When you purchased SolidWorks you might not have realized that you received a free version of DriveWorks. DriveWorksXpress comes with every license of SolidWorks. In this blog, I am going to show you how to start using it and how to automate your modeling process.
The first step is turn it on, by clicking on the DriveWorks Express button on the ribbon bar under the Evaluate tab in SolidWorks.
Once DriveWorks Express is loaded you need to choose where DriveWorks Express will save the program. It will create a .mbd (database) file. Name the file what you would like, and then click Open.
Before you can begin capturing your model, you need to tell DriveWorks Express where to find your saved model.
Now it is time to start capturing your model.
In the screen shot below the length dimension and the inside/outside diameter dimension have been captured. To capture a dimension double click on the dimensions one at a time, and click OK in the DriveWorks Express box.
Best practice for dimensioning a model that you want to drive in DriveWorks Express is to change the default dimension names (d1, d2, d3) to names that are more meaningful.
Then, press the next button to start designing your form. In this example, I have made three numerical boxes for the form.
Once the form is created, press the next button to start creating your rules.
To create a rule, double click on each of the captured dimensions and link them to the inputs that were created on the form. You will also have to create a rule that will change the name of the model every time you run it.
Once the rules are created, you are ready to test out your project.
To test the project, you need to fill out the form that has been created and click build. A new model is created based off the original model that was created.
There are some great practice exercises at http://www.driveworksxpress.com/index.php/training
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