CADWorx, CAESAR II & PV Elite: Insider Blog

2008 CADWorx User Conference

The 2008 CADWorx User Conference is scheduled for October 20-22 in Houston Texas. The venue has been selected and the Conference website is online. This is a great opportunity for you to get out of the office and network with your fellow CADWorx users from around the world. Everyone who attends will receive a copy of the CADWorx Video Training DVD, CADWorx Plant Professional a $650 value. Please visit the Conference_Website for more information and to register for this great event.

See you in Houston Texas

Best Regards,

Joseph Dixon

Product Manager - Plant Design Solutions
COADE Engineering Software

Webinar, June 19th, 12:00pm CST: Special End Components

with Rod Abbott, Mechanical Technologist, Wardrop Engineering

Learn how to use the special end components to create custom fittings, and put them in to the sanitary portion of your spec. 

Speaker bio:
Rod Abbott is an intermediate Mechanical Technologist with 8 years of engineering experience.  Rod has been with Wardrop Engineering for 5 years and is the Mechanical CAD Lead for the Thunder Bay office.  Since joining Wardrop, he has played a key role in implementing various 3D tools, including CADWorx and ISOGen.

MEP and CADWorx

We've been running CADWorx on MEP the last few months and had to run through several issues to get CADWorx to run on the base AutoCAD without loading the MEP modules.

The key to getting running AutoCAD MEP as plain AutoCAD is in the registry.  After running the setup profile routine from CADWorx (or adding the support path to your profile), double-check the registry to make sure your profile has a DWORD of IsPureAcadProfile = 1.

To check this (close all AutoCAD sessions), go to Start->Run and type in regedit, then press enter.

Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Autodesk\AutoCAD\(version)17.2\Profiles (View this photo).

This will display a list of the profiles in your AutoCAD version.  In the AutoCAD profile you can see the DWORD IsPureAcadProfile is set to 1 (View this photo) , in the MEP the DWORD is set to 0 (View this photo).  An examination of a CADWorx profile shows that this entry is not there (View this photo).

To add, right-click on the profile and select add->DWORD (View this photo). Enter "IsPureAcadProfile". By default, the value will be 0, double-click to edit and set it to 1.  When you start up your CADWorx profile you sessions will act like AutoCAD without loading any of the MEP modules.

Forcing SKEYS

Often it will be quicker to modify the SKEY of an exist CADWorx component that is similar in appearance than going the whole User Shape and Custom SKEY route.

Needing to create a cooling tower like below and getting it to show up on Isogen correctly users can do the following to save time.

Model some small bore piping to simulate the cooling tower. The SKEY we are wanting to use is EX**

Now in the ISOGEN CEDIT we will notice that we can change the identifier for the SKEY, but not the SKEY itself.

To force an SKEY we would need to go back to the CEDIT Dialog and insert the following into the TAG Field: SKEY=EXFL.

Close down the CEDIT Dialog box and reopen to now access the Isogen Data. Note how we have forced an SKEY onto the Component. It's good practice to then clear the TAG Field as this will override all the SKEY settings from the Isogen Data back to the TAG Field SKEY if the Isogen data is edited at a later stage.

Turn grouping off, delete the pipe solid and replace with a realistic looking 3d solid to make the model look neat.

Running our Iso it looks the business.

Webinar, June 5th, 12:00pm CST: Spec Datafiles

with Rod Abbott, Mechanical Technologist, Wardrop Engineering

Learn what a data file is, how to manipulate the data, and use it in a spec.

Speaker bio:
Rod Abbott is an intermediate Mechanical Technologist with 8 years of engineering experience.  Rod has been with Wardrop Engineering for 5 years and is the Mechanical CAD Lead for the Thunder Bay office.  Since joining Wardrop, he has played a key role in implementing various 3D tools, including CADWorx and ISOGen.