CAD Toolbox

February 1, 2016

Ryan Gehm

Maplesoft has released the MapleSim CAD Toolbox, a new add-on to MapleSim that allows engineers to understand and improve their mechanical designs by bringing their CAD assemblies into the advanced system-level modeling and simulation platform. The MapleSim CAD Toolbox imports CAD models directly into MapleSim, recreating the model components and preserving their kinetic and kinematic properties as well as the spatial relationships between components. It offers feature detection, allowing users to easily add new coordinates at points of interest, such as the center of a hole or along the edge of a component. The toolbox also makes it easy to share coordinate frames between separate bodies, ensuring the bodies will be properly aligned when joined. The MapleSim CAD Toolbox handles files from “virtually any” CAD system, through direct support for a large number of proprietary formats, including those from Inventor, NX, and SolidWorks, as well as the widely supported STEP and STL file formats. Once in MapleSim, the models can be shared with other users, or online using the MapleSim Server, without requiring that the end user have access to the original CAD system or CAD files. Engineers can detect and correct problems at the virtual prototyping stage, long before expensive prototypes are built, according to Maplesoft. The MapleSim CAD Toolbox is available on Windows for both the English and Japanese versions of MapleSim.