Dedicated Registered AutoCAD Workers
Users Group - Fort Wayne, IN area

2004 Meeting Highlights

January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September | October | November | December

Previous Years Highlights
2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000

2005 Highlights

December

Due to conflicts and schedules, December's meeting was cancelled.

November

We cancelled our November meeting due to scheduling problems.

October

What a great meeting again. Ed showed TransMagic. This is a translation package used to get CAD drawings and models from one software to another.

He and Allen then went through some basics of Inventor including some uses of work points, polar dimensions, etc.

As the topic came up, we also looked at polar and radial dimensions in AutoCAD. All in all a great time.
 

September

September's meeting was held at Industrial Technologies hosted by Ed Rose. Ed presented some tips on AutoCAD and showed how to access some of the tutorials, tips, etc. from the Autodesk website and from the subscription pages. Give them a try. There is lots of good stuff in there.

Allen Gager, of Flare Inc., continued his series of short Inventor lessons, we are calling Baby Steps in Inventor. The bird houses got dimensions and views this month. Inventor is so cool!  Thanks Allen.

CADOPOLIS once again came through with goodies for the group all of which were big hits. The give away software for the month was a product called SmartNotes.

August

August's meeting was held at Industrial Technologies hosted by Ed Rose. While there were only eight members and one visitor in attendance we had a good meeting with some great information. Ed shared some on using layers and showed that to add new layers etc. one needs to right click inside the dialog box. He also showed us a quick look at plotting in 2005. Some of the settings are a bit different here. There is a single dialog box with a flyout on the right side instead of the old two pane dialog box. Just know that will save you much frustration.

Ed also showed how the FEA in Inventor Pro works. It is pretty impressive. The FEA package is one of the mid line products by ANSYS. The interface seems much improved and the reports that were generated were pretty impressive.

Allen Gager, of Flare Inc., continued his series of short Inventor lessons, we are calling Baby Steps in Inventor. This has been a great topic and though we intended each lesson to be only 12-20 minutes they have been lasting over an hour. We revisited the project files setup, modified some of the parts and assembly made last month of the bird house and then added a sheet metal roof in a couple of different ways to show some of the sheet metal features. Thanks Allen, this is a great topic.

We also continued talking on the topic of taking a trip to Novi, MI to tour the Autodesk facility there for a future DRAW meeting.

CADOPOLIS once again came through with goodies for the group all of which were big hits. The give away software for the month was a product called SmartNotes.

CADAddon also gave us five copies of the their AutoXlsTable 2.5 software to place Excel spreadsheets into AutoCAD. Thanks guys!

July

Ed Rose gave us quick look at what is in Inventor Series 9 and AutoCAD 2005 products.

Ned Scholer of Proficient CAD did an outstanding job on updating menus and a look at slide menus. He mentioned a utility that helps w/ the AutoCAD picks such that you pick on the down click rather than the upclick. The information about the toolbar locking and button picking utility can be found at www.manusoft.com. Click on the link to download QuikPik. Once it is installed you will see a "blue Q" button on the right side of AutoCAD's status bar. You can pick this button to configure QuikPik's settings or see the QuikPik tab that is added to AutoCAD's options dialog.

Ned also sent me an e-mail following the meeting with some additional information regarding the menus and a bit of programming. Thanks again Ned.

There is something that would have been worth mentioning in regards to coding file paths into menu files. With a little lisp written into the menu macros you could easily make it so that path changes could be made in only one place. As an example, here is a line from the menu we saw last evening. It inserted a block named DIODE.

[Diode]^C^C^P-insert;diode;\1.0;1.0;\

Instead of just entering the name of the block to insert as shown above, use lisp to string concatenate a path variable to the block name. Like this.

[Diode]^C^C^P-insert;(strcat sympath "diode");\1.0;1.0;\

The expression (strcat sympath "diode") will concatenate, or put together, the piece of text and the variable that's assigned the path text.
If I use the expression (strcat "Star " "Gate") it returns one text string "Star Gate".
Likewise if I set a variable to a string, like (setq fname "Ned").
I can then use the expression (strcat fname " Scholer") to return "Ned Scholer" as one piece of text.

