Chapter 18: Using DriveWorks Xpress
In This Chapter
Introducing DriveWorks Xpress Automating Design with DriveWorks Xpress Discovering what you can do with DriveWorks Xpress
DriveWorks Xpress — DWX for short — is rules-based design automation software that is aimed at engineered-to-order businesses. The version you find in SolidWorks 2011 is free and available with all levels of SolidWorks. It enables you to drive the creation of variations of parts, assemblies, and drawings based on rules attached to a simple form that you fill out. SolidWorks 2011 contains a new version of DWX, where the interface resides mainly in the Task Pane.
The basic workflow with DWX is as follows:
1. Understand the various factors that drive the design of a product.
2. Reduce the factors and the potential values to a form with questions requiring responses selected from a list, or that are numerical.
3. Create a model parametrically driven by dimensions linked to the form.
4. Make sure that assemblies, parts, and drawings all update properly in response to data from the form.
5. Run the project, fill out the form, and watch the assembly, parts, and drawings update.
The results of using DWX are very familiar – the ability to make many versions of an assembly. When you first use DWX, it just looks like a nice interface on a design table. While these do describe some of what DWX does, they don't describe all of it. DWX does not work by using configurations. Every time you run a DWX job, it makes new copies ...
