PTC Education

During the FRC build season, all FRC and FTC teams are welcome to a free weekly webinar called "ROBO-TALK." Topics such as improving program management of your team, quick conceptual design tips, documentation and calculation tips, etc. will be covered as well as guest appearances of teams, mentors, and special guests.The weekly webinars begin tomorrow January 12th. Check here for dates, times and registration. Good luck this season!

This Mathcad worksheet was created by Mathcad Application Engineer Roger Yeh and used as a demonstration at the FTC Kickoff event held at PTC's Needham Headquarters in September 2011.

This worksheet was created while I was reading an article discusing the necessity of factoring in air resistance when analyzing the kinematics of the flight of the basketball. I am posting this worksheet to illustrate how Mathcad can be used as an environment for developing and refining your ideas as you learn new concepts to apply in analyzing your robot's performance.

This worksheet demonstrates the use of Mathcad's programming capabilities. A matrix of shot heights is developed using a Mathcad function. The shot heights are generated from a vector of launch angles and velocities.

This worksheet demonstrates how to use Mathcad to analyze the kinematics of the motion of the basketball shot with a given velocity and launch angle. The image of the forces shown on the first page was created using the drawing tools in Excel and then copied and pasted into the Mathcad worksheet.

This file illustrates how Mathcad can be used to document engineering data such as court measurements. Within the worksheet a coordinate system is developed for tracking the position of the robot on the Rebound Rumble court. The origin was set at center court.

We have trouble uploading files to Windchill. We were able to do that in the last two years. I was told the old accounts are not automatically switched over to the latest version so last Saturday I created a new account as the mentor and start fresh. The instructions said I will get an email with instructions what to do to setup the project but I did not see anything. Who do I call? Who can help me? It just seems to go into a black hole.Very frustrated.

I coach an FLL team in Medford, MA and we got a write up in our local newspaper!http://tinyurl.com/69myldv

Do you maintain a personal or business website or a blog? Maybe you run a website for an educational institution or a PTC User Group? Now you can add one of our LearningExchange badges to your site to make it easy for your friends, followers, and readers to find our free tutorials on LearningExchange.We are offering 3 different badge sizes with HTML code to choose from:Pick a sizeCopy the HTML code andUpdate your site on your web server.Let me know if you have any questions!Bettina

This weekend I participated in my first FTC tournament and it proved that nothing ever happens how you think it will. My team burnt out a motor in the center or our robot shortly after hardware inspection and spent most of the qualification rounds trying to get it replaced, just to have it burn out again when we started testing the robot's functions. Over all the tournament was really exciting, if a little stressful. I got to be our team's "coach" during the matches and learned a lot about creating new strategies on the fly. We ended the event winning the Think award and second place Inspire award as well as being considered for the PTC award and we wanted to thank PTC for all their support.Lindsey VanderlynTeam Tiki #2859

Hi folks,here's a little documentation that may be helpful to you sooner or later.Assume that you have a CAD document in Windchill that you want to replace by another that you got from somewhere else (maybe downloaded with a bunch of other parts with corrections).You can't exactly just tell the databasee you want to get rid of the old file and use the new one. Below are the steps to do this with Creo1 and Windchill 10. I've done variations of this way back in Pro/E 2001 and Intralink 3.2. The theory is the same while the steps have increased. Hope this helps.By the way, if this doesn't work for you, please let me know! Sometimes I do steps in my head that I forget to write down 1. Import replacement documents to workspace2. Open replacement documents in Creo3. Update replacement documents in workspace (reuse content in workspace)4. Check out replacement documents in workspace (reuse content in workspace)5. Save documents from Creo to workspace6. Check documents back in

I just downloaded the WF5_Schools_DVD and installed ProE Schools Edition. Program starts, but there is a "warning message list" box that states "License request failed for feature" and some additional details. Program shuts down when the "OK" button on the box is clicked. I do have a valid user name/password and am a member of a FIRST Windchill project. Any suggestions?Thanks,Ken Snodgrass

This deals with Creo Elements School Edition that is given free.I followed the directions that were given and the license file was created. I viewed the file and even saw the correct name in it the so I know that it was able to access the server when creating the license file.The end date was a bit messed up. 1-JAN-0This is not a correct date.Not sure if I should expect any help from this. I tried the PTC support page but that is terrible and I haven't heard a response from the email I sent in for their website. The email address given was feedback so I may not hear anything from that. The only other option was for facebook and that is a no.

Does anybody know where I can get the CAD model for Banebot 550 with 16:1 gear reduction?

