Measure to Variable feature

kevin_o_toole_1

 This custom feature will measure a distance between entities (or the length, area, or volume of entities) and store it in a variable which can be used in downstream features and sketches.

Click the link below to add it to your toolbar now:
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/cc0e00cacc4401e125d7b538/w/ae938ab05c35f7c826263f5e/e/eb30fd60f2938035ced700c5

There have been a few "Measure"-type features written before, but none have had quite the full set of niceness that FeatureScript allows. This feature was written for Onshape by Andrii Furseiev and has already gone through some internal testing and code review.


Our hope is that this feature (or a descendant of it) will eventually become more integrated into Onshape by default. That means we want it to have a high-quality experience, which

• Presents a clear, uncluttered interface
• Has the full set of options you would expect out of such a feature, so you don't need to go searching elsewhere
• Quickly gives you the correct info you need
  

I encourage anyone in this forum to add this feature to your toolbar and to give us feedback here on how it's working for you!

– Kevin

eric_pesty

That looks really neat! I like the visualization arrows as it could be hard to tell what the different options result in otherwise!

My only thought at this point would be that it would be nice if the "size" allowed multiple selection, and the variable be the sum of whatever was selected. Would be helpful to get the length of a chain of edges for example

S1mon

This is useful, but there are opportunities to improve .

Some issues:

1. When you start the feature and select some entities, the variable name is blank, and therefore it doesn't do anything and seems broken because it's red. It would make a lot more sense to me to put in a starting name (e.g. 'd1', 'd2', 'd3'...) which could easily be edited.
2. Between circles/cylinders we only get closest or center-to-center. There's no maximum option or min/max option, unless this is part of the "two groups" mode. 
3. I can't find any examples of the "two groups" being used, so it's hard to imagine what it does. The text on the PDF is not clear enough.
4. There doesn't seem to be a way to select multiple edges to get a path length. The "measure value" featurescript will do this with "perimeter".
5. There's no alternate units or dual unit options.
6. The color coding and "value to record" are useful, but could be much better. Some color hints in the feature dialog to connect to the color coding of the lines on screen would go a long way to reducing cognitive load. Similarly, some way of making the selection for the "value to record" highlighted on screen would be helpful.
7. The arrow sizes seem to be based on the bounding box size of the model, not something that's related to view. In some cases the arrow heads are so small that it's hard to find them. 
8. It could be really useful to have a "keep measure line" option which would create a straight curve entity for the "value to record" line.
9. The tool tips for the measured values aren't working. It reports 0 always. 
10. Playing around with the selections I can get the tool to show me measurement values but no arrows. This was with "extend entities" checked
11. What is the "size" of a curved edge? It seems like it's reporting the edge length (which is good) but it's not immediately obvious.
12. The arrowhead style looks nothing like a standard dimension. In an ideal world, these would look like sketcher dimensions and arrowheads.

kevin_o_toole_1

@eric_pesty
Great catch!

You can now update to the latest version to allow measuring multiple entities.

konstantin_shiriazdanov

When feature like that be added natively it should be called as subfeature for numeric input fields of other features, just like current Variable feature does. But for me personally the more desirable is a kind of parametric "query creator" feature which result we could save into variable or link to query fields directly and also call as subfeature

romeograham

Hi @kevin_o_toole_1
Can you confirm that this tool does not currently measure angles (like, between two lines, or between two planes etc).
Just want to make sure I'm not missing the special way to select elements that might give an angle.

Thanks!
romeo

kevin_o_toole_1

@romeograham That's correct, no way to measure angle yet.

MichaelPascoe

Nice Kevin, thanks for sharing!

steven_van_luchene848

perfect. thanks for sharing! 
 Can you use this tool to measure a distance beween 2 features in a certain direction (other than WCS x, y, z)? 

_anton

stvnvl_8501 said:

perfect. thanks for sharing! 
 Can you use this tool to measure a distance beween 2 features in a certain direction (other than WCS x, y, z)? 

Yes, and this is now part of our standard Variable feature. See here: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/54f0e6294dc423cedcf2931a/w/15f0834a578292ff4801efb3/e/c5d1800b2d99ad3b881f3fab

This has the following caveat. You can take "measure a distance in a direction" to mean "get the distance vector, then project it onto the direction" or "project both entities onto a line along that direction, then measure the distance between the projections". Our feature does the former.

ChaosCrafter

This looks to be just what I need, except, can it work in sketch mode?  I know I can probably two-stage it (put the measure to variable outside the sketch then use the variable back in the sketch, but that sounds like a recipe for a feed-back loop.

kevin_o_toole_1

@ChaosCrafter
You're correct, there is an inherent loop in that structure. To use the result of this feature in a sketch, you will need to measure entities that existed before the sketch was created.