IMAGINiT Manufacturing Solutions Blog

Dropbox: Change the Way You Access Your Data

It has happened to me on more than one occasion.  I get up bright and early and pat my boys on the head and send them off to school.  Kiss my wife and off to work I go.  I set up my laptop, pour my first cup of coffee.  Check my iPod for any fan mail from the blog or Facebook comments about last night's adventures.  Then it happens.  I reach into my bag for my flash drive and its not there!  I hunt around feverishly inside neoprene and other fiber I can't discern, searching deep into the nether regions of my personal portable computer storage container of livelihood.  Then the Blackberry goes off and its a text message from my wife.  "Did you need your Sandisk 8GB Titanium Flash receptacle thingy?"  Now my wife's technical vocabulary was enhanced in that last sentence.  Usually I get "thingy" as all the descriptor.  I had an ace up my sleeve just for this sort of problem.  Now it was time to put her technical ineptitude to the test.

Two weeks before I installed Dropbox onto all of my home and work computers.  I had heard whispers of this from my other tech friends before, but never really saw the need to grab an account and try it out until my wife started asking me for all my music and Christmas Card lists that were on my work computer she could not access especially since I travel quite a bit.

Dropbox works like an online Uber flash drive.  That's right, I said Uber, don't judge me.  To start out you get 2GB of free online storage that is expandable to 5GB after enough referrals.  There are also pay plans for you video junkies and audiophiles that need extra space.

The Dropbox can be installed on any PC or Mac and even the iPod and iPhone now.  Whatever is added to the Dropbox is synchronized across all Dropbox locations as long as they are online.  Furthermore, I can share files with direct links to the location to anyone in the inter-webs.  All I have to do is Crtl+Right Click on a file and choose the Copy Link Location right from my Dropbox and paste it into an email.

Well, Mr. Tech Trend smarty pants blogger, what if my computer takes a download over the side of a cliff with all my other computers daisy-chained with Serial cables.  Now I have nothing right?  Wrong.  You can log into your Dropbox from any computer and Upload or Download any of your synchronized files.  Mom's recipe for Sugar Cookies and my wife's Christmas Card Address list are safe and sound and the Johnsons on the other side of the US will still get their pictures of my boys pretending to get along at Christmas time.  And I won't lose Mason's first snow mobile ride on the lake either.  Don't worry he was supervised, they don't ride single until they are 4 years old. ;)

What if my not so tech savvy wife/spouse/significant other/house pet deletes a file?  Well Dropbox has you covered there too.  You can restore deleted files up to 30 days in the past without the need for a Flux Capacitor and a Delorean.  If a file isn't deleted, maybe it is merely updated you can also get previous versions of that file.

So I had my wife take my flash drive and simply drop the files into the Dropbox folder and minutes later I had the documents I needed for the day.  And yes, she asked if she needed to drop the icons into the folder thingy.  Crises averted.

Inventomizations - Image Export Options

Welcome back to another Inventomization (still looking for the TM on this one).  With all the talk and hub-bub about Inventor Publisher, I thought I would take a stroll down memory lane on this idea of quick documentation and revisit one of my favorite tips.  In this posting we will take a look at a dynamite tip to get a fantastic image for PowerPoint or any other system that uses images from an engineer's Inventor designs to create either sales material, documentation, or just the good ole presentation to the boss.

When you have to export an image from Inventor a couple thoughts come to mind.  First you may consider a screen grab.  It's quick, easy and by far quickest way to grab something and put it in a PowerPoint or CAD administration guide.  For those that have forgotten the ways of the screen grab, let me refresh your memory.  Hit PrintScreen on your keyboard, this captures your current screen to the clipboard which you can simply Paste into anything else.  If you hold Alt+PrintScreen at the same time you get the active Window.

The next thing that you can use is the Inventor Save Copy As or Export commands.  These will take your current graphics screen and save them out as a Image file with a format of your choosing (BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF).  Although the export options that are given here are rather limited.  For instance we can only change the X and Y of the capture and not the DPI.

