Initial Thoughts on DriveWorksXpress

Thoughts on DriveWorksXpress
Although this is obviously a very powerful and useful tool as evidenced from all the demos and videos floating around on the WWW I have found some issues.

1. You can never find a tutorial or demo that does exactly what you are wishing to do. (Like how would anyone know what I want to do anyway?)
2. All the tutorials and examples that I’ve seen start at the DriveWorksXpress use. You really and truly need to be thinking DriveWorksXpress when designing the parts initially.
3. You can’t teach the logic of DriveWorksXpress in a tutorial. If you don’t have a grasp on the logic of what you are trying to do you will never get it to work. This is not a fault of the program but rather a fault in my brain.

I spent a total of 5 hours over the weekend trying to make a DriveWorks database to drive a metal cabinet design that we have. At some point yesterday I finally admitted defeat to myself. Please understand that the program does exactly what it is suppose to do and does it well. But from my experience I’ve learned a few things that will help me in the future. Oh and BTW when I say that I ‘admitted defeat’ it doesn’t mean that I’m giving up, it only means that I think I need to start the process of using DriveWorks earlier in the design cycle.

What I’ve learned:
1. You can take an existing design that you did over a year ago and build a DesignWorksXpress database around it. But be forewarned you better have a complete understanding of how your design works (no pun) and interacts with other parts in the assembly. This is where I am with my cabinet project.
2. Limit or eliminate arrays of features with dimensions that need to be driven. I had several arrays with only 3 elements in them. While I’m sure that DriveWorks could deal with them it’s one more dimension rule you will have to create. I’ve found that using ‘linked’ dimensions within the sketch to make multiple features works better.
3. In my original design I did a lot of in-context part creation in the assembly. This seems to cause problems. If trying to use DriveWorks on an existing assembly you might want to go back and break all the references making sure to track down any other parts that might reference the part you just broke the references to. This includes mates in the top level assembly.
4. Your directory where the assembly resides is going to get very cluttered with the new parts and assemblies you create. Make a copy of your directory before each ‘test’ run of DriveWorks. I used Pack and Go to make a flattened copy of all the components within the assembly.

Please understand that I don’t mean this to sound like I’m putting the product down. Heck I even know that eventually I could get this to work on the mentioned cabinet assembly. But I also know that if I had of stopped 3 days ago and went back and redid the cabinet with the intention of using DriveWorks I would have been ahead of the game.

Expect additional posts on this subject and eventually a working DriveWorksXpress assembly.