DesignPoint Blog

How to Model: Self-Packing Scutoid in SOLIDWORKS

Posted on by Robert Maldonado
Some exciting news has broken out in the scientific and mathematical community. In July 2018, a paper was published by P Gómez-Gálvez: Scutoids are a geometrical solution to three-dimensional packing of epithelia. So the first question you may have is: What is a scutoid? That is the exciting news! A scutoid is a 3D shape [...] Read more...

The MarkForged Metal X is Here.

Posted on by DesignPoint

MarkForged 3D Printers can make your business more profitable – put the pedal to the Metal (Metal X that is) and jumpstart  into the 21st century! DesignPoint is excited to announce that we are hosting the new MarkForged Metal X printer and it’s ready for your visit! We are proud to be the only retailer […]

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How 3D Printing Crushes The Competition At Robotics Tournaments

Posted on by Andrew Garchik
Recently I was speaking with a teacher who runs a robotics program in North Jersey and I was inspired to address how 3D printing brings a competitive edge to the industry. Here are a few reasons why anyone competing in robotics needs to check out the latest 3D printing technology. Time – One of the [...] Read more...

How to Prepare for Industry 4.0: A Practical Guide [Webinar]

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Learn what Industry 4.0 means for your company, the business benefits offered by Industrial IoT, and how your business should prepare for it. Request a Demo Hear from Dr. Ching Au, CEO of Durabrite, a leading manufacturer of industrial lighting solutions, about how the company has adopted and integrated IIoT into their product line. This [...] Read more...

Bridging the Gap between Plastic Part Design and Manufacturing

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Live Town Hall Webcast : Bridging The Gap Between Plastic Part Design and Manufacturing Join SOLIDWORKS panel of experts, from plastic injecting molding industry, as they discuss plastic part design and manufacturing best practices and share ideas on how to avoid costly errors and rework. Register Now Bridging the Gap between Plastic Part Design and [...] Read more...

Get Your Plastic Part Designs Tested

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Have your plastic part designs ever suffered the embarrassment of short shot, shrinkage, uneven cooling or deformation? If your designs are having difficulty performing during the injection molding process, it’s time to get tested. SOLIDWORKS Plastics gives you the tools to easily assess your designs for manufacturability by simulating the plastic injection process. By using [...] Read more...

Best Practices for Optimizing Plastic Part Designs [Webinar]

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
SOLIDWORKS Plastics gives you the tools to easily assess your designs for manufacturability by simulating the plastic injection process. By using SOLIDWORKS Plastics, you can catch potential defects in the early stages of your design, gain the insight to make smarter decisions earlier, save money by avoiding costly late-stage design changes, and get to market [...] Read more...

DesignPoint Announcement of Winning Customer Satisfaction Award by SOLIDWORKS

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
SOLIDWORKS awards DesignPoint “#1 in Customer Satisfaction in North America” for its second consecutive year. Recognized for the personal touch and value DesignPoint adds to every client interaction, More is Possible rings true. CLARK, N.J. | MARCH 16, 2018 DesignPoint, experts in 3D design software and 3D printers for engineering and manufacturing companies in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic [...] Read more...

How Much Is Your Current CAD System Costing You? [Webinar]

Posted on by Brett Dunn
Learn More Don't let cost hold you back from enhancing your design productivity and innovation. Discover how it's possible for you to cut 3D design software costs AND boost innovation during this 30-minute must-see webinar! You'll learn: Why companies using SOLIDWORKS have a lower cost of ownership and higher productivity The benefits of a customer-friendly [...] Read more...

Identify Plastic Part Deformations Before Manufacturing [Short Video]

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
SOLIDWORKS Plastics gives you the tools to easily assess your designs for manufacturability by simulating the plastic injection process. By using SOLIDWORKS Plastics, you can catch potential defects in the early stages of your design, gain the insight to make smarter decisions earlier, save money by avoiding costly late-stage design changes, and get to market [...] Read more...

Design Better Parts with SOLIDWORKS Plastics [Short Video]

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
SOLIDWORKS Plastics gives you the tools to easily assess your designs for manufacturability by simulating the plastic injection process. By using SOLIDWORKS Plastics, you can catch potential defects in the early stages of your design, gain the insight to make smarter decisions earlier, save money by avoiding costly late-stage design changes, and get to market [...] Read more...

Why You Don’t Need to Be a Genius to Run CFD Analyses

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis doesn’t have to be hard, and it certainly doesn’t have to be expensive. Let’s uncover why. I’m going to pull that wool away from your eyes and demystify the industry misconceptions of robust 3D CAD analysis software so that you, the everyday mechanical engineer or product designer, can innovate more [...] Read more...

Is 3D Printing on the Production Line Actually Feasible?

