pdomenicali

Thanks for your feedback! Regards, Peter

OK my initial search didn't turn anything up on this forum, but more poking around led me to a previous discussion. Still I wonder if there is any new info on this question; it sounds like all 32-bit apps _should_ run under X64 version of Windows XP... Regards, Peter

I am soon starting a new job and will be given a new workstation. I'm trying to decide whether to get XP64 installed, or just get a machine compatible with it but install regular XP Pro. A major question is whether IC will even run under it, assuming I can get drivers for all the hardware pieces (should be OK since the computer will be built and tested by a large computer builder). Regards, Peter

So I just installed V8 and have started to play with it. I haven't explored everything new yet, but the mechanism animation looks fantastic. I do hope the new constraints survive better than the old ones, as they are hopefully based on new code. I took advantage of the animated demos in the new features document. They were a very valuable introduction/tutorial that will make it more likely I will use the new capabilities. I highly recommend that users have a look and invest the small amount of time it takes to view these great little animations. Someone put a lot of work into creating them, and they show you things you would otherwise possibly never know existed. The ability to set your preference to jump to the distance in the copy/link dialog is a very welcome productivity enhancement. Yeah! All the new blending is going to take me a while to play with, but the new abilities seem very powerful. I'm particularly interested in the new drafting feature, as it is much better than having to tilt faces individually, or introduce tilted sides in a bunch of individual intellishapes. This new ability seems very powerful and I look forward to using it in a casting I'm working on now. As a user since V3, I can truly say this upgrade is the most substantial ever. Kudos to the development team!

Further explanation: In SolidDesigner you can set the accuracy for STEP import to be either manual or automatic. I normally leave it at automatic, which was choosing 1e-5mm for all IC parts. I've tried forcing it manually to 1e-6mm, and in that case some parts come in OK but others come in with errors, showing up as non-manifold parts (i.e., an incomplete set of faces due to the imported faces not quite touching at all edges and corners). The imported parts then show the desired 1e-6mm accuracy, but of course the corrupted parts are non-usable. So it appears that SD is somehow insisting on slightly finer accuracy than IC is delivering in the STEP files. I suspect this is a rounding issue at the last decimal place. SD seems to be very strict with imported part geometry. Has anyone else run into this problem? If so, how have you dealt with it? Regards, Peter

I have exported models many times via STEP for use in SolidDesigner. If these parts are then used for certain operations in SD (such as boolean operations or matching faces), SD refuses to perform the operation citing different accuracies between the bodies. The native SD accuracy defaults to 1e-6mm, whereas it shows the imported parts from IC to be 1e-5mm. A while back on this forum it was claimed that IC's internal and export accuracy was 1e-6mm, but this seems to be in conflict with what SD reports about the imported parts from IC. This is causing a problem because you cannot change a part's accuracy to a smaller number in SD, so my client is forced to change all other parts in the assembly to 1e-5 to match my exported IC parts. They are not happy about this! So I'm wondering: 1. Is this a bug where IC's exported STEP files seem to show 1e-5mm accuracy even though it is supposed to be 1e-6? 2. Is there a setting somewhere for changing the exported part accuracy in STEP? Regards, Peter

I'm thinking of replacing my laptop. Looking at Dell's Inspiron 8600, they have a choice of ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Proturbo. I've read good things about this for gaming compared to nVidia GE Force 5650, which is their other choice. But how would it be for Ironcad? Dell also sells the M60 "mobile workstation" at a premium of about $700, but that is with the nVidia Quadro FX Go1000 graphics, which I assume are somewhere near the workstation Quadro's in performance. Does anyone have experience or know of benchmarks for these laptops? Are there other laptops I should consider? I will use the laptop 90% docked with a large monitor and external kb/mouse. I don't need a large screen, and would prefer lighter weight for the times I do travel with it, but of course that is not compatible with high-end graphics. Regards, Peter

Good to see a major discussion of a problem I beefed about (along with others) at least a year (probably two) ago. There has never been a reply from the developers. I've always assumed that the code was written for this tool in such a way that it calculates the head dimensions based on the nominal screw diameter. To me that would explain the odd values for head diameter it generates. And also why it's not such an easy task to fix it. I'm guessing it was not written to use a look-up table, but rather using a parametric approach (an equation to generate each dimension). Just a hunch. Regards, Peter Domenicali