Hi FIRST teams,I was wondering if anybody else is having problems searching for documents (CAD files)?"Search in Table" is working beautifully, but it won't go down to sub-folders. I tried "Simple" and "Advanced" search options with no luck.Looking forward to your feedback,Josh

I have several veteran students and mentors who come from several different FRC teams and are "set in their ways" when it comes to what CAD applications they use. Has anyone had any experience (especially with Windchill 10.0) managing projects created with CAD applications other than CREO?

My team is struggling with Mathcad and Creo. We're following the tutorial but can't seem to get this sorted out.We're using the Mathcad worksheets provided and have tried it seperately on two different computers to make sure that we're not messing anything up.When we save the the wing_def worksheet, there should be an output of saved data of both the root and tip points. We're only getting the root file and not the tip so we're hitting a major roadblock there.Additionally, when we tried it on the second computer on the wing_optimization worksheet there wasn't for the tip chord. It's missing from the end of the worksheet.I will try to take a few screenshots this afternoon to include with this post that can better elaborate on our difficulties. I think the major issue is that the files that are supposed to be automated from the Mathcad worksheets aren't appearing. Maybe they're not supposed to and I'm just missing something major, but I'm not sure where to head at this point.

Dear PTC,Hi! My name is Katie McDonald. I am 15 years old and a sophomore at Agawam High School. But more importantly I am a member of FIRST team 839, Rosie Robotics and this is my Pro Engineer story. It all started my freshman year when I joined the robotics team at the request of a friend. I had no intention of joining permanently never mind becoming an engineer. However I stayed which turned out to be no mistake. When build season rolled around I was placed on one of the team’s engineering subgroups rather than my requested marketing subgroup. On my engineering subgroup I had become the designated engineering notebook writer. This was true until one day the leader of the subgroup Rj, had moved to the computers to start putting the conceptual designs to life in a CAD program. As I saw this virtual robot come together I became immediately enthused. It was the day I asked to try this program that would forever change my life. Throughout that build season I used Pro Engineer everyday an

When will 2012 KOP CAD Library be up? Got email that they are ready on www.ptc.com/go/firstkop but do not see them.Also any way to "dump" the entire library into each Team's Windchill Project?THXStu/Buzz

The discussion title sums up the question from our software team - has anyone tried this? I searched and found a thread where Windchill was used in industry for some type of software development, but the links are obsolete so I can't find out the details. It seems like Windchill would need to understand the connectivity between the different VI's in a LabView project the same way it keeps track of parts in an assembly in Creo in order for it to work correctly.

A customer just came up with this question and I thought I'd answer it here as some other users might have the same question."Do I need special access to LearningExchange if I have a license?"The anwers is: No. As a PTC customer, you usually already have a ptc.com account (the one you use to access our online services and software downloads). You simply sign in with your ptc.com user name and password.If you don't have a ptc.com yet, you would simply click on the "Join now" button to create one. This is a simple web account - it will make browsing ptc.com easier for non-customers as it will pre-populate the forms for document downloads, for example. Creating a ptc.com is free and without any obligations. Feel free to comment with any additional question you might have!Bettina

I use ProE Wildfire at work so I'm new to Creo, and I'm not sure if this is specific to the student version or not. We downloaded the field files yesterday (thanks, they look great), and we were looking to calculate the mass and CG of the rotating part of the ramp. The densities all came across as default (1.0), so I was going to show the students how to input the density, assuming it was the same as ProE (edit>Setup>Mass Properties), but there is no Setup in the edit pulldown menu. When we run a mass properties analysis, it prompts for the densities so we could input them there, but it didn't appear to save the values as a parameter that I could find anywhere (it did seem to store the values somewhere in the files, however). Is there some straightforward way to change densities or read in material property files in Creo?Thanks.

Download for CREO Elements (3.7GB est 2+hours) was interrupted after 1.7GB.Has the download be broken up into smaller zip files?Is the download available on FTP site?Have recommendation for a different browser / download management application to download the zip?Thanks,

I know the PTC team would feel unloved if they didn't hear from me at least once on kickoff day First off, kudos for making AE235100-0160_2012.asm a mechanism!Second off, kudos for putting mass into the models!Now the non-kudos 10 components have names of PRT0001. There are 2 PRT0002 and one PRT0003.1219487_2012 is a Generic Family table with no instancesLastly, there were whispers about a Library being created for the KOP this year that would be accessible in Windchill. Did that not happen?Overall, not bad!Thanks guys,Josh

We acquired a small company in France that uses SolidWorks. We'd like to bring them onboard with Pro/E but have concerns about finding qualified users. How many Pro/E users are there on the western cost of France? The company is located in Quimper.