 

If you have become savvy with Inventor enough to delve into the Inventor Studio environment you may have already found the answer to high quality presentations in the aspect of the rendering engine that Inventor uses.  In Inventor Studio, lights, surfaces, backgrounds can all be modified to get a desired result for marketing or sales scenarios.  Illustrative renderings can even be generated to create a sketched appearance to the design.

Here is where the dynamite tip comes in and saves me so much time when I don't have it to begin with.  When I have my Studio illustration or rendering ready for output, select the Options before saving.  This allows for more customization to the export than allowed in the normal environment of Inventor.  For instance, DPI is now a selectable value for most formats (GIF exlcuded).

Perhaps the most powerful export image type here though is the PNG format.  PNG allows for creation of an alpha channel that will drop the background from the image.  Now before you tried this you probably tried just a plain white background.  The problem with that is that there is STILL a background.  Alpha Channel will take the background and remove it from your design so that if fits better on screen with PowerPoint backgrounds as well in technical documentation to allow words to wrap around the image.

Related Inventomizations Posts:

iFeature Icons

Custom Color Schemes

Color and Texture

Constraint Audio

20 Inventor Tips in 20 Minutes

Okay, so it is more like 17 minutes.  But I have compiled my four part Inventor tip series from Autodesk University into one video.  These tips were presented right on the show floor but instead of just a video, the lucky viewers in the audience were graced with my presence.  I even hung around to sign autographs after the presentation and hand out flash drives and other trade show swag.  Okay, the only one who wanted my autograph was the person at the booth checking me off the list of other presenters showcased at the Authorized Training Center booth.  Now, without any further ramblings...enjoy.

20 Inventor Tips in 20 Minutes - Autodesk University from Mark Flayler on Vimeo.

Links to previous posts (no audio, but descriptions of each tip)

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4

Inventor AU Power Track - Sketched Symbols

This past year at Autodesk University I conducted a class on Sketched Symbols and their use with Inventor Drawings involving creation, use, and administration.  Here is a short preview of one of my favorite tips in the class.

Class Audience

Any user interested in standardization and custom symbol creation

Class Description

Drawing Manager in Autodesk Inventor has the functionality to create Custom Sketched Symbols to document your designs or standardize your company's notations and standards without the monotony of recreation. This class takes a look at the tools available in the Drawing Manager that are designed to facilitate this need. Learn to create and use custom notations and geometry to communicate your design. Utilize blocks from your AutoCAD® drawings for similar usage with little redesign for use in Inventor. Learn how to organize and update your symbol libraries using Inventor's Drawing Resource Transfer Wizard.

Key Learning

• Learn to create custom sketched symbols in the Drawing Manager
• Utilize existing blocks from AutoCAD files in Inventor drawings
• Learn how to use prompted entries, iProperties, and connection points effectively
• Identify Design Intent usage in your drawings
• Learn how to update and replace symbols across multiple drawing files

Make sure you check out Autodesk University for the complete class, handouts, FAQs, and Q&A for the class here: link

Determine Volume of a Container using Autodesk Inventor

A common question I get from Inventor students is how to obtain internal measurements of volume that is not actually modeled.  For instance, the amount of fluid that fills a manifold with multiple channels, or a tank/vessel that houses fluid or gas or even just a measurement of volume at different levels of fill.  Now if this was a simple cylinder it would be rather easy to get this volume, but with more complicated designs, like a hydraulic manifold we can use some new and old tricks with Inventor to accomplish the task quickly and without the need for advanced manual calculations or summations of data.

I've put together a video and a tutorial exercise describing some of these methods using simple calculation, assembly derivation, and using multi-body solids in Inventor 2010.

Exercise: Tutorial

Exercise File: Air-Box.ipt

Video Link (free file download with Vimeo account): Video