 3DVIA Composer. Patipat told me he didn’t understand very well PDM but now he did. And he added that it was a very good demo.

Ayuthaya

We checked with our travel agent, she managed to get the last 2 seats from Chiang Mai to Singapore on next Monday. That meant we still had 4 days before heading north to Chiang Mai. OK, let’s go for another demo on Thursday in Chonburi.
Back to Bangkok on that Wednesday night, it was still business as usual in CentralWorld and Sukhumvit.
On Thursday, we drove to Chonburi. It was a Danish customer with facilities in Thailand. The Prince of Denmark visited them the day before and the whole delegation couldn’t leave Bangkok for the moment, just like us.
My agent called me again with good news. There might be a special charter flight from U-Tapao airport. I was told by our Thai reseller that U-Tapao was naval base and the opposition wouldn’t dare to come here. I was told by our travel agent to be ready around 6:00 PM; her local agent will pick up us at the Sukhumvit area for that special flight. We started joking on the car during the trip back to Bangkok from Chonburi about this flight. It could be a human smuggling operation and I might end up with a group of illegal migrants, etc …
Back to the hotel around 5:00 PM then the bad news came. There were not enough passengers for this special charter from U-Tapao. However, I have a chance to take the Malaysian Airlines flight from Phuket on Friday. I bought the idea and started arranging transportation from Bangkok to Phuket on Friday. Everything was in place, so I went down for dinner.
Once at the restaurant then I realized that it was Thanksgiving. Back in the States, we could celebrate with turkey and the whole family. And I was alone by myself.
I woke up very early on Friday morning, at 4:00. My driver and the car were ready for the long journey from Bangkok to Phuket. Mr Phon, the driver, was very happy because his business was good since Tuesday due to the political situation of Thailand. He drove a customer the day before from Bangkok to Siem Reap in Cambodia. And on Staurday, he will take another one from Bangkok to Krabi. His English is OK, not good enough to maintain a long conversation during this 9 hours journey from Bangkok to Phuket. Either he got lost or I got lost after 30 seconds of conversation.
We arrived at Phuket Airport around 2:00 PM and the International terminal was full. Every single queue was long. People just queued up even if they didn’t have ticket hoping that miracle came and they would get a seat.
I was happy with the boarding pass on hand after spending almost 1 hour on the queue. I passed the immigration and saw the announcement on the display board. It wasn’t a good new, my flight was delayed by almost 3 hours. Malaysian Airlines brought in the largest aircraft they could have in hand to get us out of here. That explained the delay.
11/28 – 9:00 PM. I’m still waiting at the airport but with a boarding pass in hand. I want to go home now. I don’t want to miss my daughter grading on Sunday. She will turn 8 in few weeks and she started Karate 3 months ago. I don’t know yet for what was the main reason but she decided to do Karate. She just told me one day “Daddy, I want to go to Karate with Ba-Thy”. Ba-Thy is my elder son and he is black belt karate. I was surprised hearing it. If this is what she wants, then let’s do it. She is wearing a white belt as beginner since August. The grading is scheduled for Sunday. And I don’t want to miss that event.
11/29 – 0:25 AM, I finally land in KLIA. Despite the early announcement that connecting flights in KLIA will wait for incoming passengers from Phuket, it doesn’t happen. I just got my new boarding pass for Singapore at 8:05 AM. In the meantime, we will be transported to hotel nearby. I can see on the electronic board that flights have been arranged to come to U-Tapao Airport.

Phuket Airport on 11/28 at 2:00 PM

Phuket Airport on 11/28 at 3:00 PM

11/29 – 3:00 AM, I got the key for hotel room at the Hotel Empress; about 20 minutes drive from KLIA.
11/29 – 5:30 AM, Wake up call to catch the bus to KLIA
11/29 – 7:05 AM, Gate G4 still not open yet for 8:05 AM flight.
11/29 – 9:05 AM, I landed in Changi Airport.

Ba Thong Phan / Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp

SolidWorks 2008 SP5.0 available for download

This service pack is now available to Subscription Service customers. To download, click here. Or log into the SolidWorks Customer Portal at https://customerportal.solidworks.com and click Download Software and Updates to access the update.

For a listing of SPR’s fixed in this Service Pack, click here..

Quick tip on flattening a screw conveyor flight

I came across this a few years ago when looking to flatten a screw conveyor flight.
I believed it couldn’t be done but here’s how….

Create a sketch on the front plane and place a 100 mm diameter circle on it.
Use this to create your first Helix/Spiral using the Pitch and Revolution option. Select Constant Pitch of say 600mm and 1 clockwise revolution starting at 0 degrees.
Repeat this with the same settings but use a larger diameter circle say 500mm.

