Managing team's CAD work.

[RollingCamel]

While we tried our best to keep all models up to date but even working very closely to a team mate we ended up having some chassis revision different.

It was hard work because we had to upload on shared folder accounts. And at the end assemblies were quite large especially with the slow DSL speeds we have here.

I'm looking into Solidworks Workgroup PDM, but I'd like to know about your experience.

[coastertrav]

We have always used dropbox.

[RollingCamel]

While we didn't, the new team is planning on using dropbox. A merger between PDM and dropbox would be heaven.

[RobbyObby]

We use a teamwide external hard drive that all the team leads have access to. Works great.

I have thought about using Dropbox for our team (I personally use it and love it) but unless you pay for an account the max alotted data is only 2GB and once you start uploading complex parts and assemblies its really easy to max that out.

[RollingCamel]

Anyone thought of renting a virtual private server (vps) and running PDM on it?

Another problem is that we don't work together, everyone works in his house because we don't have a place to work in together and waiting too meet is not time efficient.

[Dash]

We use dropbox, and while its a thousand times better than trying to put all the files onto one computer, we end up with the dreaded " conflicted copy " fairly often. We have hence broken the car down into several sections, and each section has its own sub-assembly that is then taken into a final assembly. This lets the section leads work on their own parts without messing up a final assembly, but at the same time the sections can see how their stuff fits into the final package. this has worked fairly well so far.

[Ben K]

We use dropbox as well. We made all our members sign up for accounts, so we have 10 gb of space. Pretty much perfect and we can then share folders to specific team members. Low-tech PDM.

[Mazur]

PDM is definitely the way to go. It creates a revision of an assembly/part after each check in and you can give read-only access to particular files for members you don't want mistakingly messing stuff up.

Now after saying that, the new sponsored SolidWorks Student Edition software doesn't seem to give us PDM. Why the hell not! It makes no sense to me whatsoever.

[RollingCamel]

Originally posted by Mazur:
PDM is definitely the way to go. It creates a revision of an assembly/part after each check in and you can give read-only access to particular files for members you don't want mistakingly messing stuff up.

Now after saying that, the new sponsored SolidWorks Student Edition software doesn't seem to give us PDM. Why the hell not! It makes no sense to me whatsoever.

I think they need a mini-me version of PDM for educational teams. Needing a server is quite inconvenient for non-permanent establishments, a cloud based solution is a way better option.

I'm still running on 2009. Removing it from 2010 is really stupid. If teams don't use it that much, it still has potential.

[edit]

Googleing a bit, it seems that Solidworks is planning a Mini-me version of PDM called Solidworks Connect for early 2011. It is for small companies and teams.

h t t p : //blogs.solidworks.com/solidworksblog/2010/10/an-update-on-some-things-we-announced-at-solidworks-world-2010.html

[JasperC]

In the past, we used a server with a large hard drive where every team member saved their drawings. They would make the CAD assembly for their component and position this w.r.t. the car's coordinate system.

The department leaders would then assemble all these CAD assemblies into an assembly for their department, and in the end the Chief Engineer would assembly these department assemblies into one assembly, the car.

We always let the team members save their drawings as a new file whenever they made a change, so that the department leaders forcedly had to look at these changes in order to put the department assembly together; this is to filter out any possible design errors. Filenames had to be structured, like 'DUT09.Suspension.Innerwheels front.Upright.17.CATpart', 17 being the version number for that file.

Once every team member had their part correctly aligned w.r.t. to the coordinate system, the parts would "always" automatically appear where it belongs in the car assembly, not requiring any work from the department leaders or the chief engineer (all they needed to do was put the coordinate systems of all the assemblies on top of each other).

However, surprise surprise, some team members make mistakes with the positioning and so in practice the department leaders still had a lot of work aligning everything properly. And, even a bigger surprise, some team members would still save their parts as 'Part1.CATpart' which is a pain in the ass if you need to trace back a certain part in the CAD assembly.


So last year we moved to a different system, an SVN drive (check Wikipedia for Subversion software; we use the open source program TortoiseSVN). One of our team members runs an online server where all CAD files are saved. At any time, they can upload their work and download the updates for all other parts on the car. Everyone can continuously check the status of the car assembly. Everyone still has to position their own part, but the position can now be checked continuously in the context of the car, so this becomes a lot easier.

You can define a set of rules for uploading, so files named 'Part1.CATpart' are automatically rejected, team members are forced to name their files properly. They are also forced to enter a comment when they upload something, so they include a short summary of what they have changed.

You don't have to care about version numbering anymore as you can always revert to a previously uploaded version of the file. So you automatically keep backups while always saving your files at the same location, with the same name.

Finally you can give every user the restriction to upload changes only in the directory that they have access to, so a suspension engineer will not be able to accidentally change the position of the engine (which, in Catia anyway, was quite possible in our old system...).

One downside is that the department leaders and the chief engineer are no longer forced to check every new version of a CAD file. So it is their responsibility to do this regularly. But you can have the system send e-mail notifications to the administrator's whenever something is changed, so they are alerted every time.


All in all, I think this SVN thing is quite brilliant and I can strongly recommend it to every team.

Best regards,

Jasper Coosemans
DUT Racing Team 2008-2010
Delft University of Technology

[Wetmelon]

I know our team is using the SolidWorks PDM software. The managers are being very strict about naming conventions, and if something isn't in the right place it gets deleted and you do it again. Also we only have one person checking a part out at any one time, so it's hard to get revision errors.

