Introducing Ken Rose, a long time friend and coworker.

It has been a while since I have done this and I am selective on who's resume I post on this site. Ken Rose has recently become victim of this poor economy. It saddens me when very talented people lose their job due to things such as the economy.

Ken and I worked together at INCAT for quite a while, where I quickly learned of Ken's skills and great personality. Ken is very easy to get along with and I would recommend him for my team any day of the week. You can find his resume here.

Now for a little of Ken's background. Ken worked as an engineer for four years using the Autodesk products that we supported while at INCAT. After moving out of engineering into consulting with INCAT he was able to put his engineering skills to great use as a post sales consultant. Ken also performed many pre-sales actions at INCAT and did very well at it. Ken helped INCAT to win some very large Data Management projects while he was there. After INCAT Ken moved to another reseller where he further honed his skills.

Ken is both a great coworker and a great friend. If anyone has any questions regarding Ken or would like a reference I will personally be one of his references.

Thanks

File Naming Schemes in Vault Workgroup, Collaboration and Manufacturing

I posted a few weeks back about the Vault product line to introduce the 4 different products that make up Autodesk Data Management. Today's post is on the Automatic File Naming in 3 of the 4 products. The products that have this feature are:

Vault Workgroup
Vault Collaboration
Vault Manufacturing

Automatic File Numbering
This is one of the first things I looked at because in a past career I helped to design an auto file naming tool so I wanted to see how this compared. So that I don't confuse anyone I won't talk about the other tool, only what's included with the application.

Numbering Schemes
You can define numbering schemes to help you automate the file naming process. For example you might have several different styles of naming for your Inventor files. For example you have a part numbering convention for weldments and one for standard make details. Possibly you have two different divisions of the organization that have recently merged, that previously had their own numbering conventions.

Defining a numbering scheme is really easy. The hardest part is understanding your organizations numbering scheme. In order to create or edit a Numbering Scheme you will need to log into the Vault product of your choice (those listed above). After logging in, you will choose Tools then Administration. After the Administration dialog box appears you will choose the Define button for Numbering Schemes.

After the Numbering Schemes dialog appears you will see an image like this:













As you can see I have two numbering conventions created, both are set to active, and one is set to default. The very cool things is it works with Inventor. When you click save (if you are logged into the vault through Inventor) the naming tool is activated. If you click Skip it allows you to change the file name (For R&D or concept parts). If you have two naming schemes it displays the default first and any other one under a drop down list. This provides for easy access to multiple numbering conventions. In a later post I will discuss how to configure these naming conventions but for now let's look at how they look.


In the image below the highlited area shows the drop down list. The "Number" field under the Scheme is displayed based off of the selected scheme.










In this image you see I have selected the "Weldment" numbernig scheme and I am getting a
different number generated.









As mentioned earlier, I will be posting more on this subject in the next blog post.

Autodesk University Tech Talk

Recently I submitted an article to Autodesk University to be part of the Quarterly Tech Talk that they have been doing. It was published and you can read it here. You can read other articles on the manufacturing products here.

Vegas Baby...

I got accepted to present 2 classes this year at Autodesk University. Stay tuned for more details.

Location vs. Installation Codes

Overview
Over the years I have implemented AutoCAD Electrical into a fairly large amount of clients ranging in different industries. During this time one thing that seemed to always be slightly confusing to some people is installation and location codes within AutoCAD Electrical. This article hopes to clear some of this up.

Installation and location codes, both serve a common purpose. This purpose is giving the user the ability to “Filter” during certain project wide processes based on these codes. For example let’s say you were to perform a Bill of Materials report but you did not want a report of all of the components that are in your project.

What type of “Filtering” are we talking about here? Let’s consider this; we have a main control panel, junction box and 3 push button stations. 2 of our push button stations are complete and ready for release while the rest of the panels are about 1 week away from completion. If we assign certain values into the location and installation codes, now we can run our BOM on specifically PB Stations 1 & 3 which is complete. This would also make it very easy to complete station specific BOM’s and put them right on the same drawing as the panel layout.

What we have to remember is that these are filters that we can use that are at the component level. We would not want to use something high level like STA 400 which would be everything in the project. There are another set of filters I will talk about in a future post that would be a great fit for high level filtering. Look at the following examples and descriptions of location and installation codes.

Location Codes
One way to think about this, based on how many other companies are doing it, is to consider where the device is physically located. For example we may be labeling a Limit Switch which would not physically be located in the panel, but instead it would be located maybe on the Conveyor. Our location code might be something like this:

(CONV-5) This might be the nomenclature our company came up with to specify that it is located on a section of conveyor in the system and that section is 5.

Installation Codes
Let’s think about Installation codes as where the device terminates to. For example let’s consider our Limit Switch from the Location Code example. It is physically located on the conveyor section 5 (CONV-5). Now those wires terminate back in a junction box somewhere else on the line. That junction box might be named J-BOX 5, meaning it is a Junction Box and it is the 5th one. Now through several different reports and other tasks we know by looking at our 2D Schematics exactly where to find the physical device, and the terminating wire.

This can also be very useful in From/To type reports.

I hope this helps, if you have any questions please feel free to email me at Robert.stein@zephyrtechnologies.com

Are you forgetting to order components for your electrical design?

Back when I used to talk to client's about AutoCAD Electrical on a regular basis I always asked this question. Are you forgetting to order components in your electrical / controls designs? The answer would be something along these lines:

• "Isn't that what field BOM's are for?"
• "On every job, it cost's us time and makes us late on delivery at times."

Those were the answers I wanted to hear because it gave me yet another tool in AutoCAD Electrical to talk about that can help them. Actually there are two tools and we will discuss them both.

Missing Catalog Data

Located on the Reports Tab of the Ribbon, then on the Schematic panel this tool will put a graphical "diamond" around any component that does not have a catalog entry assigned to it. See images below.

Missing BOM Report

Located on the Reports Tab, Schematic Panel under Reports the "Missing Bill of Material" report will do just that, it will give you a report specificaly on all schematic components that have not been assigned a Catalog Number.

I hope this help. if you have any questions feel free to email me at robert.stein@zephyrtechnologies.com

Another iLogic use

In previous posts I showed how to use iLogic rules to change your model based off of selections. Yesterday on my way home I got to thinking why can't I use it to force the model to stay exactly how I want it without any options. In the video below I show how to create a new rule using the "Add Rule" command, then I use the "Capture Current State" which grabs the state of the model parameters. I add a simple message box in to tell the user that they can't change any of the existing parameters and BAM, I'm done. Check out the video and I will make the file available for download.



As a recap, I am enforcing the model to be one size and shape, keep in mind that with this example the user can add new features. The user just can't modify existing features. You can download the file here.