Now comes the tip – Create two 3D sketches one for each helix. In the first 3D sketch select the helix and use the convert entities command. This will place a spline in the 3DSketch with an On edge relation to the helix. Repeat converting the second helix in the second 3D Sketch to make a second spline.

The rest is easy
Go to the Insert>Sheet metal>Lofted bends and select the two 3DSketches as the profiles using a thickness of say 6mm.

You flight is now finished and ready to be flattened

Mark Duggan
Intercad Technical Support Mgr

SolidWorks Tools that keep your workstation healthy

Working constantly in support for Intercad I have a few tips that may help if your system is unstable. These are things to look at and good practices that will keep your system healthy.

1. The video card maybe having trouble.
Go the SolidWorks video card testing site https://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/videocardtesting.html This site not only has video cards but systems that have been tested with that card and the video card driver used. The video driver may not be the latest but it has been certified and tested by SolidWorks.

2. Brand named computers are not much more expensive but the time lost when there is a conflict between computer drivers is well worth the extra money compare to white box or DIY machine. Similarly building your own computer to a specification can also have pitfalls. One client found this out when he purchased a cheap power supply which although specified correctly was not up to the job.

3. Use Rx. This tool is definetly underused and has a lot of helpful features.

Two are circled above;
a) Click here to launch SolidWorks in Software OpenGL mode. This lets you start SolidWorks and bypass your graphics cards using the computer processor to produce the image. Very helpful if you suspect crashing due to your graphics card as it will be stable.

b) Click here to launch SolidWorks while bypassing the Tools Options settings. If you have exited the program illegally you may have some corruption of your registry settings. This bypasses your computers registry and uses “Out of the Box” settings. If your instability is resolved using this contact Intercad or your local VAR and they can edit your registry to fix this.

4. Maintenance of your system.
Rx is again the tool you should make use of.

The system maintenance tab.
Notice above that it will clean out not only temporary SolidWorks files but normal temp and internet temp files. You can also see at the bottom circled two really neat features that allow you to select your computer drives and do a check disk and run defragmenter.
Lastly how often and when do I have time you ask?
When selecting Start Maintenance it will ask you whether you want to do this

Now
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
and at what time.

All you need to do is set it and it will do as often as you want when you want even if you aren’t there as long as your machine is on. Rx is the easy way to keep your machine clean and the hard drive clear. Go To Start>All Programs>SolidWorks xxx>SolidWorks Tools> SolidWorks Rx.

More tips later …

Mark Duggan
Intercad Technical Support Mgr

Tired of updating Multiple Workstations at your site?

Tired of updating Multiple Workstations at your site – if you maintain SolidWorks on more than 1 Workstation then you should consider using an Admin Image.
Have you had the situation where multiple users on your site are all downloading and installing service packs separately? Using up valuable bandwidth and productive time – if so then using an admin image is just what you need

An admin image allows you to install on multiple machines concurrently. When the admin image is Service Packed all the clients can be automatically updated – a huge time saver
Creating an admin image is now very easy using the SolidWorks Installation Manager. Gone are the days of needing to create multiple admin images for each add-in product using command line syntax.

The SolidWorks Installation Manager guides you thru the simple process of creating an Admin Image that can contain all the add-ins available including the likes of SolidWorks Simulation & Motion.
A full guide is available on the Customer Portal once you’re logged in take the link for Admin Guides under the references section. Then select the SolidWorks Installation and Administration Guide – once there you can browse to the section on Admin images as shown below right.

Once your image is created you still have the ability to edit options if you have specific requirement for various computers – for example you may need to change serial numbers or add-ins that are being installed.

The SolidWorks Administrative Image Option editor is designed to help you with this – the new 2009 version has been enhanced with additional options as shown below

So I would encourage you start using an Admin Image its well worth the effort and will save you and your staff allot of time…

Linsay Armstrong
Applications Engineer
Intercad Australia/New Zealand

SolidWorks, does ‘works’ just fine sometimes you just need to tweak your workflow a little…

Working on Intercad’s Technical Support team you come across many customers that sometimes just seem to struggle with the performance of their machine(s) and as SolidWorks adds greater value to the product each year this performance appears to go downhill… Not true!

I’d have to say nearly 80% of SolidWorks performance related issues are the blame of an incompatible video card or just the video driver. As SolidWorks is so reliant on the openGL functionality of your video card having the right hardware and configuration is critical, the right hardware or driver can give you either a good or bad experience with CAD software. To aid this SolidWorks produce their own drivers which are available on their website at www.solidworks.com if you have not checked your video driver for updates in the last 6 months please do. The drivers can be filtered on the site by Vendor (please also note that DELL and HP are also listed as cards for these systems are specific to DELL and HP configurations) SolidWorks version and system can also be filtered.

