Design Approach for Complete Product

wiley

Search isn't working, so maybe this has been covered, but I'm getting a bit frustrated so I thought I'd see if it's just me being dumb.

I'm trying to model a product that has a bunch of parts. It includes a PCB, a chassis, some connetors, some gears, etc. The packaging is pretty tight, so I need to design a lot of the parts in relation to other parts. So lets say I import a model of the populated PCB. I'll probably make a reference sketch of the pcb to base the chassis off of so that if the sizing changes later the chassis can be altered based on a few dimensions. But I still need the PCB model to design for clearance.

So I make a few other parts in the studio. Now I need to make a housing for a motor. I've already modeled the motor elsewhere so I import that. Of course the housing needs to fit with both the imported motor and the chassis I just designed. So I I'd like to model the housing in the same part studio. But for the life of me I can't figure out how to do this. In SW I'd use an assembly to do a layout and base separate parts off that layout. But in onshape assemblies don't seem to have any sketching or part creation tools.

I love the multiple parts in the same studio concept, much nicer to work with than the SW assembly, but I'm not going to remodel every shared part for each new design. There's got to be a way to move parts between studios, right? Please tell me I'm missing something.

andrew_troup

At the moment, only possible using workarounds. Can't point you to a discussion of these right now, because (as you observe) Search is not delivering any results. However this has been traversed quite thoroughly.

I don't right now recall any workarounds which would be particularly satisfactory for the situation you describe, but I could be forgetting something.

wiley

@andrew_troup - Thanks. If it's not natively possible then I imagine it has been gone over quite thoroughly

I can live without it for imports, but hopefully we'll be able to copy onshape-created parts between studios, or at least some way to constrain geometry in one part based on a part created outside a given studio (they don't have to remain externally linked for me.)

Anyway, thanks for the response. I'll poke about for workarounds when the search is back.

Cheers,

brucebartlett

Like Andrew said your not missing anything.
Only workaround I can think of is to get all your parts in the 1 studio from the start, not easy as direction changes and you want more parts in.

You can export an assembly as a parasolid then reimport as a flattened studio to combine parts into a single studio but just a dumb import.

Looking forward to inter part studio relations, hopefully we see something soon.

wiley

@brucebartlett - I really like not having to make an assembly to design related parts. So my ideal scenario would let me import or make parts in their own studio, then copy parts from one studio to another and orient them in their new home via feature-based relations or dimensions (not DoF mates.) And then at some point in the future the ability to turn on/off that part's link to the original studio.

brucebartlett

@wiley Yes I agree a much more stable approach than designing across assemblies (leave assemblies for motion study). However if/when we see inter studio relations I think we will need some better tools for positioning parts and the ability to have multiple instances of the same part. BOM's are very important and I think I would like to see them work in the part studio and not have to create an assy to get a BOM count on parts. Exploded views are an other area of interest, these most like would have to be done from an assembly.