Acuity Team Blog

2012-01-26T15:10:00.001-08:00

The first maintenance release for NX 8 has been released, 8.0.1, and is available for download from the GTAC ftp site. Highly recommended.

Teamcenter 8.3.3 Released

2011-12-16T14:45:00.000-08:00

Teamcenter 8.3 MP3 (Tc8.3.3) is now available for download from GTAC. This is an overlay to Tc8.3. The 80-page readme is at: http://download.ugs.com/teamcenter/MP/windows/Tc8.3.3_README.pdf
(a Webkey is required).

Patrick Kennedy, www.acuityinc.com

End of Support for Teamcenter 2007.1

2011-12-16T14:42:00.001-08:00

On 11/31/2011 Siemens PLM reached the end of standard support for Teamcenter 2007.1 and it’s MPs. Teamcenter 8.1 is set to expire on 09/30/2013.

Patrick Kennedy, www.acuityinc.com

NX Maintenance Release 7.5.5

2011-12-16T14:41:00.000-08:00

NX Maintenance Release 7.5.5 is now available for download from the Siemens PLM FTP server. (Note: A valid WebKey account is required.)

Patrick Kennedy, www.acuityinc.com

Creating groups of holes in NX

2010-08-10T11:52:00.000-07:00

One of the best overall additions to NX was selection intent. There are various options, including single, connected, inferred (NX best guess, depending on what you are doing at the time), and Feature.

Feature is interesting, because it will feed all relevant entities to the target NX modeling function. This has some nice side effects when it comes to the hole command.

Consider the following common scenario. A part has multiple holes of a given size, and multiple sizes. Normally, the hole command is used from a point, or sketch to define and place a single hole. A very common use case after that is to pattern, or instance that hole feature to various places on the model.

Feature brings the ability to group all like sized holes, of a similar orientation, into one operation without having to use patterns to do it. Irregular patterns of holes can be done, of course, but this can be confusing and or tedious.

An alternative to this is to place points in sketches, with each sketch defining all holes of a given size, and given orientation all in one place! The Part Navigator "rename" function, available on the right mouse menu when a history item is selected, can be used to convey the size for quick reference.

It all works like this: (Shown in NX 7.5, but works in NX 6)

1. Build your sketches, one per orientation and size, containing points, constraints and dimensions to locate the holes.


Many Holes, only three instances of the "Hole" Design Feature!

2. Make sure "Feature Curves" is selected, as shown at right, and select the sketch in the "Hole" design feature command, to generate all the necessary holes at one time.

Repeat as needed for all desired sizes and orientations.

Acuity Lunch and Learn Online Tech Sessions

2010-08-10T10:21:00.000-07:00

Why Lunch 'n Learn? Well, before everything moved to online, we used to regularly show up around lunch time to present technical content. Some food goes a long way. (And we can still do that, for you and your company too, just contact us.)

With trends being what they are, the more common thing is people get online during their lunch hour. We thought having regular, short and informative sessions might work well for people, and that should explain "Lunch and Learn".

First online "Lunch and Learn Session Screen shot.

The first one went well. Really, about the only trouble we had was with content limits. A half hour goes pretty quick when talking fun, new CAD stuff.

NX was the topic this time. I fired up NX 7.5 to do a run down on some of the changes to sketcher, customer default settings people might want to know about, and a few ways to apply both new and old features together

Brian ran through Section Editing using the new Synchronous Technology functions in NX 6.

We are never sure what version to run on things like this. If you have some thoughts, please leave them in the comments below. Recordings of these sessions will be made available in the future.

NX On Mac Test Drive!

2010-08-04T11:38:00.000-07:00

We just had a new iMac arrive in the office. Of course, the very first thing to do with it, after admiring the sleek design, is to find out what running real CAD on a Mac is like!

(the short answer is pretty sweet, read on for the longer one!)

The screen shot to your right shows my spartan Mac desktop. About the only real customization done here was to get the terminal fonts and colors adjusted to my liking. The rest is out of the box NX and OS X Snow Leopard.

Installing NX on Mac was not all that difficult. It took some time to track down a distribution of Open Motif, and a little bit more time to make sure the X Window System was configured with good, NX favorable focus and click through policies. Once those two basic tasks were complete, the actual NX install was a non-event, remarkably similar to how we normally see it done on a PC.

There are a few minor league differences in how the UI looks, and those are due to the options available to applications running with X and Motif. In terms of click for click functionality, there are few to no material differences. If you are a average to dangerous NX user, you will find the operation familiar.

I did find the Mac mouse ballistics somewhat different than what I am used to on a PC. Some time spent fiddling around with the Apple mouse control widget fixed that quickly and easily.

There are some functional differences. I believe this is due to library code not being avaliable on the Mac platform. I've not loaded this release on Linux (I will soon), however I suspect the same overall limitations are in place there as well. The Mac, after all, is Unix.

Placing True Type Text in a sketch does not appear to be available, nor does NX Human, and the ability to open Solidworks parts right from the "File, Open..." menu. For this reason, I strongly recommend a floating license configuration, so that a PC can be used in a pinch, if these things are needed.

The one other difference I noted involves Excel integration. We don't have Excel on Linux, which uses the old xess spreadsheet instead. On Mac, Microsoft Excel is available, but to use it with NX, you need to be running Office for Mac 2004 or earlier. The reason for this is Microsoft has removed the core VBA / OLE functionality on the Mac platform on current Office for Mac software releases. The good news here is Office is mature, and anyone with a license can downgrade for this purpose.

I found the overall compute and memory usage on par with the standard expectations in place on a PC. 2GB or more RAM is highly recommended, particularly if the various Apple OS tools and some other applications are running when NX does. 1GB RAM is enough to run the software nicely for small to moderate models, if other application use is kept to a minimum.

All in all, this is a very solid, serious CAD on Mac release! I'm looking forward to a more extended test drive in the near future, and will post my findings here.

Welcome! (and rules of the road)

2010-07-28T11:28:00.000-07:00

The screen capture at right, is a flask drawn and sectioned in NX. It's there because I wanted to have a picture up, just to see how the simple Blogger formatting worked.

The next post, a NX on Mac test drive, preview will have a real screen shot, and commentary related to it.

For now, consider this the Acuity Blog, "hello world", and know there will be more to come!

Comments are enabled and encouraged on this blog. We really enjoy all things related to CAD, PDM, PLM software and the product design and manufacturing process.

Please refrain from contributing negative or inflammatory comments. We welcome strong opinion, and especially welcome informative comments, because that is where the fun is!

Any and all feedback can optionally be sent to info@acuityinc.com. Thanks, and enjoy the blog!