So in the macro above how do I set the variable; sympath? Well, every time AutoCAD loads a menu it looks for a MNL file of the same name as the menu. If you create a file named MyMenu.mnl and place it into the same folder as the menu MyMenu.mns, AutoCAD will load and execute anything in MyMenu.mnl. In the MyMenu.mnl file you simply need to add the following text on a line by itself:

(setq sympath "C:\\My Symbol Path\\")

If the menu is used on a different system or by someone else the path can be changed by simply changing the one line in the MNL file.

I know this explanation may be long winded thereby making this seem difficult, but its really not. You only have to do two things.
1. Add (strcat sympath "blockname") to the macro.
2. Add (setq sympath "C:\\Somewhere\\") to the mnl file.

Maybe this will come in handy sometime.

Ed Rose did a review review on toolbars (slide menu like toolbar). Ed presented this a few months ago when we were at Homestead High School, but we thought we'd let him review the material to compare it to the slide menus that Ned will demonstrate.

Allen Gager of Flare Inc. started a new series of short Inventor lessons. This month we started by building a birdhouse showing simple part, adaptive part, and assembly modeling. If  you are interested in the settings that Allen used to set up the projects we have placed them in this Word doc file.

Byron demoed the package called Check-n-Get which allows you to check and organize Internet links. It will also allow you to synchronize links between several different browsers.

Allen mentioned a registry cleaner that he has had great luck with called AATools Registry Cleaner.

All in all it was a great meeting that left everyone taking something home.

Once again to CADOPOLIS.COM for the demo, handouts, and door prizes!

June

I want to thank those who came to the DRAW meeting in June. We had a decent turnout, though not huge. More pizza, beer and sodas for the rest of us!

Vic from IT started the meeting by giving us a demo of EdgeCAM software. Impressive what they can machine these days.

Great stuff. We had a lot of fun looking at the selection options w/i AutoCAD. For those that missed it, look into the qselect, wp, and wc command. Oh by the way folks, I did miss one that I had on my list. SINGLE. Using the single option you only get to pick one item (noun) and the action (verb) gets enacted immediately. Could be really cool used in macros.

As a recap we looked at select, last, add, remove, undo, single, multiple, window, crossing, box, auto, window polygon, crossing polygon, fence, groups, all, class, ?, 'filter, qselect, pickfirst, noun/verb, and shift to add. What a chunk for a quick refresher on selection, eh? Hope you all found it usefel.

We also had Larry Goodwin with us from the Novi office of Autodesk. Larry, tagging with Ed, showed us some of the what's coming items in Inventor 9. That looks like it will be totally awesome folks. And it works better with AutoCAD than any other CAD software out there!

Lastly, thanks again to Ed and Industrial Technologies for hosting our meeting and for the CD's containing a lot of helpful programs. So how many "ads" are you processing in the background?

May

This meeting was wall attended. Thanks to CADOPOLIS we had some great door prizes to give away. Topics included a look at AutoCAD 2005 and using analysis tools in Mechanical Desktop.

April

There was no April meeting as the members were encouraged to attend the SME Tool Show that evening.

March

Homestead High School hosted our March meeting and it was quite impressive. The kids gave a solid presentation on their high mileage car and the work that they put into it. Kudos guys.

Our second topic of the evening was Kurt Boller of Bronze Bow Software discussing security issues. Kurt talked about firewalls, settings, wireless connections, backups, etc. It was a really informative night. Thanks again Kurt for a splendid job.

February

February's meeting was on attribute extraction and sending data to Excel. We used the EATTEXT command and looked at it's options. We also looked at using AutoCAD Mechanical's BOM possibilities.

January

Our first DRAW meeting of 2004 was held at Homestead High School. The students were to present their projects they designed using Inventor. Unfortunately they had some schedule conflicts that made that impossible. Ed Rose did bring some interesting topics for us on AutoCAD Mechanical and straight AutoCAD. The AutoCAD portion was on the power toolbars. He showed how to customize and use these great block selection aids.

Remember that this is a great time to upgrade to AutoCAD Mechanical if you are using standard AutoCAD and you do mechanical drafting.

Next months meeting schedule