Thanks for this tip, Beat. I never knew about this before, but looking back on things over the last year or so, I'll bet this factor is responsible for most of the data corruption and other problems I've seen. Now, why isn't this documented in the program? Surely the code could check the current configuration before committing a save part operation? Beat, can you reproduce this error or corruption? [i know you said 10% chance, so that means probably hard to reproduce on demand.] Chris, do you know if this factor is officially recognized by the development team? I'm sure over the past few years I've many times saved a part/assembly out as its own scene file, usually linked to the current scene, without ever checking what my current config is. Do you think this could have been the cause of my corrupt files? Regards, Peter Domenicali

Upon reviewing the existing bug reports, I see this one's been discussed already beginning 3 days ago. I tried adding them under Edit/User Defined Symbols, and picking the Arial font, and that does indeed do the trick. It's still curious as to how they came to be replaced with O R R! Regards, Peter Domenicali

My recollection is that it was there before adding the service pack, but I may be mistaken. It was certainly there in versions 4.x. My guess is that its disappearance is related to fixing the PDF symbol output issue (just a wild guess). I'm filing a bug report on it right now. My workaround has been to copy the symbol from the text page of the properties for a diameter dimension created normally, then paste it into the text page of the properties for the one you want to add it to. Tedious, but it works. Regards, Peter Domenicali

Sorry so much time has passed since I opened this thread. We ended up installing pdf995 for exporting PDF's on our 2 ironcad machines, and it works fine with no hiccups. We still use Acrobat for viewing and marking up PDF's, but no longer use Distiller. Also, Chris, I think you did send me the DLL's, and I believe I did try exporting the big drawing in question and it works now. I'm posting a new topic to discuss my results with the SP1 beta. Regards, Peter Domenicali

Chris, Yes the files have definitely been saved under 5.2 first, and in fact were created under 5.2 in the first place. Thanks in advance for sending the DLL's to me to try. I have meanwhile found that 5.2 will export to PDF a much smaller drawing that I tried, so it seems to be tied to the drawing or scene file itself (i.e., the particular geometry or the quantity thereof). I can FTP the zipped file to you once you tell me where to send it. Regards, Peter Domenicali

OK, I uninstalled both Acrobat 4.0 and Ironcad. Then I reinstalled Ironcad 5.2. First thing I tried was File Export to PDF on a large drawing, using true representation for curves (don't want that tesselated look). It crunched away for a few minutes and then IC crashed with a message to check the log file. Here is the contents of the log file it generated: *** ***Exception Report Number 1 *** Unhandled exception. No other information available Not too helpful. I tried the same thing on my other seat of IC 5.2 and got the same exception notice. Here is a screen shot of the dialog that generated the above exception report (see attached file). I can send in the model and drawing data used for this, but unfortunately it is about 30 MB of files (maybe less when zipped?). Regards, Peter Domenicali IC exception 7-9-2002.zip

Chris, Your point about the new PDF data block in another topic on this forum started me thinking about my crashing situation in my message above. Since we have Acrobat 4.0 installed (including Distiller) on the subject machine, I wonder if it's possible that's at the root of our problem? Coincidentally, Acrobat 4.0 stopped working on MY machine about the same time that I upgraded to IC5.2 (don't remember exactly when). I'm thinking maybe there is a DLL conflict between IC5.2's newer version of its PDF writer and whatever is used by Acrobat 4.0/Distiller for the same purpose. We'll try UNINSTALLING Acrobat 4.0, then REINSTALLING Ironcad 5.2 on the problem machine and see if that solves the problem of crashing when saving drawings. Do you think this might work? Regards, Peter Domenicali