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Implementing a realistic 3D printing strategy may seem like a distant, formidable plan for the future, but we promise, it's easier to get started than you might think. In fact, many of the largest cost saving additive manufacturing (AM) opportunities in manufacturing are produced in low volumes when compared to the number of parts they [...] Read more...

Why 3D Print Manufacturing Cradles?

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Parts like this UHMW cradle for manufacturing industrial vehicle frames can be slow and costly to produce for many manufacturing departments. These types of tools and materials are excellent opportunities for additive manufacturing on production lines. A high strength 3D printer, like one from Markforged’s Industrial Series line, can make quick work of such a [...] Read more...

Winter Challenge: Create a Snowflake Using all of the SOLIDWORKS Patterns!

Posted on by Robert Maldonado
There’s no better way to end 2017 than with a SOLIDWORKS challenge! I’ve tasked myself to design a snowflake using all of the feature patterns available in SOLIDWORKS. Do you think I can do it? The patterns I will use for this challenge include: Variable Curve Driven Mirror Linear Sketch Driven Circular Table Driven Fill [...] Read more...

5 Ways Automation Can Make Your Job Easier [Electrical Schematic Webinar]

Posted on by Loretta Stiurca
Learn More Overcome the bottlenecks slowing down electrical design! Level up your electrical schematic designs by: Effectively planning your projects Reusing work instead of redoing work Automating intelligent, data-rich design documentation Propagating design changes instantaneously Improving communication between users simultaneously working on projects Ready to achieve more with your designs? Fill out the form below [...] Read more...

Stop Wrestling With Your Design Data – The Fundamentals of SOLIDWORKS PDM

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Watch this 2-minute video to learn how you can focus more on design and spend less time wrestling with your design data! Learn More With SOLIDWORKS PDM, you can: Minimize redundant data and save time when searching for files Work with intelligent file versioning and revisioning controls Share and sync data that can be accessed [...] Read more...

Creating a Sound Design Part 4: Will It Fill? Fixing Our Headphones Using SOLIDWORKS Plastics [Webinar]

Posted on by Roy Mutalik
Learn how you can better understand real-world mold flow behavior and detect problems in molding earlier with SOLIDWORKS Plastics. Watch this webinar with Application Engineering Manager at DesignPoint, Roy Mutalik, for the details! Learn More Here View the Full Series In part four of this webinar series, you will learn how to set up and run [...] Read more...

Your Engineering Team’s Transformation [Webinar]

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
You no longer need to accept that "good" is "good enough" within your engineering department – More is Possible®! Learn More Learn how to solve these three common industry challenges: There is tremendous time pressure to get things done. Tedious, manual processes are slowing the team down. The team isn’t using their tools as effectively [...] Read more...

5 New Features in SOLIDWORKS 2018 for Workflow Speed Demons

Posted on by Robert Maldonado
As CAD users, you want nothing more than to work fast. For decades, SOLIDWORKS has introduced additional functionality to its suite of tools to make CAD speed demons work as quickly and efficiently as possible. And SOLIDWORKS 2018 is no exception. Try out these five new enhancements in 2018 design to learn how you can improve your [...] Read more...

Turn Your Engineering Status Quo Into a 3D Mastery Machine

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Your Engineering Transformation – Make It Happen! Accelerate your engineering efforts for maximum impact. Watch the webinar to learn how! Watch It Here Formalize your vision for your engineering team by flipping internal inefficiencies into productivity-boosting strategies. How much time have you spent over or under analyzing a design concept? Having a second set of [...] Read more...

Driving Efficiency in Engineering [Webinar]

Posted on by Roy Mutalik
Learn about the correlation between engineering and product data management (PDM) systems. Application Engineering Manager at DesignPoint, Roy Mutalik, will walk you through how PDM can save you time with tasks such as searching for parts and helping with standardization. Learn More In less than 20 minutes, you’ll learn about: Standardization of file and folder [...] Read more...

Creating a Sound Design Part 3: Simulating a Plastic Part With SOLIDWORKS Simulation [Webinar]

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Prevent future design failures by knowing exactly when and how your products will fail using SOLIDWORKS Simulation. Watch this webinar for the details! Learn More In part three of this webinar series, you will learn how to run studies on a broken plastic part from a set of headphones in SOLIDWORKS Simulation to prevent it from [...] Read more...

Creating a Sound Design Part 2: Reverse Engineering With Geomagic for SOLIDWORKS [Webinar]

Posted on by Andrés Lesmes
See how easy it is to manipulate 3D scanned data within SOLIDWORKS. Learn how to reverse engineer a plastic part for production in this webinar with Andrés Lesmes, an applications engineer, at DesignPoint. Learn More In part two of this webinar series, you will learn how to reverse engineer a plastic component from a set of [...] Read more...