Not only hardware and drivers but your workflow may just need updating…

With each new version of SolidWorks there are many new features, many of which are customer driven enhancements. With these new features the software inevitably becomes larger, this will lead to you more than likely requiring an update yourself! In the past few releases SolidWorks has added many performance enhancements to assist you in getting the most out of you currant system. SolidWorks prides itself in the customer not having to constantly upgrade their hardware, so performance enhancements like SpeedPak, greater functionality in Lightweight mode, and Large Assembly Modes are added to assist you.

In the recent release of SolidWorks 2009 there have been many fantastic performance related enhancements, one of which I have noticed is in the drawing views. As you zoom in and out SolidWorks is adding view detail as you zoom in, this means that when you are just looking at the sheet from a page fit perspective not every little piece of data is loaded into the views leaving greater RAM space. This feature has been added to improve dynamic display speed and generation of drawing views.

The new SpeedPak functionality is brilliant offering you the ability to insert large sub-assemblies into an even larger top level assembly, not only this but all you BOM and annotation features are still available. SpeedPak allows you to generate drawings of large assemblies quicker than ever before. Another fantastic feature of the SpeedPak is you can email only the assembly file and not all the references as all the reference information is added to the file when you generate the SpeedPak.

Other features like “Quick View/Selective Open”, Display States and the ability to load specified drawing sheets have been added in SolidWorks 2009, this giving you the ability to only load 1 or 2 sheets of a large drawing file, maybe just to make a minor adjustment, save as PDF or print.

To summarise the above, SolidWorks has so many great performance enhancing features with every new release that it can be hard to keep track of them all in our little worlds. SolidWorks together with Intercad and other vendors all over the world have put together Innovation Days that you can attend to gain this vital information. So don’t get left behind with this extremely fast paced developing software and get along to one of these events, also take the opportunity to speak with Technical Support staff and SolidWorks affiliates from around the globe!

Don’t get left behind, finding yourself using SolidWorks 2009 with your old 2003 techniques!

Watch this space for more…

Micah Speight
Intercad Pty Limited., www.intercad.com.au
Authorized Solidworks Reseller in Autralia & New Zealand

SolidWorks Enterprise PDM 2009 – New BOM

SolidWorks Enterprise PDM 2009 Pre-release is posted for customers on Customer Portal.

SolidWorks Enterprise PDM is the new name of PDMWorks Enterprise, who was formely named Conisio.

There is one new feature that we like a lot. It’s about Bill of Materials or BOM. Actually, this new feature is a concerto work between SolidWorks and Enterprise PDM. In previous version of SolidWorks, you could only create BOM in drawing. With SolidWorks 2009, you can create your BOM at the assembly level (or Cut List at part level). Later one, you can put that same BOM in SolidWorks drawing and the 2 BOMs are linked (that one is cool as well).

Then, the BOM created in SolidWorks will go to the Vault as soon as you check in the Assembly. That’s a lot of time saving.

Let me explain why.

First of all, you can have your template for BOM in SolidWorks. Therefore, you can build your customized BOM with let’s say “Total Cost” by sum up the cost of each item x number of instances.

And then voila, whatever BOM you want to see in SolidWorks, will show in PDM in the same way.

And now with SW Enterprise PDM 2009, these kinds of BOM can be pushed to ERP via XML format as well.

Ba Thong Phan

PS: Next week, the trafic will be restricted due to the coming F1 race in Singapore. We may have to work from home. I may have more time to blog then. Who will be the first Singapore F1 winner ? Lewis Hamilton or Felipe Massa or Sebastian Vettel ?

By the way, do you think that the Singapore government will force all the F1 cars to install the IU ?

There are several ERP gantries along the track. The more laps you run, the more you pay.

Race starts at 8:00 PM. And they may cut off the ERP at 8:30 PM. Some pilots could wait until 8:30 PM to save cost

Explanation for non-Singaporeans. ERP means Every Roads Pay and not Enterprise Resource Planning. It’s actually a kind of Electronic Toll Road system, just like the EZ-Pass in USA. Good thing is that ERP is not always on. The local government only turns it on when trafic is heavy. It supposes to reduce congestion during rush hour. In reality, it’s somehow true. Congestion just moves from the CBD to Bukit Timah and River Valley.

Are we talking about PDM or ERP ?????

SolidWorks World 2009 website up!

A quick note to announce that the SolidWorks World 2009 website is up! The upcoming biggest 3D CAD event will be held in sunny Orlando, Florida! Don’t miss this great opportunity to meet up with the SolidWorks community. Visit the website.