RELEASE NOTES

CatalystEX 3.0.2
Improvements have been incorporated in all areas of CatalystEX. To take advantage of the
changes, it is recommended that jobs processed with previous versions of CatalystEX be
reprocessed with CatalystEX 3.0.2 prior to building parts.

Enhancements

Note: The following enhancements were included with the release of CatalystEX 3.0 /
3.0.1. They are listed here for reference and are relevant to those upgrading from
CatalystEX 2.1 or earlier to this 3.0.2 release.

CatalystEX now supports the new Dimension BST 1200es and Dimension SST 1200es.

CatalystEX can now be installed and run on Windows Vista in addition to Windows XP.

When the General or Orientation tab is selected the user may now right click to open a menu
allowing easy access to the Shade Toolpath command.

The user can now change the current printer or access the Manage 3D Printers window from the
Pack tab.

The Pack tab now includes a CMB Notes button that allows adding user notes to a CMB file.

The user may now easily select the number of part copies they want to add to the Pack tab.
Upon selecting the copy command a dialog box appears asking you to enter the number of
required copies.

The first column of the queue in the Printer Status tab now contains two new Green indicator
symbols for jobs in process.

There will be sufficient material to complete the job.

Material will be exhausted before completion of the job.

Resolved Issues (3.0.2 release)

Improvements have been made to the accuracy of the 1200es build time estimator.

Non-ASCII characters in the job name no longer cause 1200es printers to lock up.

Material volume values are now scaled correctly for all regional options.

Build time and material consumption estimates have been improved for the Dimension Elite
printers.

Improvements have been made to reduce certain interior part geometries (islands) not filling
properly.

Improvements have been made to extrusion parameters which reduce the possibility of overfill on
the first layers of model material.
The problem of unneeded support layers occasionally being generated in the middle of a part has
been corrected.

Previously Resolved Issues

Note: The following issues were resolved with the release of CatalystEX 3.0 / 3.0.1.
They are included here for reference and are relevant to those upgrading from
CatalystEX 2.1 or earlier to this 3.0.2 release.

CatalystEX no longer crashes on Page Down operation when moving through layers (if regional
options are set to French, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Polish, Russian and Ukranian).

Parts that have been manually positioned by the user are no longer repositioned as new parts are
added to the pack.

CatalystEX can now be run by “non-privileged” users (member of Users group, rather than only
by Power Users or Administrators).

The default “Solid-Normal” interior fill geometry for the Dimension Elite printer is now less dense
for certain thick and large geometries. This automatic reduction of the amount of part fill material
will aid in the reduction of part curl. This same feature is utilized in support of the Dimension BST
1200es and SST 1200es.

The View Menu is now grayed out when using the Pack, Printer Status and Printer Services tabs.

Improvements have been made to the handling of unexpected errors that cause CatalystEX to
terminate unexpectedly.

Unexpected error causes are now reported and logged to the Windows Event Log which can be
copied and saved for reference.

A check is now performed to verify that the part fits into the build envelope before slicing and the
user is notified accordingly.

Metric part unit conversion for bounding box sized parts has been improved.

The discovery of web-based software updates is now fully compatible with Internet Explorer 7.

Certain characters in the printer name caused an inability to receive printer status. Names are
now limited to alphanumeric, ‘_’, ‘-‘, ‘.’, ‘ ‘, ‘#’ and ‘\’ characters which resolves the issue.

There is no longer a crash on Add from Network if 3D Printers Service is not installed.

The STL Report now describes the specific circumstance of a processing failure resulting from a
part dimension being too large for the bounding box.

Filename length is now limited to the maximum allowed in Windows which is 64 characters. The
pack name used is the first 64 characters of the filename.

There are no longer calculation errors when processing history is saved as a text file. The model
and support material values are now correct, regardless of the current display units.
Changes

Note: The following changes were in effect with the release of CatalystEX 3.0 / 3.0.1.
They are included here for reference and are relevant to those upgrading from
CatalystEX 2.1 or earlier to this 3.0.2 release.

Default choices for Support Fill have changed and are automatically selected upon opening
CatalystEX or changing printer type. Following are the Support Fill defaults by system type.

Printer Support Fill Defaults

Model Basic Sparse
BST 768 X
SST 768 X
BST 1200 X
SST 1200 X
BST 1200es X
SST 1200es X
Elite X

Minimal Support fill option is no longer available. Basic, Sparse and Surround support fill styles
remain options on all Dimension printers. Break Away support fill remains an option on all BST
printers.

There have been changes to the nesting feature in the pack tab that include the following.

-Allow nesting function is now always turned on.

-Parts will position automatically without overlapping when brought into the pack window.

-The user may manually overlap parts when positioning in the pack tab. In these cases
overlapping part detection will cause a cross hatch to appear over the part images. The
job will not send to the printer while cross hatching is visible. In order to proceed, the
parts must be positioned not to overlap.
Open Issues

3D Printer Service may fail to start at end of CatalystEX install:

On some machines, the CatalystEX installation may fail at the end of the installation
process with a message that indicates “Error 1920. Service Dimension 3D Printers
Service (ModelServerWinServiceP) failed to start”.

This is caused by a failure of the Microsoft C++ Runtime Redistribution libraries to

install properly. The installation of these libraries is launched from the CatalystEX
installation and they are a prerequisite for installing CatalystEX.

Work-Around: Manually install the Microsoft C++ Runtime Redistribution

libraries and then run the CatalystEX 3.0 setup again. The
technique is different if you are installing from a CD or
performing a web update.

Installing from a CD:

1. Open Windows Explorer.
2. Explore to your CD drive, e.g. d:
3. Open the folder vcredist_x86.
4. Run/Open the file vcredist_x86.exe, e.g.
d:\vcredist_x86\vcredist_x86.exe.
5. Explore back to the top-level of the CD, e.g. d:
6. Run/Open the CatalystEX 3.0 installation: d:\setup.exe

(Continued)
Installing from web update:
1. Download and install vcredist_x86.exe from the Microsoft
web site, as described below.
2. Open a web browser and go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?
familyid=200B2FD9-AE1A-4A14-984D-
389C36F85647&displaylang=en
3. Verify that the page title is “Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1
Redistributable Package (x86)”.
4. Under the Quick Details, verify that the version is
8.0.50727.762.
5. Click the Download button.
6. Click the Save button.
7. Pick a folder to save the file, e.g. My Documents.
8. At the conclusion of the file download, click the Open Folder
button.
9. Double-click vcredist_x86.exe to execute and install the C++
Runtime.
10. Repeat the web update installation for CatalystEX 3.0
Planned Solution: This problem will be fixed in a future release of CatalystEX
Appendix A – Enable Parts Printing Directly from SolidWorks
CatalystEX 3.0 will copy the necessary files to the workstation hard drive upon installation. The
files must then be registered with Windows.

Procedure
Note: This procedure must be performed for each workstation by a User with
Administrator privileges on the workstation.
1. Make sure that SolidWorks 2007 has been installed on the workstation. Make sure that
SolidWorks is not running while performing this procedure.
2. Install CatlystEX 3.0
3. Open a command shell and navigate to C:\Program Files\Dimension\CatalystEX 3.0\nt
4. Enter the command “regasm.exe SolidWorksPrintDriver.dll /codebase