Mate & Pattern Geekery

Malcolm_Daniel

This is just a geek out moment.

I imported a 3 finger pneumatic chuck and wanted to make it actuate properly.  I started with adding 3 slider mates + 2 linear relations...cool...it works.

For giggles, I wondered what would happen if I patterned the first finger.  Holy smokes...it worked as hoped!  Could be biased perception, but it actually seems to work more smoothly (less calculation?). 

In any case, it saves assembling 2 more parts + adding 4 more mates.  Will be interesting to see if these 2 methods have ripple effects at higher level assemblies (i.e. adding the fingers to the moving jaws).

Gotta love it when stuff just works.  Way to go OS team.

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/60ae9cf99b6ed982260fee2b/w/0c4a04d70d08be7baf72bf06/e/d7d22347d31e8ee8f53c201b

   

alnis

I had a similar awesome experience where I used a circular pattern to add an additional bevel gear to a set and it meshed and rotated properly without any fiddling!

owen_sparks

Worth having a look at the "replicate" function in the assembly here. (Assemble and mate one instance, then the others are created for you.)

O.S.

Malcolm_Daniel

@owen_sparks ... thanks.  I was aware of the functionality but haven't really needed to use it just yet.  I forgot OS doesn't have the traditional reference pattern.  Replicate is a bit of a catch 22, as you don't need an underlying pattern feature (cool)...but when you do have an underlying pattern feature, it doesn't parametrically adapt the items referencing the underlying pattern (not great).  I'm guessing it's then more effort at the assembly level as instance counts vary (design changes, configurations, etc.).  I think I stumbled across and voted for an improvement request for reference patterns the other day.