The company I work for places ID tags on one of the components in our product. In the past ID tags have been purchased from a vendor that would stamp numbers on a .5” x 1” piece of 18ga (.047”) sheet metal. The company has asked us to cut and etch these items in-house. This is not the issue. The issue is the time it is taking the programming department to make these. They have to insert and edit each number manually to be able to program the laser to make these tags. If I were to make an array, in SolidWorks or DraftSight, does anyone know of a relatively easy way to put sequential serial numbers on the tags and export that as a DXF for programming. We will yield 6,300 to 6,500 tags from on sheet of sheet metal. As you could imagine this would not be a small task to complete. We did a quick estimate and determined it would take about 2 weeks to program this if that was all our programming crew was to work on. Any input would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
See if this type of thing will meet your requirement…
TLDR:
One part file for the tag
Sketch text on the tag for the number
Sketch text is linked to custom property
Part level design table used to instantly genereate/update 500 configs that vary only by custom property.
Assembly with an array of 500 instances of this part.
Assembly level DT easily assigns each instance with different config.
This makes a DXF sheet of 500 sequential tags at a time. The starting tag number is just entered into the design table for the part. Excel functionality is used to actually build the sequential text for each configuration.
The design table in the assembly is just used to easily assign a different configuration to every instance of the tag part in the assembly. It takes SW a minute or so to process rebuilding all 500 configs, but it’s way faster than doing it manually.
You can easily adapt this method to any size/shape of tag/text/font/etc.
I do not believe it would be. The company that makes the Laser also has their own programming software and it does not play well with other software packages.
Thanks for this. It works well to make the tags we are looking for. Now we just need to see if we can overcome some hurdles within the programming software.
