Jeff's Tool Shed

Next Thursday, yours truly will be presenting at the NEWSUG Conference in Westford, MA. My presentation is going to be on COSMOSXpress and DriveWorksXpress and I figured they’d make a good post as well.

Did you know that they both come in every seat of SolidWorks? Yup, you get a first-pass analysis tool and a bit of KBE software for free! Granted, they’re both limited to parts, but, c’mon, what’d you expect? They’re free for Pete’s sake! They do have a wizard interface to help walk you through their individual setups.

Now, just because they’re "limited" to parts doesn’t mean you can’t use them on assemblies, you just need to finesse them a bit. Now this doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to necessarily run them on an assembly of an excavator, but perhaps on one of the cylinders.

Take COSMOSXpress for instance. Let’s say you have the above mentioned cylinder and you want to run a quick stress analysis on it. How about using the ‘Join’ command and then running your analysis? Remember, this is a base product, you don’t want to be basing your final assembly solely on the data collected from COSMOSXpress.

Then there’s DriveWorksXpress. While it is a bit more versatile than COSMOSXpress, it is still limited. This doesn’t mean you can’t create an easily configurable assembly, it just needs to be on a small scale. You’ll still be able to create a new part/assembly/drawing(s) from the original. Throw in an equation here and there and you can squeeze a bit more out.

Both of these Xpress tools are, in my opinion, ‘Gateway Drugs’. They’re just going to leave you wanting more. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I’m just saying…

For those of you going to the NESWUG conference next week, I promise my presentation will be a lot more exciting than this post (knock on wood). For those of you not going, talk to your VAR, or just get in there and try them out.

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