Thanks, Chris. I "forced" my employee to switch to IC on this job because for the first time we are collaborating on one set of fixtures (joint project). Previously his work and mine (at least in terms of design) really did not overlap. When I hired him I bought him a seat of SW as that was his choice and he had a lot of experience with it, and it was hard for me to force IC on him, as it was about 18 months ago and as you know IC was going through a rough transition period. I had just upgraded to 4.2 at that time, but had experienced data corruption and file saving issues with 3.0 and 3.2 and 4.0 that made me less than confident about getting another seat of IC at the time. A few weeks ago I decided to migrate him and his work to IC 5.2, as I had been fairly satisfied with 4.2, and was told that 5.2 was very good and even more stable than 4.2. Plus IC had the special pricing offer for a limited time to get additional seats. So nearly simultaneously I bought a second seat for him and installed the 5.2 upgrade for myself. In parallel with my employee discovering crashing and other odd bugs, I've been finding odd bugs and strange behavior with 5.2 on my machine, too, which I'm sure is more frequent than what I found with 4.2. So I'm tempted to conclude 5.2 has some fundamental flakiness problem, maybe which wasn't there in 5.0, though I never tried 5.0. Just now I was trying to reproduce a chain of commands that caused a corrupt part and a failed save, and in the middle of trying to reproduce it, instead the machine froze (even the cursor froze, Ctrl-Alt-Del unresponsive, required hard reset). With IC 4.2 this happened only perhaps 3 times in a year on the same exact hardware and OS (this machine is WinNT 4.0 SP6). I don't know what to tell you. I'm facing a major investment of time to start reproducing each "bug" and document what causes it, when it's faster to just re-do the part with perhaps a slightly different sequence. Most of the time, after a strange occurence, I can just restart IC and open the file as of the last save and continue where I left off, basically repeating what I did, though probably in a different way, and then there is no problem. So IOW, most of the time the glitches don't seem very repeatable. It's as if IC just gets tired of being a "good boy" after an hour or three and says, OK, enough of this being on my best behavior, now what can I do to be a "bad boy"? And sure enough, it finds a way to misbehave for me! Sorry for the long post, and I do realize most of what I'm writing is not at all helpful to you. I'll try to generate some clearly repeatable "misbehavior" examples and send them in. Regards, Peter Domenicali

On one of our machines (FireGL 2 graphics card, 1 GB of RAM, Win2K) we are getting frequent messages popping up in IC5.2 stating the machine is running low on memory, we should check the virtual memory settings or close some open apps. Well, a check of the Task Manager shows only about half of the physical memory is in use, and none of the virtual memory of 2 GB (page file size) is even being touched. Both Ironcad and the OS have been stopped and restarted several time, to no avail. The rendering setting in Options is Software. We've also tried OpenGL only for camera moves, but that setting didn't help either. This machine is also displaying frequent crashes of IC, especially at the moment of saving a drawing (didn't seem to happen as frequently when only working on scene files). The user is getting extremely frustrated and wants permission to go back to SolidWorks (almost never crashed on the same machine, same memory, same graphics, same processor, same OS, essentially the same model). The total size of the model (main scene file plus sum of all linked files below) is about 30 MB. I need help on this problem fast or will have to jettison IC in favor of SW (which I personally hate to do, but I can't afford the rate at which I'm bleeding money through lost productivity). Regards, Peter Domenicali

Rick, I've been printing to Acrobat Distiller for several years and early on I found the resulting pdf files couldn't render the symbol fonts on other people's machines. The fonts required are vds_weld, etc, anything that starts with "vds" in the font name. Now here's where it gets interesting. I'm using Acrobat 4.0. Distiller has a choice to "embed" certain fonts, and you can pick which ones to "always embed". So naturally I thought that would solve the problem, and I just selected the vds fonts to always be embedded. Well, to my surprise this did NOT fix the problem. As I didn't want to spend time on it, I simply zipped up the vds fonts and sent them to my machine shop, and they installed them on their computer, and now they can read them with their pdf reader. I still have no idea why "embedding" the vds fonts in Distiller doesn't work. Regards, Peter Domenicali

Chris, is this use of shift in making 3d curves documented anywhere? I also need more instruction in this topic. Regards, Peter Domenicali

We're using linked files on a server on a 100BaseT network, and find it works OK. So far under 5.2 we haven't had linking problems as one used to see in versions 3.x. Regards, Peter Domenicali

We have 1 IC support contract and 1 subscription. We have two full-time users. To get a second logon to this forum, do we need to have both users on full support? Regards, Peter Domenicali