Introducing the World’s First Mini Workstation Designed for CAD Users

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Get a FREE HP Z2 Mini with Your SOLIDWORKS Premium Purchase! Learn More Out of 7 billion people, 5 million designers imagine, engineer, and shape our world. You are 0.1% of the population. And now, there’s something designed specifically for you. Introducing the world’s first mini workstation designed for CAD users – the HP Z2 [...] Read more...

Creating a Sound Design Part 1: Reverse Engineering With the Geomagic Capture Scanner [Webinar]

Posted on by Andrés Lesmes
Welcome to DesignPoint’s Reverse Engineering Video Series! This series will walk you through how to reverse engineer a plastic component from a set of broken headphones. Join us as we prepare this part for manufacturing or 3D printing without the hassle of using calipers, micrometers, calculators and other antiquated tools. For each major step in [...] Read more...

SOLIDWORKS 2018: Powerful Model Based Definition

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Learn More Model Based Definition in SOLIDWORKS 2018 is more powerful than ever allowing you to more accurately define all the manufacturing information needed within the 3D model. You can now apply datum features to patterns more accurately representing real life designs like the three mounting holes in this cover. Model Based Definition helps companies [...] Read more...

3 Ways Collaboration Enhances Electrical Design

Posted on by Loretta Stiurca
We live in a world where collaboration is the key to success. Without it, projects often aren’t completed on time and mistakes are much more likely to go unnoticed. Because of this, we need tools that enable a highly collaborative environment. You’ve probably used tools like Skype, Dropbox, Asana, Slack, and One Drive, but when [...] Read more...

4 Ways to Get the Most From Your SOLIDWORKS License

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Many necessary evils live within the product development cycle. They can appear as design rework, hardware order mishaps, a chaotic quoting system or too many slow and manual processes just to name a few. But becoming more efficient with the capabilities already inside SOLIDWORKS can save you significant time on grueling, manual labor while monitoring the [...] Read more...

The Holy Grail of 3D Printing: The Markforged Industrial Series [Webinar]

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Watch this quick webinar to learn how industrial strength 3D printing is now financially attainable for every manufacturing business! Request a Demo In this webinar, we introduce a variant on an established 3D printer line! Learn how the new Industrial Series 3D printers from Markforged are the go-to solution for manufacturing tooling such as jigs, [...] Read more...

The Holy Grail of 3D Printing Has Arrived!

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
You no longer need to accept the trade-offs between strength, part-quality, and affordability when selecting a 3D printer. We are pleased to introduce the Markforged Industrial Series line of composite 3D printers! With this introduction, Markforged has made industrial strength printing financially attainable for EVERY manufacturing business, allowing them to compete on a global stage. [...] Read more...

Markforged and SOLIDWORKS Join Forces

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Watch the video to see how these two companies are bringing carbon fiber and metal 3D printers into the mainstream. Request a Demo Aerospace engineer, innovator and three-time entrepreneur, Greg Mark, went from creating wings for race cars made of carbon fiber to redefining the way engineers are building parts made with carbon fiber. By merging [...] Read more...

Stop Guesstimating and Start Validating Your Designs [Webinar]

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Watch this 23-minute webinar to learn how you can solve common design challenges that disrupt product development before it's too late. Request a Demo Product designers and engineers face many of these obstacles throughout development: Material costs are too high Product warranties get in the way Project delays Product failures in the field Long prototyping [...] Read more...

Production Quality 3D Printing Software for the Everyday Engineer

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Whether you are brand new to 3D printing, use it for tooling and fixtures, prototyping, end-use parts, educational purposes or any combination of these applications -- adding materials for strength and calculating that cost has never been easier. You can leave your manual calculations in the 80s along with Microsoft Paint, and step into the [...] Read more...

7 Things I Learned in a SOLIDWORKS Fundamentals Class as a CSWE

Posted on by Robert Maldonado
Here at DesignPoint, we always talk to our customers about the benefits of formal SOLIDWORKS training. Even if you’ve used SOLIDWORKS for years, there’s always more you can learn from being formally trained. Recently, I had the opportunity to experience this first-hand when I attended a SOLIDWORKS Essentials class. As the newest Applications Engineer with [...] Read more...

Dragons Are Coming! Can Engineer Johnny Snow Save the Realm?

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation: A Song of CAD and CFD Brace yourself; dragons are coming. Now the only person standing between saving the realm and watching its cities burn is the warrior engineer Johnny Snow. While some wild folk believe he knows nothing, Johnny knows of a special weapon: SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation. Equipped with this powerful [...] Read more...

3 Ways to Reduce Your Number of Physical Prototypes

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Frustrated by long lead times and excessive design iterations? Reduce your number of physical prototypes before they get to production. Whether you make several prototypes at once, go with your gut or use chintzy materials to gauge functionality, these methods are no longer efficient in today’s digital world. Making “course corrections” as quickly as possible [...] Read more...

