Assembly Regeneration Time List?

[royaltrude]

I am trying to figure out if there is either a utility or tool in solidworks 2006 that will help me hunt down an offending (poorly modeled) assembly or component that is hurting the top level's regeneration time. There is such a tool for features on the part level (Tools-Feature Statistics)
But the so called assembly statistics is less than helpful- just gives totals for the number of parts/unique parts etc... within the assembly.

Anyone have a utility or tip on this? It would be GREATLY appreciated.

I am trying to track down areas where models can be improved from what was left to us by an x employee and there are TONS of parts and assemblies... I would like to speed up the ones that need it, but identifying them is a bit of a problem.

Thanks...

 

[DesignerGuy16]

I don't know of one offhand that will take an assembly and show the regen time of each component seperately, but it shouldn't be too bad to start looking at the most complex parts first and narrowing your field down from there.

Try hiding/suppressing components to narrow it down. Also check the complexity of any patterned components, as that can bog down the works very quickly.

I know your pain though. My work has been using SW since about '96, and it's like they didn't have any direction, or even templates on setting everone up until I hired on over a year ago. It's a painful long process. Probably best to take it a part/assembly at a time as you actually use them. Be thorough and methodical about fixing them and eventually all of the work you deal with going forward will steadily improve. You might find a common theme with the parts as well. And that common theme if it's anything like here, is it's easier to remodel & redetail them correctly than trying to patch a garbage model.

James Spisich
Design Engineer, CSWP

 

[smcadman]

Statistics used to work on assemblies in 2006 and I believe 2007 but for some reason it doesn't work in 2008. Some assemblies were very slow to rebuild and it was because I didn't have the little checkbox on patterns "Pattern seed only" checked. Using statistics in an assembly would tell me that I had 2,502 parts instead of 101 parts.

There is a benchmark that has a ship in a bottle and a macro is run that tells you how long it took to rebuild a file x-number of times. This macro runs on ANY part or assembly, not just the ship in a bottle part. After the rebuild you get a pop-up that tells you the time for the rebuilds. For example, here is my rebuild time for 50 rebuilds:

http://www.paul-flores.com/solidworks_screenshots/ship_time.jpg

By seeing how long a model takes to rebuild, you can see which one takes the longest and therefore the one that is slowing you down.

Maybe this macro could be modified to do the following:
1: default to 1 rebuild instead of asking for how many.
2: In a top-level assembly, go through the tree and rebuild each assembly/top level part and then post how long they took.

ship in a bottle macro, third one down:

http://www.mikejwilson.com/solidworks/solidworks_files-03.htm

Flores

 

[royaltrude]

Thank you smcadman, that seems to be pretty close to what I wanted. Now I just need to learn how to edit the macro so I can open the top level assembly and have it step through each subassembly and generate a report containing regen times for each of the subs. If I can figure that out, life will be good! I am fluent in VBA for excel and any of the office software... hoping this won't be a huge leap from that. Thanks so much!

Jspisich, my problem is that I have people using the Top Level Assembly all the time, especially in drawings as the product is nearly complete... however we are losing a ton of productivity to the slow regeneration of the whole assembly... and often lightweight is not an option for what we are trying to do. I basically need to have ALL the parts and assemblies streamlined as of last month... thanks and sooo glad to know I am not the only one facing such interesting modeling practices as ignoring templates and suppressing excess mates...

Anywhere you would suggest to learn how to write the macros for solidworks?

Thanks

 

[DesignerGuy16]

I'm not saying lightweight. I'm saying to make the parts in the patterns hidden. It resolves, fills the BOM, and doesn't take up very much memory to resolve a hidden component vs. fully resolved. Give it a shot.

I personally won't load anything lightweight. There's no way to know what your working on is up to date unless you have it all resolved. Even if it hurts a little.

As far as SW API goes, find a macro posted online close to what you need and start getting to know the SW API help file. I've got a pretty complex custom property macro setup where I'm at. It started as a basic macro I downloaded, now it's 99% different in the code and I've searched the help and google to find how to code how I needed to. I'd recommend having a basic knowledge of coding in VB.

James Spisich
Design Engineer, CSWP