Thanks, guys. Going to ACIS for this part does indeed fix the problem I reported. So now I've seen my first example of something ACIS handles better than Parasolid! Also I'm glad to see we can now get mass properties on assemblies of mixed kernel parts (a while ago we needed all parts to be in the same kernel to get the mass of an assembly). Case closed. Regards, Peter Domenicali

I don't see any other online place to upload a support request, so I'll do it here. The attached part file has two sweeps attached to a cylinder. Edit the cross section of either sweep and reduce the radius of the circle to some value below .05 inch (try .04). Upon regeneration the surface of the entire part gets corrupted. Or for other values (try .03) only the wire surfaces get corrupted. Any idea what's going on here? Regards, Peter Domenicali BlueSkyLaser.ics

Urban: I've seen this before on multiple CAD s/w and several different cards. Right now I'm using a Wildcat 4150, and I see what you're talking about whenever the foreground part is very thin in relation to the distance from the camera. I'm pretty sure this is related to the number of bits of resolution of the Z buffer of the graphics card. For each face of each object it must decide whether it is nearer or farther than another object that is at the same point in the field of view. If farther, it doesn't draw the facets for that face. With a 24-bit Z buffer, the resolution is about 1 part in 2^24, or 1:16,000,000. One would expect that with a scene say, 10 meters deep, it could resolve parts as thin as 1 micrometer! However, there must be further factors involved, as you will see the background part "disappear" if you move it a bit farther behind the foreground part (try moving it about 1 mm and see what happens). So anyway, I don't think it is only related to Ironcad, and yes, a more expensive graphics card with a "deeper" Z buffer (try 32 bits) should help. Regards, Peter Domenicali

Ironcad is like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead (US children's nursery rhyme): when it's good, it's very good, but when it's bad, it's horrid. Or it's like a high-performance Italian sports car. For an afficionado, it's the only way to fly, but one must live with having it in the garage a lot for repairs. Along comes Mitsubishi (SolidWorks) and makes a product a bit more staid and not quite as blood-curdling, but so very reliable and predictable (OK, I know I'm stretching the point a bit thin here). As 5.2 is being released, I decided to go ahead and upgrade from 4.2 to 5.0 (I've had the CD sitting on my desk for months, but was in the middle of several design projects and have a rule about never upgrading CAD until the current project is finished.) Here are my observations: 1. Several times I've saved the current scene file, then hit the close button, only to get a dialog box telling me that linked files have changed since the last save, do I want to save them. This shouldn't happen if I've just saved. It's trivial if the scene file is small. But when it's a large assembly that takes 5 to 10 minutes to save to disk (local hard drive), waiting that long again is a real waste of time. OTOH, if I answer "No", I risk losing something that for some reason didn't get saved the first time. Isn't that the point of having the s/w track the save status for us? 2. Once (and it was repeatable in that circumstance) I used the zoom window command and the resulting view position did not at all correspond to the box drawn on the screen. Maybe this is some kind of graphics card bug, but I've never seen it at all in 4.2 or before. Very frustrating to not be able to zoom in to the place you're trying to see (note this was NOT a case of zooming in very small, the parts were normal size, many mm across). 3. There is still no saving of the scene browser status and width with the scene file. Yet all view status buttons ARE saved, such as Smart Dimensions, Intellishape Sizebox Dims, Rendering Options, etc. All other normal Windows programs save the working window conditions with the file, like Excel, Word, etc. I know this is minor, but it's been requested for years. 4. Still no hotkey zooming/panning in 2D mode. Having to use screen buttons for + and - zoom or zoom window is a real productivity drag. I can't believe this would be that difficult to implement. CoCreate ME10 has had it for years, as do Visio and SolidWorks (2D & 3D). I don't consider this minor, and it has been also requested for years. So I think "Yes, it's very important" to have an online bug list, plus an online enhancement list. The forum section is great, but we need to see a list of which enhancement requests have been formally acknowledged, and whether or when they will get transfered to a list of those being actively pursued. Maybe users could vote periodically on the list of items acknowledged but not implemented yet, to help set priorities for the developers. Regards, Peter Domenicali