They're really doing a good job of it this year, from what I can tell.

[Wetmelon]

Originally posted by Wetmelon:
I know our team is using the SolidWorks PDM software. The managers are being very strict about naming conventions, and if something isn't in the right place it gets deleted and you do it again. We've got the check-in/out going nicely, so we might actually have a proper 100% clean CAD file for the first time http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif

They're really doing a good job of it this year, from what I can tell.

[AAce]

We switched to SolidWorks PDM this year and it's great. Once the whole car gets in there you need a decent internet connection (no spotty wifi) to get the new stuff. It runs off a personal computer in one of our member's apartments.

We used to have one person tend the full car CAD and this is infinitely better. It was always a pain designing without the confidence that the CAD on your drive matched everyone else's.

Recommendation: back up the PDM server regularly. Though the designer's should all have updated copies, if your server crashes it's easier to back up from one location than random laptops. (Yes, this happened to us)

[RollingCamel]

With 512Kb connections most have here would it be too slow to be beneficial?

[Jersey Tom]

Originally posted by Wetmelon:
The managers are being very strict about naming conventions, and if something isn't in the right place it gets deleted and you do it again.

I like this. Should have taken that approach when I was in school.

Might have reduced the use of naming conventions like:
"tHE GOODS.sldasm"
"Big ass CAD model.sldasm"

Or going into a folder to find...
"upright v3.sldprt"
"upright v4 final.sldprt"
"upright v4 final for real.sldprt"
"upright v5.sldprt"

Can't make this stuff up...

Edit - Now that I took a quick look at the Solidworks Enterprise PDM video - that totally looks like the way to go. Revision history with comments, a design approval workflow.. good stuff.

[HenningO]

To further prepare yourselves for the life as a "professional mechanical engineer" make a point of using a PDM system.

[AAce]

512k will probably be sufficient as long as it's reliable. The big pain comes when it's an intermittent connection. You'll still probably need some patience though.

[RollingCamel]

Oh bugger...!

I've been asked into looking into proposing a part numbering system for our company.

[wagemd]

We have had a team server on campus (AC and Gigabit) running an FTP service and that's worked fairly well.

[RollingCamel]

My company is running a server which is quite good along with sync, which rarely works and screws things up. However, although we are a very small company yet the IT is so incompetent using 100 Mb/s lan and connecting the server through the router not directly to the network.

[M. Nader]

We use Dropbox (didnot look into PDM till lately), but still we don't have enough space on it so are usually sending each other updates via mails or other uploads. Tried the numbering system but still there was "final brakes" followed by "final brakes v2" http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif

the problem i am currently having is that Solidoworks is REALLY slow on my laptop and is killing me in the assembly, after assembling the wheels in an assembly file and making several sub assemblies compromising each sub team/assembly (e.g suspension, brakes, engine,,,etc) putting the whole thing together has been a nightmare with several errors coming up and several redesigns being made.

The real problem/pain is actually with the program itself, after putting in so much components suddenly things start going wrong for no apparent reason, if i mirror a component and is perfectly made i restart the program the following day and it is out of position for example. the Chassis-suspension welded mounts has been a nightmare of course but my main issue is that the program is VERY SLOW, keeps destroying my mates for no apparent reason and is quite tough to handle, so is anyone facing these problems or is it just me?

now i am actually putting things were they should be with very few mates and the rest is taken by measuring, rotating and moving the components to avoid errors, but needless to say things are looking quite messy and i would really like to mate things the correct way at least to have a decent design report and assembly drawings.

P.S my laptop has an i5 processor and a decent enough video card so if it is the problem i guess i will have to buy a fast server at the university labs!!

[Thrainer]

I would contact the local SolidWorks distributor and ask for a training workshop, or even a PDM. If they're not interested, you could ask Autodesk and others. Many CAD companies are supporting FSAE teams and universities, because they are their future customers.
SolidWorks runs assemblies with thousand of parts, but performance depends a lot on how exactly you do the mating etc.

Regards
Thomas

[kcapitano]

I run solidworks PDM on my laptop, and while it is slow, it's still usable. One way to avoid assembly errors is to fix all components in your assemblies and delete the mates. Deleting mates should stop you from having rebuild errors and will speed up your CAD. You can also try turning off all the fancy graphics and running in "large assembly mode" if you haven't tried that already.

As for the PDM, solidworks has been very good to our team about providing the software and helping us get it running.

[M. Nader]

thanks, Solidworks did give us the program actually and they were quite helpful with us. I am already working in large assembly mode and shaded view to reduce graphics requirements, yet i am still getting a very slow performance and a huge number of rebuild errors (some mates actually go off if you try to move a part and then there is a rebuild error!!). I have given up on mating parts and gone off to get dimensions and mounting points from CAD design models (e.g OptimumK) and adjust each part manually in the SW assembly (a very painful process i might add).

[RollingCamel]

One good option we didn't use was "pack and go"

Be sure to use when passing assemblies to each others.

PS. The server shouldn't be doing any render/processing work...

[M. Nader]

Originally posted by RollingCamel:
One good option we didn't use was "pack and go"

Be sure to use when passing assemblies to each others.

PS. The server shouldn't be doing any render/processing work...

Yeah that helps immensely, it reduced my files (which include multiple versions) from 1.5 gb (LOTS OF MODEL UPDATES) to just 150mb which only includes the parts used in the assembly so it is quite handy we always use it when transferring large assemblies just to put the needed things together in one place.