My team is finishing up our computer lab we have been working with our sponsors on. They are pretty beefy machines (7 of them)
Specs:
Core i5
Quadro K2000 2gb
16gb RAM
256gb SSD
They work really well, but when I try to open up CAD files from other teams (118 and 148), it bogs right down. It takes FOREVER to open the files. They are the .step files found here:
2017 118: https://ccisdrobonauts.org/?p=robots
2018 148: http://www.robowranglers148.com/resources.html
When trying to open them in Solidworks (something I don’t have any experience in), it takes forever and crashes.
When trying to open them in Inventor, they take about a half hour to open. The RAM Utilization goes from 700MB to 2.5GB then drops back down to 700MB and keeps cycling. I was able to get 118’s robot open, but only after a LONG while. I was able to open 148’s as well, which also seemed a lot faster than 118’s.
I know they are really detailed CAD files, but I don’t think they would take THAT long to open. My Macbook can open them in Fusion 360 relatively quickly.
Any tips? Any bottlenecks I need to be looking for?
Try opening them overnight. STEP files always take forever to parse when you’re looking at an entire robot CAD.
Fusion does weird stuff to open stuff quickly. Solidworks takes way longer.
I have a system with a Ryzen 7 and GTX 1080 (so about the same as yours for CAD). I have found that for some reason in Solidworks it will take forever to open them (15 hours for 148 2018 cad). However, if the computer goes to sleep or you use another window while Solidworks is running (even though solidowrks is using only 1 of 16 threads) it will crash. So I think Solidworks has some issues there. However, I also have Creo and it will open the files in the background in about 5-10 min. I have no experience with Inventor.
I can open them up in about 5-10 minutes in SolidWorks on my laptop. The key is to not touch anything (your mouse, keyboard, etc.) while it’s opening. I’ll usually click to open large step files and go make some breakfast while it’s opening. By the time my breakfast is ready, the file is waiting for me. Also, you can save them out as SolidWorks files afterwards and you won’t have the long waits after that.
What OS?
What particular model i5? How much free space on the SSDs? Are the files also located on the SSD or somewhere else? It will take a couple minutes, but not 30. I’m wondering if an AV program is scanning it as you’re opening it, and that’s the bottleneck.
As many have stated, when opening STEP files try not to use the machine at all. It takes a while for the CAD software to read and translate the STEP files over to SolidWorks/Inventor/Creo/etc. files. Once converted save everything (top level assembly, sub-assemblies, parts) in the native file extensions; this should make it much quicker to open in the future.
Do this once and then share the files with all other computers.
It’s worthwhile to note that SW is a single-threaded application and is generally CPU-limited, so there are a number of BIOS settings you can change to speed that up- the most significant one is disabling hyper threading.
i5 CPU’s don’t have hyper-threading.