3 Reasons Why Your Current Electrical Schematic Design Process Is Failing You

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Test Drive SOLIDWORKS 3D Software Join us for an upcoming Hands-On Test Drive event. Test out the software at one of our three locations! View Events Speed up electrical schematic creation and say goodbye to exhausting, manual processes! Dreading your schematic design documentation? Unable to update your designs unerringly? Cumbersome communication methods causing a conundrum? [...] Read more...

Create Your Design Documentation Faster

Posted on by Loretta Stiurca
The typical electrical design documentation process goes something like this: Draw Document Audit In the drawing stage, you select parts, draw up panel layouts and determine the connections. In the documentation stage, you generate reports such as the bill of materials, wire lists, cable lists and more. And in the auditing stage, you verify that [...] Read more...

Getting Your Designs Right the First Time With SOLIDWORKS Simulation

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
“I’m surprised every day by what I find out running simulations. I don’t know that I could do my job anymore without it.” – Todd Turner, Senior Product Development Engineer at Macro Plastics, Inc. Macro Plastics, Inc., is a leading manufacturer of large agricultural bins in the citrus and apple industry. They rely heavily on [...] Read more...

Metal 3D Printing Redefined

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Ready to benefit from 3D metal printing, but don’t have the space or budget to accommodate this technology? Then ADAM (Atomic Diffusion Additive Manufacturing) technology from Markforged is right for you. The metal 3D printers of today are very expensive ($500K - 1M) and can take up a large amount of space. Markforged's revolutionary ADAM technology [...] Read more...

4 Ways to Reduce Design Rework

Posted on by Loretta Stiurca
The bane of every engineer's existence – rework! You’ve just translated your brilliant idea into a beautiful schematic. You’ve created all of its related documentation and verified that all connectors are properly constructed. So now you’re feeling pretty great about it! But with all great designs, there’s almost always changes that will need to be [...] Read more...

Why Engineering Is a Company’s Greatest Asset

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Streamline the day-to-day work and consistently meet your deadlines by accurately identifying and resolving bottlenecks throughout your development process. Are you not as productive as you need to be? Do you find yourself treading water in a never-ending flood of emails, new projects, projects that need to be re-designed, projects that need to be optimized, [...] Read more...

Implementing “Trouble Sheets” to Easily Document Design Change Requests

Posted on by Roy Mutalik
Your engineer team works tirelessly to design a product. After days, weeks, months, maybe even a year's worth of work, you finally approve and release your product design. Your job is done. Everything is sure to work out perfectly -- of course, this is hardly ever the case. Organizations, small and large alike, identify problems [...] Read more...

SOLIDWORKS® Awards DesignPoint Highest Customer Satisfaction in North America for 2016

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Coveted award presented to DesignPoint at the SOLIDWORKS World 2017 event, demonstrates DesignPoint’s unwavering commitment to delivering the highest levels of customer service. CLARK, NEW JERSEY | JANUARY 31, 2017 DesignPoint — experts in 3D software and 3D printers for engineering and manufacturing companies in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states — received the coveted SOLIDWORKS [...] Read more...

Need a Good Picture? Why Not Render It With SOLIDWORKS Visualize.

Posted on by Roy Mutalik
Photo-realistic rendering is a powerful tool for CAD designers. It allows you to output true-to-life images of your design before you’ve even built a model. The ability to create customer-facing marketing or sales materials earlier in the design process has huge benefits in cost and time savings later downstream in the design. However, that’s not [...] Read more...

How to Secure a Firm Grip in Robotics Automation

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Looking to improve and expand production line solutions? Learn how Dixon Valve eliminated weeks of manufacturing lead time and developed new product solutions with 3D printing. Getting a Grip An industrial FANUC robotic arm gracefully swings from one automated machining center to another with a pipe fitting firmly gripped between its jaws. Dixon Valve, a [...] Read more...

DesignPoint Expands Offerings to Include Markforged 3D Printers Enabling their Manufacturing Customers to Create High-Strength Parts

Posted on by Danielle Harrison
Revolutionary Markforged 3D printers use materials such as Kevlar®, carbon fiber, and fiberglass which make it possible to create parts for manufacturing applications and in finished products. CLARK, NEW JERSEY | JANUARY 31, 2017 DesignPoint, a leading provider of solutions for product design, engineering, manufacturing and 3D printing in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, is [...] Read more...

How to Add Wire Numbers to Schematics in 10 Seconds or Less

Posted on by Loretta Stiurca
Adding wire numbers to a schematic with standard 2D CAD software can be a tedious, time-consuming and error-prone task – especially if a project is revised before sending it out to production. Power lines are often numbered differently than other wires, and there might be even more variation based on the type of wire we [...] Read more...